Ela Bhatt: Empowering Hundreds of Thousands of Impoverished Women

by James Parks, Sep 28, 2006

Windows Media
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ela Bhatt, winner of the AFL-CIO Meany-Kirkland Human Rights Award.

Although thousands of U.S. jobs go to nonunion workers in India, India’s economic boom is leaving most of the country’s workers behind. In rural India, for example, it is common for women to work on their own farms and, when times are tough, to work as laborers on other farms. When the agricultural season is over, they work in the forest collecting gum. All the while, they produce embroidered items either at piece rates for contractors or for sale to traders who come to villages to buy goods.

Because they work in so many occupations just to make ends meet, these women do not easily fit into any single occupational category and have not been covered by India’s worker protection laws. For generations they had no benefits and no voice.

That ended in 1972, when Ela Bhatt, a diminutive labor lawyer with India’s textile union, founded the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA). With some 792,000 members, SEWA now is the largest union for informal workers in India and the largest union led by and for women in the world. Last night, the AFL-CIO and the Solidarity Center honored SEWA and Bhatt with its 2005 George Meany–Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award for courage, innovation and leadership.

The annual award, created in 1980 and named for the first two presidents of the AFL-CIO, recognizes outstanding examples of the international struggle for human rights through trade unions. Previous winners have included Mikhail Volynets of the Ukraine, U Maung Maung of Burma, Nancy Riche of Canada and Wellington Chibebe of Zimbabwe. 

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who presented the award to Bhatt at the AFL-CIO building in Washington, D.C., called her:

…a woman who exemplifies what it means to organize. I can think of nothing more important to advancing freedom, democracy and prosperity than empowering women.

By organizing women in their communities, addressing gender discrimination and working to change labor law to include so-called “informal workers” at the local, national and global levels, SEWA is in the forefront of organizing the largest sector of workers in the global economy. Informal workers, those who work in casual jobs, temporary jobs, unpaid jobs or subsistence agriculture, make up 93 percent of India’s workforce. One-third of those workers are women without legal protection, secure contracts and health or retirement coverage.

In her acceptance speech, Bhatt says organizing workers in the informal sector is critical.

Workers in the informal sector are now a majority of the world’s workers, and they are mostly unorganized. Organizing the informal economy is a huge task, but it is an essential task for the labor movement if it is to survive as a significant social force globally and retain its capacity to change the world for the better, to make it a better world for ordinary people, for workers and for women.

SEWA is unique within the global union movement. While advocating for the rights of its members, SEWA also operates several women’s cooperatives that produce handicrafts and train and employ poor women. The group advocates for women and workers’ rights, economic justice and non-violence and against gender bias, caste inequities, religious divisions and violations of workers’ rights. SEWA also created its own bank, enabling impoverished women to gain independence through access to financial services.

Bhatt also is a founding member of Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), a global research-policy network that seeks to improve the status of working women in the informal economy. She also launched StreetNet International, an international alliance of street vendors and HomeNet, an international network of home-based workers.  

Bhatt says all these groups are connected by a common goal:

We are removing poverty through work. On one side we struggle to demand our rights. And on the other we are building power. We had to find ways to build power. We created co-ops to produce, sell and distribute products. Today we have 90 co-ops, including a co-op bank. That way we build a presence and money power in the economy.

Our strategy is one of joint action of being a union and a co-op. We are building power not to control anybody but to create a countervailing force in the economy, to be present and strong in the mainstream where major decision are taken.

Although SEWA does not engage in partisan election politics—Bhatt was elected to Parliament as an Independent—she says much of the union’s work is political:

Whatever we do is political action. To change the policies for poor women is political.     

An example of SEWA’s political action will be evident next week. SEWA’s members still are not covered by the nation’s labor laws, but they can and do bargain for fair wages and working conditions. The Indian Parliament is expected to take up a bill soon that would extend the nation’s social security system to informal workers, a major goal of SEWA. To highlight the importance of this bill, hundreds of thousands of members of SEWA and other unions will march Oct. 2, the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, to demand that Parliament pass the bill.

The ultimate goal of her work and life, Bhatt says, is based on the simple notion that all people deserve a good life:

Poverty must go. It is man-made. Gandhi said poverty is an ongoing violence. Everyone must have bread, clothes, shelter and education. And it must be maintained. 

Print This Article | E-Mail This Article |Comments (0)