2013 International Strategy Session- India
Last month 14 United Worker Congress Member Leaders arrived in New Delhi, India for an intense 11 day labor education exchange & strategy planning. The purpose of the trip was to introduce the United Workers Congress as a growing platform projecting the voices of workers not protected under current US labor law, share strategies with leaders of the Indian trade union and social movements and to move conversations that will build the United Workers Congress long-term. In addition sharing organizing models used to build our base and our power with similar sectors in India, UWC delegates discussed strategies impacting employment structure/practices, including day laborers (daily wagers), contract workers, self-employed, cooperatives, and labor-community alliances.To learn more about how this session is part of implementing a broader vision for UWC click here http://excludedworkerscongress.org/our-work/international-labor-issues-campaigns
Below are photos, videos & testimonials from our delegation.
Day Laborers and the Struggle for Bread. India and the US.
(by Roger Sikes Organizing Director of Atlanta Jobs with Justice)
The United Workers Congress (UWC) met with members of the independent construction workers union called Nirman Mazdoor Sanghatana (NMS) in Mumbai, India this past week. This union organizes in the informal sector, largely among workers that we would call "day laborers" in the United States, while in India they are referred to as "daily wagers." Day laborers gather in small to medium sized groups in informal yet visible sites in a city or town (for example in front of a gas station, a public street corner, in-front of a shopping center) in search of work ranging from roofing, small construction projects, painting, loading and unloading goods and any tasks that the homeowner, business owner or small contractor may need.
In Atlanta, GA one might find day laborers on Ponce de Leon standing in-front of the shopping center that includes Home Depot and Verizon Wireless stores....
We had the opportunity to visit a daily wager site in Mumbai that is organized with NMS. This location was on a street corner on a busy road in Mumbai. The organized daily wagers had built a shelter at this location to protect themselves from the weather while waiting for work. As we stood hearing about the organization and the struggles and experiences of day laborers at this street corner, a group of workers quickly secured cold sodas from the store front just adjacent to the shelter and gave them to our delegation.
Daily wagers and members of the community quickly gathered at the site to understand what was going on and a leader of NMS took the opportunity to build political consciousness among the crowd around the need for worker organization in India.
Day laborers in both India and the United States face similar issues in their quest for work. The strong connection between theNational Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON) - a key part of the United Workers Congress - and the daily wagers in India was obvious. Harassment from police officers for occupying public space, wage theft from employers, unstable employment and pressure from the surrounding community that may be wary of the day laborers presence to name a few. NMS uses a community/labor organizing model and ensures that there is community representation on the elected leadership body of each daily wager site. This promotes communication and understanding between the local community and the daily wagers.
Before we left, the daily wagers again brought us gifts, this time roses (note that these gifts appeared spontaneously, the daily wagers were working their magic - or community connections - as we stood learning). The roses were presented to each member of our delegation.
As we were leaving the site a small, tight knit group of women approached us. They were construction workers (day laborers). When asked about their experiences working as construction workers as women, their response was simple, "if we don't do this work we cannot eat."
I was struck by the tight unity of the women as they rolled up to the crowd, here you can see their hands touching each other's shoulders as they addressed our delegation.
(by Roger Sikes Organizer Atlanta Jobs with Justice)
Today is our first day in the world's 4th largest city, with a population of 20.5 million: Mumbai, India. During the morning we had the opportunity to engage with Mecanzy Dabre from the National Hawkers Federation (Street Venders). Street venders make up a large and vibrant sector of the Indian economy, employing approximately 10 million Indian workers throughout the country. The National Hawkers Federation (NHF) represents 1,125,000 street venders across 25 states in India. Street venders often face retaliation from police for establishing a space to sell their wares as well as resistance from some neighborhood associations. Street venders provide affordable goods and services to urban communities and offer employment to folks that may not have access to any other jobs. Street venders provide jobs to typically marginalized communities such as muslims and women. The 11 Central Trade Unions have pushed for legislation to establish the rights of street venders and ensure that there is proper city planning to allow space for street venders and pedestrians in a thoughtful way. Some national legislation has been passed, but oftentimes enforcement at the state and local level is lacking and NSF organizes to enforce it. We then heard from Salma Shaikh the general secretary of the Azad Hawkers Union. Salma said the first step is to remove the fear. They employ aggressive education around the rights of workers and street venders. They educate 100 venders at a time and then elect 2 or 3 to handle the police on behalf of that base. Salma shared an experience from 2007.... She was selling her wares in the street and the police came and beat her and other street venders with sticks. She was furious at the treatment they faced and vowed she would live and die in the struggle. She has since been to jail 7 times fighting for the rights of street venders. Salma said that women need to be central to this movement, "In a women's lap, life is born."
