SEWA India – Feminism in Action

Posted by Irresponsibility

If I paid any attention to my mother’s exhortation to “not say anything at all” if I can’t say something nice Irresponsibility would be a pretty sparse affair. I take her point, however, that it is important to give air to the good stuff — if and when you find it.

India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) is one of the good things. Founded in 1972 by Ela Bhatt, a groundbreaking woman lawyer, the SEWA organises and provides credit, health insurance, pensions and other essential safety net services to hundreds of thousands of self-employed Indian women. There is a nice article in the IHT about it, well worth reading.

I only wish they had chosen a less patronising title than: A hand that lift’s India’s downtrodden women; it makes it sound like these hard-working women are beggers. They aren’t, they are workers; and SEWA isn’t a charity, it’s a trade union. Ela Bhatt, addressing the UN General Assembly, said:

In my experience, the link between poverty and growth is decent work. Decent work means full employment at the household level; it builds the local economy and strengthens a community. Employers are constantly searching the globe for cheap labor; but the jobs they create abroad cannot build a
society, or even a sustainable economy. Special economic zones are nothing but glorified laborcamps; they force migration and the break down of families and society.

SEWA‘s members are not looking for a ‘hand up’, they are creating the futures with their own hands. All they asking is the first world not fuck them over with oppressive economic policies.

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