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Global: "Domestic workers: their time now" by Celia Mather

Global: "Domestic workers: their time now" by Celia Mather

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by IDWFED published Jan 08, 2011 12:00 AM
Contributors: Celia Mather/International Union Rights
Celia Mather, a UK-based writer on global labour issues, including for the IDWN, recently published an article in International Union Rights. Ms. Mather hails the historic fight that domestic workers have embarked on to win an ILO Convention that gives them fundamental rights equal to other workers.

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Celia Mather, a UK-based writer on global labour issues, including for the IDWN, recently published an article in International Union Rights. Ms. Mather hails the historic fight that domestic workers have embarked on to win an ILO Convention that gives them fundamental rights equal to other workers.

"The Convention has behind it the weight of more progressive governments," Ms. Mather observes, and "can help to kick-start much needed changes for millions of (largely) women around the world."

Excerpt of the article:

‘Historic’ is an overused word. But, in the case of the next new ILO Convention on the table, it really does apply.

The world’s domestic workers have in their sights the first ever international Convention that recognises them as ‘workers’, with the fundamental rights of other workers. Given that, at best, their work is often dismissed as merely ‘help’ and, at worst, many are migrants kept in servitude, plus it is one of the main locations of child labour, this step is not just ‘historic’ but utterly right and just.

As one domestic workers’ leader told me in Geneva last June, “These things that I knew in my heart were not right but I just had to accept as ‘how life is’, it is so amazing now to see all these governments having to discuss them”.

In June 2011, the second draft of a Convention (with an accompanying Recommendation) comes to the International Labour Conference (ILC) in Geneva. The contents will be hotly debated, as they were at the first discussions at the ILC this past June. There is still a chance that the Convention will be rejected in favour of a much weaker Recommendation. Some governments – particularly many involved in the mass export/import of migrant domestic workers from South/South-East Asia to the Middle East – are hostile. So is the Employers’ Group at the ILO, gauging by its responses in June.

However, the Convention has behind it the weight of more progressive governments, as well of course as the Workers Group, ably led in the 2010 discussions by Halima Yacob from Singapore. With concerted lobbying – now - on those who are still wavering or trying to beat off certain important elements, it is well possible that it will be passed this coming June, and with useful wording that can help to kick-start much needed changes for millions of (largely) women around the world.

Source: Celia Mather/International Union Rights

Story Type: News

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