By IPS Correspondents
BRUSSELS, Mar 8 2004 (IPS)

A leading trade union network is launching a new initiative to defend the rights of women workers.

The new three-year campaign ‘Unions for Women, Women for Unions’ will focus on women working in the informal economy and export processing zones (EPZs).

The campaign was launched in Brussels on International Women’s Day Monday by Global Unions, a group of trade unions which includes the Brussels- based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and Global Union Federations.

Some 43 million people work in EPZs, areas established by governments to encourage manufacture of goods for export, according to the ICFTU. Their number has grown from just 79 in 25 countries in 1975 to some 3,000 in 116 nations in 2002. The majority of workers here are women.

These zones are often a “hotbed of anti-union activity”, says ICFTU, whose members represent some 158 million workers in 150 countries.

ICFTU says the campaign aims to “organise women working in the informal economy” and “to enable women in the informal economy to assert their rights and to become the driving force behind unionisation.”

ICFTU says informal work, an ever-growing trend affecting developing and developed nations alike, is often characterised by “zero protection and desperate vulnerability”.

ICFTU says women are over-represented in the informal economy where they are discriminated against. Global Unions says that in the course of the campaign it will “seek to ensure that companies will not be allowed to offload cost and risk to those who are least able to resist.”

Monique Marti, who heads the women’s department at Union Network International, a global union for skills and services, says organisation is one of the main problems women in developing countries face.

“The difficulty for many women trade unionists in developing countries is that they are shouldering such a heavy burden of work – managing their families and struggling against poverty – that it is difficult to find the additional and unpaid time for trade union activities,” she said in a statement Monday. “You need to find the people to organise this work.”

Jasna Petrovic, coordinator of the ICFTU women’s network for Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Newly Independent States (NIS) where trade union density is in severe decline, believes trade unions need to do more to organise women. If they do not, they “could face an even sharper drop in their membership.”

In spite of a decline in union membership in this region, ICFTU data shows that in 2003 women membership of trade union members in the CEE and NIS region rose to 50.3 percent compared to 43.6 percent in 2000.

“I consider it is a strong message to trade union leaderships in the region, and of the ICFTU, that they should pay much more attention to the interests of women members, and in total to the workers with family responsibilities,” Petrovic said.

The ICFTU is marking its new campaign with a May Day event “Respect for Workers’ Rights, Respect for Women Workers and Respect for Those Working in Poverty”.

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