SEWA’s Feminism

Abstract

State Department for gender parity in foreign aid and international decision-making, tapped Bhatt to present on the SEWA bank at a seminar days before the offi cial UN conference in June 1975. Two years later, the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation awarded Bhatt its annual cash prize honoring "greatest of spirit and transformative leadership in Asia. " She used the money to capitalize the Mahila SEWA Trust for member services. 9 Th e UN Conference exposed Bhatt to the social justice struggles of women throughout the world: she recalled how it sparked "a new feminist consciousness"not one based on the sexual politics and legal equality dominating mainstream feminism in the United States and Great Britain, but one located in the resistance of Bolivian mine and Malaysian plantation workers, that is, in the fi ght for economic redistribution within and among nations that was rocking the UN system with the membership of independent "Th ird World" nations. 10 In Mexico City, Bhatt came into contact with Ghanaian businesswoman Esther Ocloo, who was seeking to improve the prospects of market women, and US investment banker Michaela Walsh, who, "blown away by the role of women in their local economies, " spearheaded the organization of Women's World Banking (WWB) to expand access to credit to women globally, much as SEWA was doing locally. Bhatt became one of WWB's trustees. 11 At subsequent UN conferences, Bhatt and other SEWA leaders met feminist staff from the International Labor Organization (ILO). During the 1980s, the ILO would channel monies to the association not only to document working conditions under the new putting-out system, as researchers referred to industrial homework, but also to facilitate SEWA organizing, which the ILO promoted as an example to other grassroots groups in the Global South. 12 SEWA then joined with national and local groups as part of the transnational feminist push for what became ILO convention #177, "Home-Based Labor, " the fi rst international instrument to recognize homeworkers as workers, rather than housewives just earning income on the side, and thus worthy of the labor standards covering all other wage earners. 13 Th is is where I came in. In April 1989, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC), SEWA and the Gandhi Labour Institute organized an "International Workshop on Homebased Workers. " 14 Th e ILO Offi ce oft en supported such eff orts to facilitate its own gathering of information used to spur the making of global conventions. As a historian of industrial homework in the United States, I was among some thirty "experts" who traveled to Ahmedabad to discuss what we knew about home-based labor and to develop a research agenda. We considered defi nitions and types of home work, organizing strategies, occupational health, legal contexts, and macro and micro economic trends. During the meeting, SEWA actively shaped our perceptions of the situation. We visited the SEWA Reception Centre, toured the slums of Ahmedabad to observe garm...