Women's Homework

Rizza Leonzon

On a lazy afternoon, Julie scrambles to assemble her circuit boards, not inside a spacious and lavish laboratory room but in the expanse of their living room. Circuit boards are no school homework or past-time, for Julie is neither a student nor a teacher. She is a mother of two children and her home also happens to be her workplace.

Apparently, Julie isn’t the only one caught in such a situation.

Around the world, there is an estimated 300 million more home-based workers, mostly women, who have joined Julie in trading the comforts of their homes for a cents’ worth of earnings through small scale jobs. Behind closed doors, these workers, who constitute a part of the informal labor sector, carry out different forms of jobs that are either paid out by an employer, a subcontractor or a middle person or are self-employed and working for small family businesses. All over the world, these home-based workers produce various goods and services such as clothes, shoes, food, electronic components, manufacturing, assembling and packing of processed products, craft works, etc. that are in turn sold by large corporations for huge profits.

Over 85 percent of home-based workers in most countries comprise of women who are tied down to this form of employment due to cultural constraints as it is evident in Muslim countries or low level of education and training. Moreover, globalization, which restructures and integrates production processes worldwide, results to the current phenomenon of outsourcing – a major reason that also accounts for women’s decision to stay at home and work at the same time.

While large corporations benefit from reduced costs of production due to the subcontracting of home-based workers, the said workforce largely remains underpaid and stripped of benefits for health, retirement, allowances, etc. that a firm usually gives out to its regular employees.

"I work 14 hours a day, every day of the week sewing garments. Last week I earned $1.70 an hour that was with my husband and two children giving me a lot of help," says Mai from Australia. Meanwhile Gayatri from India earns 75 cents for every 1000 bidis (hand-made cigarettes). She makes 800 bidis a day which barely compensates for back aches and long hours of sitting in the floor just to roll these cigarettes. On the other hand, Beauty from South Africa is in the business of growing fruits sold to the local market or to a contractor of big food companies. “I hope to keep having work so my family can survive,” she explains.

In the Philippines alone, about 7-9 million home-based workers perform both piece-rated and own account work in rural and urban areas and like the rest of the workers belonging to the informal sector, they need to put up with low wages, unpleasant working conditions and lack of benefits and social protection.

Given such appalling situations, the responses of women laborers in the informal sector are now coordinated and represented through various labor based-organizations and movements.

During the early 70s in India, a trade union of low-income working women founded the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) an organization that caters to the street vendors, home-based workers, agricultural laborers, construction workers, head loaders and rag pickers and has since become the international force behind advancing the welfare of women laborers worldwide.

Meanwhile, specifically leading the movement of home-based workers worldwide, an international alliance, HomeNet was established in the mid-1990s. Much of HomeNet’s work is concentrated in lobbying for the passage of the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention on Home Work (1996) which aims to level the playing field for home-based workers as compared to other formal wage-earners in specific areas such as:

ü establishment of organizations

ü protection from occupational hazards and employment discrimination

ü remuneration

ü social security protection

ü access to training

ü minimum age employment

ü maternity benefits

This convention has only been ratified by five countries namely Finland, Ireland, Albania, the Netherlands and Argentina. Governments that have ratified the convention are expected to create and adhere to national policies that:

ü Recognize the economic and social value of home work.

ü Raise living standards through higher incomes and social protection.

ü Strengthen domestic demand by increasing the purchasing power of the masses.

ü Enable the working class to exercise their rights.

ü Achieve gender equality through women empowerment.

In the Philippine setting, the Pambansang Kalipunan ng mga Manggagawang Impormal sa Pilipinas (PATAMABA) spearheads the movement in advancing the welfare of the informal workers. With a membership of about 14,138, 98 percent of whom are women, in the end of its 2003 formal registry, the organization provides education and training along the lines of leadership, entrepreneur, networking, gender and rights awareness, paralegal work, etc. Moreover, it is also providing economic assistance through the PATAMABA- Women Workers' Entrepreneurship and Employment Development (WEED) Livelihood Programme and by helping out their members in establishing micro-enterprises and cooperatives to avoid dealings with sub-contractors and middle persons. On the other hand, the HomeNet Philippines is in turn focused in pushing for adoption and reinforcement of laws and policies that promote the welfare of Filipino home-based workers such as the ratification of ILO Convention on Home Work (1996) and the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) Department Order No. 5 on Homeworkers that affirms the home workers’ right to immediate payment and self organization, etc.

Undeniably, these labor-based organizations have made huge contributions in uplifting the welfare of low-income workers, especially women. However, the fight for the advancement of the welfare of informal workers does not end and begin in these organizations. Much still has to be done to reach out and to educate the rest of the informal women workers about their rights as workers and as women.

After all, it takes not just an organization, but rather a movement, to shatter the oppressive societal shackles that are holding down the thousands of Julies around the world.