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:
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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Yes, Ela Bhatt and SEWA are seriously inspirational. And what she says about decent work is of course true. One of the many barriers to women getting decent work,though, is that they carry a disproportionate burden of unpaid household work (finding and carrying drinking water and fuel etc) and thus even if they could find “decent” paying work, they don’t have the time to do it. Correcting infrastructure shortfalls – giving people easy access to clean water and fuel for starters – is a necessary precondition for widespread opportunity for women.
OK. I’ll step off my soapbox now. Thanks for being the first commenter on my blog. If I knew how to send you a gold star, I would.
The problem is so much work is unpaid/devalued specifically because it is done by women. If we weren’t drudging the men would have to pay someone to do all the cleaning, cooking, childcare, etc that women do for free. That would fundamentally alter the economic order. I say we go on strike…
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