To start off the afternoon we engaged with two independent and self-sustaining Domestic Worker organizations (Picture attached). A big piece of their organizing has been making domestic work visible and formal. One step has been providing identification cards to their members. Membership in the union costs 25 rupees per year (about 50 cents in the US). Madhu Birmul, a leader with the domestic workers union explained that in one of the homes that she used to clean the tea that she would drink was different from that of the family. She asked one day who washed the cup that she was drinking from, and if that person also received a different type of tea... The answer was no. From that day on, she wanted to organize domestic workers. She said that domestic workers were often ashamed of their work, and the first step was building consciousness around the dignity of their own labor. When Madhu first started to build the domestic workers union she had support from only two other domestic workers. The union has grown to over 25,000 in her state. Because Domestic Workers make very little, they ask members to contribute plastic bottles and metal to the organization that can be sold to recyclers. Madhu told us that national legislation was passed in 2008 around the rights of Domestic Workers, however the legislation was not being implemented at the state level. The domestic workers thought out a plan to hold the government accountable: they asserted that the government was dead. In order to highlight this death, the domestic workers planned to shave their heads (In some Indian communities, if your husband dies, the widow will shave her head in mourning). However, it was difficult to push members to take this drastic step, especially if they had living husbands. So it was domestic workers that were already widows - a group of 25 - that stepped up and shaved their heads to highlight the death of the government.
The local government reacted quickly to this dramatization and began implementing the national legislation. Later in the afternoon we heard from Madhukant Pathariya with the independent construction workers union called Nirman Mazdoor Sanghatana that organizes day laborers (referred to as "Daily Wagers" here) in Mumbai. The union was founded in 1984. Madhukant said that in 1991 India opened
up to the global economy and around this time the "organized sector" or formal sector began losing jobs and traditional unions only rotected their own members and did not expand to the informal sector. He then stated that "the more insecure labor is, the more organized it becomes." NMS does much of its organizing on street corners where day laborers congregate to find work. Much of this work is small scale construction/labor, and not so much on large construction work. The organizing was very similar to that of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). NMS also works within the community which is especially important because of the visible presence of the day laborers waiting for work within the community. A bit on the organizational structure of NMS (photo attached)... Each location where daily wagers congregate elects a 21 person leadership committee. There must be at least 2 women on the committee, 18 must be day laborers, 2 must be members of the outside community (again community relationships and perspective is important) and 1 person from the central leadership committee of NMS. Madhukant spoke of a stigma around the word union for many of the daily wagers as some had negative experiences in the past, so the name of their organization does not include union but "organization." There are many social divisions within the informal sector such as caste status, state origin, language and religion. These divisions sexist within the base of NMS. NMS believes that it is not formal educational trainings that help to build leaders and consciousness, but through struggle. They believe strongly in politicizing workers and building class consciousness. NMS is not affiliated with any political party, they ask members to leave party politics at the door. They do believe in issue based alliances.
(by Nadia Marin-Molina, Execiutive Director- National Day Laborer Organizing Network)
We began the day with a presentation from SEWA (Self Employed Women's Association) a women's union which has about 1.1 million members, including domestic workers, construction workers, street vendors, and many others. Sonia Pehn flew in from the southern state of Kerala which has a historically strong labor movement, progressive government and greater labor protections than other areas of the country. Because of this, she explained, the state has the highest rate of literacy in the country 80% and a high rate of women participating in higher education. Sonia spoke about how SEWA began organizing domestic workers in Kerala by training a group of poor women from a historically marginalized caste, as part of a strategy to professionalize domestic work. This strategy of training women in child care, health care, cooking and cleaning allowed both the organized women and their employers to see their relationship as one of employers and employees, rather than master and servant.
Later in the day, the UWC delegation visited the wonderful May Day Cafe. Established on May 1, 2012, the cafe was founded by Suda Nava Deshpande, the director of a popular street theater company called the People's Theater Group, which was formed in 1973. The all volunteer theater troupe conducts plays across the country for audiences that include students, rural communities and particularly workers. The troupe has a particularly close relationship with union struggles, often developing new plays quickly in response to strikes, employment crackdowns and other issues of concern to workers. Meanwhile unions are so familiar with the theater that they count on these plays as part of their strategies to educate and organize workers across the country. The cafe and bookstore lead directly to a door for a theater space, a room where the audience sits around the edges and the play takes place in the middle. The founder then described the broad community based fundraising strategy which allowed them to raise a substantial amount of money, enough to buy a small 3 story building which houses the cafe, as well as the performance space and a left bookstore.
