Women’s Labour, Decent
Work and Public Services
Presentation for ActionAid International Global Campaign
Nancy Kachingwe

Women’s Labour
• Labour – can be a source of empowerment or exploitation.
• Labour is key to economic production and profit = exploitation
• Our labour is our best available means to attain our material and emotional
apsirations.
• Choices in how we are able to use our labour is defined by gender, race,
caste, class, location etc.
• Labour vs work? We want to look at the totality of the work that women
do: paid/unpaid, visible/invisible, intellectual, physical, emotional
• Neoliberal economic system and the treatment of women’s labour:
• exclusion,
• exploitation
• inequality
• externalisation

Labour and human rights
• Women’s labour should benefit from the same rights accorded within the
human rights framework:
• UDHR: Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just
and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
• Equal pay to equal work (some work is more equal than others!)
• Remuneration ensuring and existence worthy of dignity
• Form or join unions in protection of one’s interests
• Safe healthy working conditions
• Rest, leisure and reasonable limitation of working hours
• Social security and social insurance
• Special protection to mothers before and after childbirth
• Adequate food, clothing and housing and continuous improvement of living
conditions
• Highest attainable standard of physical and mental health

Women’s Labour : Issues - 1
• Globally women’s total labour force participation rate = 49.4% (high
regional variations – (64% in SubSaharan Africa - 28% in South Asia)
• This means the (unpaid) work done by 50% of women is not counted at
all, ie. they are neither employed or unemployed.
• 70-79% of women express an preference to work at paid jobs
• Regarding the other half of women in the workforce:
• 13.6% enjoy wage and salaried employment vs 24.3% of men
• 76% of workers in developing countries are in vulnerable forms of employment
• 40.1% are working in extreme poverty
• 26.2% are in the moderate working poverty rate.

Women’s labour – Issues 2
• Globally: labour trends moving towards more informalised, precarious and
vulnerable employment.
• Economic crisis + race to the bottom economic policies = cheap labour to
attract investment
• Exclusion of women from large parts of the labour market. Women employed
mostly in: agricultural work, social and domestic sectors, trade. 30-55% of
women in some developing regions are contributing family workers
• Construction and transport, storage, communication, public administration and
defence: highest concentration of male workers….
• Feminised occupations and work = lower pay and working conditions.
• Invisibility of paid and unpaid care work: growing rise in migrant domestic and
care workers; rising numbers of domestic workers in some regions (eg. Latin
America)

Women’s labour – Issues - 3
• Total number of women in informal employment:
• Major sectors to consider:
• Domestic work
• Traders, vendors, micro-entrepreneurs
• Home workers
• Rural and agricultural workers
• Waste pickers
• Challenges: financial insecurity and exploitation, violence and harassment,
access to finance, technology, health and safety, isolation
• Migrant workers (rural/urban and transnational) now includes equal numbers of
women
• ILO Recommendation 204 (2015) Transition from informal to formal economy.

From cheap labour to decent Work
The decent work agenda: a guiding framework for changing women’s world of work
Pillars of Decent Work Agenda
• Promoting employment
• Respecting and realizing rights at work
• Developing and enhancing measures of social protection
• Social dialogue and tripartism
• Translating the decent work agenda to address specificities of women’s labour/work
• Valuing reproductive labour correctly
• Recognising and eliminating gender, race, class and other forms of discrimination
• Enabling new/alternative forms of organizing
• Increased public investment

Public services
• Public services are a must to address the global employment crisis
and inequalities—especially for the youth unemployment.
• Public services are a must for the realization of women to achieve
their right to work with dignity and security
• Redistribution of women’s unpaid care burden from household to
the state is a matter of gender justice.
• Climate crisis requires reorganizing policy priorities which require
public intervention… requires designing just and feminist
transitions.

Institutional analysis
• UN system and the Sustainable Development Goals
• Moblising around Goal 8 (Decent Work)
• Joining 2030 coalitions around health, education, water, food emphasizing women’s labour
• Climate justice
• ILO
• ILO Centenary in 2019
• Future of work, green initiative, women’s initiative
• ILO Convention on Elimination of Gender Based Violence in the Workplace (2018-2020)
• Strengthening the Human Rights Framework
• Binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights
• ESCR rights and the right to development
• World Bank/IMF/WTO + G7/G20
• Global economic governance and corporate power
• Public private partnerships
• Hyper globalisation