Violence and harassment faced by women migrant workers in Latin America
Women migrant workers across Latin America endure extreme violence in order to be able to provide for their families, according to research carried out among workers in the garment, domestic, service, sex and hawking sectors.
Economic precarity was the driving factor for accepting poverty wages and poor working conditions:
- Workers in maquilas (garment factories) in Guatemala and Brazil work around 12 hours per day, locked in factories until production targets are reached, for as little as 200 US dollars a month.
- Some live-in domestic workers in Colombia work seven days a week, up to 15 hours a day, with salaries under minimum wages and in some cases with no salary at all.
All participants said that the constant economic instability and job insecurity in which they find themselves makes them accept conditions that in another context they would never have imagined enduring.
The research aimed to explore gender-based violence in the world of work from the perspective of women migrant workers. The 172 women interviewed by eight Latin American civil society organisations reported experiencing a spectrum of violence and discrimination, through dynamics created by patriarchal societies and families, racism and xenophobia and an entrenched neoliberal capitalist economy. This is creating a ‘new normal’ of permanent precarity through a lack of social coverage, poverty wages, exploitative working conditions and job insecurity.
Sixty CSO activists, trade unionists and representatives of migrant rights, women’s rights, worker rights and Dalit and Adivasi rights groups across India met over three days in August 2019 to think collectively about how a cross-sectoral movement could address the systemic issues faced by women migrant workers in the country.
