Partnership initated with SEWA Kerala in India

Today WSM partnered with SEWA Kerala with Ms Sonia George for a short 6 month pilot project "Undertaking groundwork for the furtherance of organising and developing social security coverage for women workers in the informal sector". With activities like research, advocacy, awareness raising and training, we hope to have as outcomes:

1. A better understanding of a social security floor for women workers in the informal sector towards policy discussions
2. Mapping of areas/sectors in which internal migration of women is high in Kerala
3. A study of the possible mechanisms for the portability of PDS for internal migrant workers
4. Organising migrant workers through source and destination linkages.

SEWA and the women in the informal sector 

SEWA is a union of women in the informal sector in existence since 1972. This union has been expanding in several states of India and presently covers 17 states. Of the present workforce in India, 93% are in the informal sector and half of these are women who are both vulnerable and, in several ways, invisible. There are no unions that focus on this sector of women who are not only vulnerable but also relegated to a back seat in most union activity in the country. SEWA has tried to make the issues of these women workers visible. The issue of social security cover for such women workers is an area that SEWA would like to focus on in the future.

And in Kerala?

Kerala is one of the older states where SEWA is established. The membership of Kerala is made up of women workers from trades like domestic workers, street vendors, fish vendors, home based workers of different kinds, reed workers and some agricultural workers, SEWA Kerala has been responsible for the sector of domestic workers within the larger SEWA national union. 

SEWA Kerala has around 15.000 members that are domestic workers and 2.000 women street vendors, as well as 3.000 fish workers, which also often double as street vendors. SEWA empowers them to increase their livelihood and food security, by organising them, strengthening their capacities to bargain and facilitating access to seed money.  

Kerala is also a state that receives a lot of women workers coming from other states, a large number of whom are invisible as they work as live in domestic workers where access to social security schemes is complicated for them, because of lack of Kerala documents.

SEWA and domestic workers

As part of this work, SEWA Kerala has been coordinating the National Platform for Domestic Workers, a platform made up of different unions around the country that work with the domestic workers. While focusing on securing a comprehensive legislation for domestic workers in India, the Platform has also been engaging with the labour reforms that the Central Government is seeking to introduce. One of the main issues in the reform is the manner in which the informal workers will have access to social security. While the present draft of the reform bill is to render social security as a welfare measure and that too with minimal coverage, the effort is to work towards securing social security as a right. This is an area in which a large awareness and understanding has to be built.