What Changes When Women Organize?
Informal workers are often described by what they lack: contracts, benefits, stable income, or legal protection. India's SEWA Cooperative Federation offers another way to look at the issue, through what workers can build together.
For more than three decades, SEWA has supported women-owned cooperatives across fields including finance, childcare, healthcare, agriculture, insurance, handicrafts, waste management, and cleaning services. The cooperative model allows informal women workers to become not only workers, but members and decision-makers in organizations they help own and govern.
That difference matters.
A worker negotiating alone may have little influence over prices, working conditions, or access to markets. Organization can turn individual vulnerability into collective bargaining power. SEWA's experience also shows that economic empowerment involves more than earning income. Access to financial services, social protection, leadership opportunities, and decision-making can change who controls that income and who has a voice in the workplace.
This is one of the ideas I find most important in studying human rights: support should not always mean speaking on behalf of people with less power. Sometimes the stronger approach is helping create structures through which they can speak and negotiate for themselves.
Making women's work visible is important. Giving women greater power over that work may matter even more.
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