Last week, we had the opportunity to stay at the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), in the outskirts of, Kerala. SEWA is a women’s trade union that functions on the national level in India, with a membership of over 3.2 million self-employed women, namely representing women who work in the informal economy– including street vendors, home-based workers, service workers, and producers.
On our first day at SEWA, we spoke with three women who are responsible for organizing the union’s logistics, programming, and membership. They explained how SEWA provides women with new professional opportunities through training and how their network differs from government-provided support by ensuring higher pay, safe working conditions, and community.
On our second day, we visited the reed-weaving cooperative in Thiruvananthapuram. The reed-weaving cooperative was based in a family home, where women gathered with their children to weave baskets and mats. Their process was intriguing–in addition to them being excellent weavers, it was also interesting to watch how they balanced working with childcare in real time. Many of the women sat children in their laps while weaving and childcare was shared among the cooperative, based on whoever was available at the moment.
Another notable moment was meeting Nalini Nayak, the head of SEWA Kerala. She explained how she came to work as a trade unionist, initially working with a fishing community during her early career. Her story, that spanned the era between her early twenties to her seventies, illuminated the complex landscape of women’s labour rights that is complicated by patriarchy, gender-based violence, and by the legacy of the caste system–just to name a few factors.
I was curious to learn how India’s history and community-based culture affected the nature of unionization and labour as compared to the West. Nalini explained that India’s community-based culture, particularly present in smaller, rural communities, affected the goals of unionization. She explained that although many unions in the USA aim to bolster laissez faire competition vis-à-vis fair competition, many communities in India do not want this nature of free-market competition.
She said, “These people do not want to be individualized, industrialized, competitive." Rather, they advocate for fair wages and support for their mode of production.