LABOUR: Women Revolutionise Trade Unionism

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 21 1999 (IPS) - Brazilian trade unionist Nair Goulart will never forget when she was booed for daring to suggest the creation of a Women’s Department at a 1981 trade union congress in the Brazilian city of Playa Grande, near Sao Paulo.

“I suffered the worst booing in my life, 5,000 people hissing and shouting,” recalled Goulart, who today is women’s secretary in Union Force, one of Brazil’s central unions, and vice-president of the Women’s Committee of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).

Her 25 years of labour activism have reflected the difficulties that the trade union movement, a major redoubt of sexism worldwide, has had in taking up gender issues.

ICFTU figures indicate that participation by women in its member unions grew steadily from seven percent in 1950 to 33 percent in 1988. Since then, however, it crawled up to 34 percent in 1992, the same proportion registered today.

And just 31 women sit on the ICFTU executive committee, of a total of 159 committe members and alternates – a mere 19.5 percent.

Around the globe from Brazil, in India, the Self-Employed Womens’ Association (SEWA) is also expanding horizons in order for workers to bring their activism and organising strategies into line with today’s new challenges, given that large factories are no longer the main base of the labour struggle.

Founded a decade and a half ago to organise the informal sector’s poorest female workers, the association’s experience has inspired movements in other parts of the world like southern Africa, said Budin Barebro, with the Geneva-based International Union of Food Workers (IUF).

Most of the women who first signed up were illiterate women who worked at home with tobacco products and garments. In order to keep intermediaries from ending up with all the profits, the association founded a bank, to widespread ridicule.

Today, the association’s 300,000 members have 20 banks with a mere 10 percent default rate, which finance cooperatives and purchases of machinery and raw materials.

The banks also “protect the women’s money from their husbands and sons, who used to steal it for drink, but today are happy about the improvement in their living standards,” said Barbro.

A minimum wage, social security, child care centres, health care and the generation of new jobs are other gains chalked up by SEWA for its members and other women workers in the informal sector.

But the association has had a hard time earning recognition as a union. And one of its major victories, an International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention on paid homework, approved 15 years ago, has only been ratified so far by Finland.

Paid homework runs up against prejudice, especially in Europe, where people argue that it simply should not exist, said Barbro, a Swedish national who studied history, politics and languages to prepare herself for a career in journalism, before dedicating herself to the labour movement.

IUF’s secretary of union development projects and equality issues, Barbro took part in the ICFTU’s seventh conference of women trade unionists held Tuesday through Friday in Rio de Janeiro.

Changing trade union culture, not only with respect to women, who continue to suffer discrimination, was a key concern raised by this year’s conference, which for the first time was held in a developing country.

The labour movement continues to exclude “atypical” workers such as casual labour, assistants and apprentices, homeworkers, part-time workers, the self-employed, and those involved in the informal sector.

Women abound in the category of “atypical” workers, which is growing fast alongside economic globalisation, outsourcing, subcontracting, duty-free export assembly zones and other tendencies aimed at cutting costs in the face of today’s unbridled international competition.

How to organise such vulnerable workers, who comprise a majority in poor countries, is the big challenge facing the labour movement at the start of the new millenium – and a tall order, according to the roughly 320 women trade unionists from 120 countries who gathered this week in Brazil.

Meeting that challenge will require stepped-up efforts, alliances with other social movements and non-governmental organisations, a more “holistic” view of labour organising, and changes in union statutes and structures designed to incorporate “atypical” workers.

The changes in the trade union movement must focus on “organising within diversity,” according to the conference.

Participation by women must expand and extend to the elderly and the disabled, immigrants, indigenous persons, lesbians and gays – in other words a cultural revolution toward which women perhaps enjoy a special sensitivity, given their own struggle against discrimination.