By Bandana Pattanaik

In mid-2020 when we were still sceptical and confused about online work, our colleagues in Indonesia made us feel hopeful. By holding a series of inter-movement dialogues online, they showed us how to push the limits of digital communication. As my colleague Cris and I participated in the strategic conversations via WhatsApp translation while watching the speakers via Zoom, we realised that ingenuity might be the only way forward. Our colleagues from Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India and JALA-PRT in Indonesia inspired us by developing political education handbooks for domestic workers at a time when they were also busy organising emergency support and alternative livelihood for the workers.

By early 2021, we were ready to start online conversations on women, work, and migration with our members and partners located in places with limited and unreliable internet connections. Many of these colleagues work closely with migrant and local women workers in low-wage jobs – the workers hit hardest by the ongoing pandemic. Our discussions led us to talk about women workers’ agendas for change. We also wanted to know if our colleagues facilitate workers’ organising and education.

This is how we began an experimental initiative called Women Workers for Change. It brought together twenty-five GAATW members and partners from Africa, Asia, and Latin America working with women who earn their living from domestic work, sex work, agriculture, weaving, entertainment work, garment sector work, home based work and any available daily wage work. Additionally, most of these women do all the care work for their families. These structured online discussions, which were held between April and July 2021, were an opportunity for mutual learning and strategy sharing. We now notice that those who had not focussed on workers’ organising before felt inspired to do so and want to develop their organising skills. Those who were already self-organised or worker-focussed have begun taking proactive steps towards deepening political education of workers.

 Our Work, Our Lives

It is in this context that we are launching Our Work, Our Lives, a monthly e-magazine. Published on the last day of the month, each issue will take up a simple theme that resonates with the everyday lives of low-wage women workers, their joys, sorrows, struggles and most importantly, their agendas for change.

While this English language E-Magazine will act as a bridge among CSO colleagues (and the few workers who speak English) in different countries, each group will create publications in their own language. Where the workers have no literacy, they will use other innovative techniques. GAATW Secretariat will do all it can to democratise digital technology and facilitate knowledge building and sharing from the ground up.

A Day’s Work

We thought that A Day’s Work would be an appropriate theme for the first issue of the magazine because women’s paid and unpaid work was a topic that some of our colleagues had discussed in their community meetings. We encouraged others to initiate similar discussions with a view to find out how women understood their unpaid care work and the gender gap in paid work and what changes they would like to see.

The inaugural issue features 21 essays from eight countries – Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Nepal, Sierra Leone and Uganda. We hear from domestic workers – both migrant and local – weavers, garment workers, sex workers, farmers, entertainment workers and daily-wage workers. All our authors do both paid and unpaid work. Some juggle a number of tasks to earn a small amount of money. All of them have very long working days, many are the only earning member of their family and several are single parents. Some are members of workers collectives or trade unions.

Putting together the first issue of Our Work, Our Lives has been a heart-warming experience. While a few sisters (from Uganda, Kuwait and Sierra Leone, for example) wrote in English and sent a photo of the text along with other pictures via WhatsApp, many either wrote or just spoke to colleagues of theirs in other languages which were then transcribed and translated into English. We have translations from seven languages.

Each narrative in the magazine is unique, even as the tasks described by the women are quite similar. Each story takes us to someone’s home and work place. As we follow the authors while they do their day’s work, we also get to hear about their dreams and plans as well as their frustrations and concerns. COVID-19 is present in the background of most stories although not many authors talk about it explicitly, perhaps because they are based in rural areas where the impact of the pandemic has been less severe.

Why focus on a Day’s Work?

Globally, women carry out three-quarters of unpaid care work. There is no country where women and men perform an equal share of unpaid care work. If unpaid care workers received the minimum wage of their countries, those wages would amount to USD 11 trillion or up to roughly 15% of global Gross Domestic Product. Further, paid care workers, primarily women, are not adequately remunerated and often do not have any social protection. There is no dearth of evidence on the lack of recognition of women’s unpaid work and the gender gap in paid and unpaid work. Feminist economists have carried out time-use surveys to calculate the hours women spend working each day. Yet states have done very little to address this glaring problem.

There is an urgent need to reframe social protection policies and programmes with the explicit goal of recognising, reducing and redistributing unpaid care work. Networks and movements such as the International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC) and the Global Women’s Strike have been campaigning for many decades for recognition and remuneration for all care work, in the home and outside. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development reiterates that women’s unpaid work should be recognised, redistributed and reduced. Some countries, mainly in the Latin American region, have recognised the “right to care and be cared for”. It is time to step up local and global advocacy on this issue so other countries follow suit. Change needs to happen at multiple levels – attitudinal and policy, private and public. Therefore, discussions and debates too must take place at every level of society.

The first issue of Our Work, Our Lives aims to ground the global by bringing those discussions to and through the low-wage women workers and their support groups within our alliance. You can read the issue as a "flip book" by clicking on the image below. Or you can download the pdf file.