Against the Grain: Fighting Corporate Agriculture through Women’s Solidarity
Leah Sullivan
Thirty years ago, the village of Pastapur was struggling. Dalit and Adivasi (indigenous) people who lived there did so in poverty, surviving from tiny plots of inhospitable land. Many more were landless agricultural labourers, eking out a living from neighboring farms. Hunger was a constant threat, and young people left for life in the city. Today, this has all changed.
“These days, other villages come to us for support”, we are told by village elder Chandramma, whose warm smile and quick wit easily overcome the language and cultural barriers otherwise between us. Over the last 30 years, small scale farmers in the area have developed an organic, biodiverse, and rain fed permaculture system, with support from the Deccan Development Society. The communities have gained their strength through the practice of sanghams (women’s community groups), where women collectively make decisions about agriculture and finance, share seeds, information about farming methods, ask for and offer help with weeding. As a consequence, the community is thriving. Landless families have managed to buy plots. Young people are staying or returning to the community, and no one goes hungry.
It’s a very different story from those that GAATW’s partners usually encounter among rural Dalit and Adivasi communities. Dalit and Adivasi women are disproportionately represented among India’s sizeable population of internal migrants, forming the backbone of sectors with some of the poorest pay and working conditions, such as domestic, garment and construction work. Many of these women have moved into this sector from a background as small scale farmers or landless agricultural labourers, forced into migration through the increasing unviability of their livelihoods.
Addressing Root Causes of Internal Migration in India – An inter-movement convening
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.
The meeting, co-organised by GAATW, SEWA[i] and MAKAAM[ii], looked holistically at the rights of women migrant workers by analysing the structural drivers of outmigration from the states of Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. These are states of origin for internal women migrant workers going into some of the sectors with the lowest pay and poorest working conditions, including domestic work, brick kiln work, garment work, construction work and sex work.
Our discussions drew a challenging overall picture for our movements in India today: a growing asymmetry of power between employers and workers, persistent patriarchal norms and attitudes, a political economy tilted in favour of the interests of big corporations over the rights of small-scale landowners and workers.
Violence is not part of the Job! States must ratify and implement the Convention to end violence and harassment in the world of work
We applaud the recent adoption of the Convention (190) and Recommendation (R206) on Violence and Harassment in the World of Work at the Centenary International Labour Conference. This is a triumph for workers and trade unions all over the world, especially womxn trade unionists. We stand in solidarity with them and their ongoing struggles. It’s time now for States to ratify and implement C190 and R206.
Human Trafficking – From a criminal justice to social justice approach
Keynote speech delivered at the conference Disrupting Traffick?, University of Chicago Delhi Centre, New Delhi, India, 17 May 2019
Borislav Gerasimov, Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women
Thank you very much for inviting me to speak here tonight. It’s a pleasure and an honour.
First I want to say a few words about the organisation where I work. The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (or for short, GAATW) is an international feminist network of NGOs advocating for the rights of migrants and trafficked persons. GAATW sees the phenomenon of trafficking as embedded in the context of migration for labour. Therefore, we advocate for measures that uphold women’s human rights and protect them from the increasingly neoliberal economic context in which we live.
I my speech tonight I will try to highlight some of the failures of the currently dominant criminal justice approach to trafficking and offer the alternative that we at GAATW subscribe to – a social justice approach that aims to address the root causes of trafficking.
Strengthening labour rights to prevent human trafficking and unsafe migration
Outcome of the Global Consultation on Prevention of Human Trafficking and Unsafe Migration
| Español | Français |
1 May 2019
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| Women from BOMSA, a GAATW member organisation in Bangladesh, at a 2014 May Day Rally in Dhaka. |
Forty-five representatives of 35 women’s rights, migrant rights, and anti-trafficking organisations from 28 countries met on 3-5 April 2019 in Bangkok, Thailand, to discuss the successes and failures of current initiatives to prevent human trafficking and unsafe migration.
We reaffirmed that human trafficking and other rights violations in the context of migration for work are the result of a number of structural root causes. These include economic injustice brought about by neoliberal economic policies of privatisation, de-regulation and austerity, which intersect with patriarchy and racism to devalue and informalise women’s work, particular that of migrant and racialised women.
To successfully prevent human trafficking and related rights violations, states need to address these root causes in line with their commitments under the human rights framework and the Sustainable Development Goals. Civil society needs to advocate for structural changes to systems of domination based on race, gender, and class, and hold governments accountable for their failure to protect the human rights of all people. Current initiatives to prevent trafficking through engagement with the private sector and reduction of the demand for trafficking, awareness-raising and campaigning, and provision of information to (potential) migrants, fall short of these goals and fail to address the asymmetrical power relationships between workers and employers.
Missing the mark on gender equality: Governments don’t do enough to ensure womxn’s rights to social protection and public services
A Joint response from trade unions, and feminist, womxn’s rights and social justice organisations to the CSW63 Agreed Conclusions
The 63rd session of the Commission on the Status of Women saw vibrant participation of civil society, people’s movements, trade unions, collectives of informal sector workers, sex workers’ movements, feminists and womxn’s organisations, many demanding universal social protection, gender responsive public services and infrastructure that is publicly funded, delivered and managed.
We laud the Commission achieving significant gains during its 63rd session March 8-22, 2019. We believe, however, that governments failed once again to show leadership and make commitments to center gender equality and womxn’s economic and social rights and pursue systemic changes required to deal with intersecting crises. Moreover, we are deeply disappointed that governments did not uphold the universality of human rights and specifically recognise multiple and intersecting discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, expression and sex characteristics.
Public services and social protections key to migrant women’s rights
Statement by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women on the occasion of International Women’s Day and ahead of the 63rd session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women
The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women calls on states to increase their investment in public services and social protections as a way to prevent human trafficking and protect the rights of migrant and trafficked women.
Migrant and trafficked women cite the absence of social protection systems as key in their decisions to migrate, regardless of the risk. This distress migration enables a supply of workers in precarious labour sectors, such as the domestic and garment work, which do not enjoy basic protections and increases the risks of trafficking and exploitation.
In destination countries, migrant workers, particularly women domestic and care workers, are often employed to fill gaps in social protection and services, where economic pressures and austerity measures have increased the unpaid care burden on women. In some countries, migrant workers have been recruited to meet longstanding recruitment problems, and make up large sectors of the workforce particularly in health and education.
In origin countries, women migrant workers play a crucial role in compensating for the underfunding or absence of public services. Their remittances are used to clothe, feed, house and educate their families.
Despite playing an outsized, and trans-boundary role in social protection, migrant women are also among the groups least able to access services and social protection. Access to public services and social protection systems are key to the fulfilment of the rights of migrant women, and to preventing trafficking but progress is threatened by budget cuts and austerity measures that have resulted in the privatisation of public services and increased user fees.
Austerity measures, including the underfunding of public services, have a detrimental impact on the ability to prevent, detect and respond to cases of trafficking. Given their role in victim identification, it is critical that public service providers, including labour inspection, law enforcement, immigration, health and social service providers have resources to identify and assist potential trafficked persons.
Irregular migrants, refugees or trafficked persons? Challenging rigid categorisations and their impact on migrants’ lives
8 December 2018, 15:30 – 17:30, Room Atlas 2, Palmeraie Golf Palace, Marrakech
Organisers: Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, OHCHR and UNHCR
This event will present the findings of the articles published in the above-mentioned journal and contribute to a conversation about the categories assigned by states to people on the move, the impact of these categories on migrants’ lives, and how the global compacts for refugees and for migration can support efforts to protect the rights of all people on the move.