The largest public event of the trip was that afternoon, a public seminar on New Directions in Worker Organizing. Organized by the Society for Labor and Development, the seminar/panel brought together 3 presenters from the United States and 3 from India. They discussed the increasing governmental repression of activist organizing and the sinister push towards biometric identification cards (reminiscent for some of us of the e-verify / biometric work ID push in the US); the legal framework which should protect labor organizing and often does not; and the importance of uniting global labor struggles. Many audience members spoke up to provide examples of their own experience in organizing against evictions and worker abuse and facing retaliation at the hands of the police and employers.
The analysis provided by Ashim Roy of the New Trade Union Initiative encapsulated well some of the lessons that came out during the day. The Global South includes both the countries in the Southern Hemisphere and the millions of workers who have emigrated to work in the North. Without their combined contributions, both cultural and economic, the entire world would grind to a halt. But if and when the workers of the Global South are able to organize, their power will create a tide that will transform the labor movement.
(By Jill Shenker, Field Director National Domestic Workers Alliance)
Today, on our 3rd day of meetings, we finally had the opportunity to get an historical overview of the trade union movement in India – from 1875 to the present! We had three very different and interesting external meetings:
1) Mobile Creches, who provides childcare and education on the construction sites and slums of Delhi while their migrant parents work. 15-20% of construction workers here are women, and husband and wife often work together in temporary construction jobs. It was exciting to learn about this organization working at the intersection of children’s and worker rights.
2) SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association) Delhi – SEWA has 1.3 million women members across India who are street vendors, home based workers (ex. Embroidery), women selling their labor and services (ex. Domestic workers and construction workers), and small producers (ex. Small farmers and milk producers). They provide a broad range of services and economic empowerment programs for their members including: education centers for members and their daughters, referral and support to access social services and social security programs, and microfinance (loans, pension, insurance schemes, coop formation). The scale of SEWA is incredibly inspiring, and we felt we could spend weeks learning about their multitude of strategies to create personal, political, and economic empowerment of informal sector women workers. Thankfully, we have another meeting with domestic worker organizing director of SEWA tomorrow!
3) All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) is the oldest trade union in India, founded in 1920. AITUC became a revolutionary force, in connection with the Communist Party, for the independence of India. We learned more about the past three years of work building up to the national general strike and the platform of 10 common demands across all of the trade union centers, regardless of political affiliation. And they had a lot of questions for us about the realities with the recession of unemployment, bonded/trafficked labor, immigration enforcement, and the Occupy movement.
We’re sitting with many questions and a commitment to innovate strategies to build transformative mass worker organization in the US.
Photo: Building Woodworkers International & CITU-Hotel Workers
(By Erica Smiley, Director of Campaigns Jobs with Justice and American Rights at Work)
Day 2 of the trip initiated a series of public exchanges with several sectors. UWC delegates opened up the morning with a presentation by the Hotel Workers Union and the Hotel Employees Federation of India (HEFOI), a sectorial federation of hotel workers unions. After hearing about their strategy and on-going struggle with company unions in 5-star hotels, the Restaurant Opportunities Center presented on similar problems that exist in restaurants in the US—highlighting their track record for winning back wages and benefits by targeting the more popular and wealthier restaurant chains with on-going direct action.
This meeting was followed by an exchange with the Building and Woodworkers International union, where UWC delegates learned about the successful Construction Welfare Boards—institutions that construction companies pay into that then provide social security, healthcare and other benefits to the workers upon registering. Similar programs are in development for India’s domestic workers. The National Day Laborers Organizing Network responded with their experience in the US, highlighting how current immigration laws limit workers from ever wanting to “register” with a government agency. Still, all agreed that similar strategies are worth continued exploration in the US—connecting taxes on large corporations to publicly funded programs and support for workers.
The afternoon opened with a meeting with Action India, a local grassroots organization known for creating Mahila Panchayats—local women’s councils that hear the cases of local community women and support women in resolving domestic issues in a safe and supportive way. The organization lead with a feminist, anti-patriarchal purpose—aiming to support and build power among India’s women. Jobs with Justice delegates noted how similar the Panchayats were to local Workers Rights Boards, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance shared strategies (and challenges) in the organizing of US domestic workers.
The official day ended with a meeting between the UWC, the Ford Foundation of India and the ILO. The details of the general strike were flushed out a little more before discussing potential areas for future collaboration between US worker organizations and Indian organizations.
1) All India Strike - day 1 of 2 days
