Jul 30, 2013
Presenter
• Nhlanhla Mabizela, Solidarity Center Program Officer, South Africa
Facilitator
• Tom Bacote, Solidarity Center Country Director for South Africa
Nhlanhla Mabizela: Unions must look at policies and determine if they include women. Credit: Tula Connell
Mabizela posed a series of questions for workshop participants to discuss in small groups: Nhlanhla Mabizela began by describing the experience that led to his becoming a gender activist. One day as he walked by a group of nearly naked children playing on the street with no parents, he asked himself, “What kind of mother would leave her children in the streets?” Further down the road, he saw a group of men sitting around a fire, ignoring the children, and his question changed to: “What’s wrong with men? Are we that emotionless?” Mabizela wanted to be different from this male model.
• What can be done to build men’s sense of responsibility?
• How do we begin to address gender inequality, especially from the perspective of men?
• How do we, as men, begin to create those spaces for women?
• What is the benefit to men? That is, Mabizela said, “if I ask myself as a man, what is it that I’m going to be benefiting from by bringing in women? There are benefits, but we don’t want to think about them? We can’t even think about our privileges?”
He noted the major question is the implication for men for giving up spaces of privilege.
Participants broke out into four groups to discuss and then reported their conclusions.
Group 1: Women should not waste a lot of time being behind men when men are not supporting women. Women need to be proactive—if men don’t take responsibility, women shouldn’t wait for them. Women create a challenge for men when they take action, are constructive, don’t argue and show men that women are capable of achieving results.
Group 2: Women trade unionists should seek allies among men, seek out an individual who seems sympathetic, speak to him outside the union, then speak to two or three more men, and then these men will go back to the group and begin to sow the seeds for change.
Group 3: Hold union candidates to their campaign promises regarding gender equality. Hold gender awareness trainings. Develop gender policies and codes of conduct. For example, during meetings, men need to start listening more and talking less.
Group 4: Include men in trainings on gender and gender violence. Hold mixed and single sex trainings so men can be more open in all-male groups. Set rules so that any union leader involved in sexual harassment is removed from positions of power. When creating committees, ensure they are equally composed of men and women.
Mabizela then highlighted the point about making allies with men. Patriarchy “oppresses women, but oppresses men as well.” Mabizela also discussed the need to educate children, offering the example of HIV training at a union that also involved the children of union members. He discussed a series of three-day gender awareness workshops he held and noted how it was necessary for male participants to make a conscious effort to break out of well-worn patterns. For instance, he said, men at the bargaining table couldn’t understand why they needed paternity leave. Because short-term workshops are not sufficient, he also holds longer “awareness camps.” Gender inequality is “not something we can (instantly) correct,” he said. “It’s a process we need to take people through.”
Society needs to be changed as well, Mabizela said, pointing to the example of a man walking into a health care clinic and seeing only women and children and so sees no role for himself. Further, he said, “if we are just looking at the issue of quotas, we’re doing ourselves a disadvantage.” Unions must look at their policies, determine if they involve women.
In conclusion, Mabizela said it is important for men to be conscious and aware of “what I do, whom I talk to and the words I use.” As a facilitator of gender workshops, Mabizela said he doesn’t come with a solution. “I come to listen so to be able to work with (men).”
See his full presentation.
Jul 30, 2013
Participants
• Mara Luiza Feltes, Woman Secretariat, CONTRACS, Brazil
• Monica Veloso, Secretary of Work, City of Osasco & National Confederation of Metalworkers, Brazil
• Monica Valente, Subregional Secretary, Public Services International, Brazil
Facilitator
• Jana Silverman, Solidarity Center Country Program Officer for Brazil
Mara Luiza Feltes began the workshop, a continuation of the morning’s discussion, by noting that the labor movement is an important part of Brazil’s recent economic advances—and women have been a key part of this success. Feltes focused on Brazil’s service industry, where she described an example of the gender wage gap: In retail shops, women are hired to sell cheap goods while men sell higher quality products like DVDs, and so therefore men make better wages.
She said the average age in the services and sales sectors is 31 for women and 33 for men. Women earn 80 percent of what men make in this sector, even though women have higher levels of education.
Feltes pointed to CONTRACS’s efforts at achieving decent work, which include support for ILO Convention 156, which covers workers with family responsibilities; Convention 158, which sets guidelines on the termination of workers; and Convention 189 on domestic workers. Further, the union is working on a national constitutional amendment to establish equal pay for equal work and is fighting for public child care, which she described as a “big issue” because “workers need full-time child care.” Unions won a reduced work day, which was 48 hours per week and now is 45 hours per week.
However Feltes said, despite the reduction in work hours, the speed of work has not slowed and many health-related issues result. She also discussed why domestic violence is a union issue: If women are suffering at home, they cannot work.
Women union leaders are best placed to understand women’s concerns, such as equipping a workplace bathroom with sanitary napkins and providing child care so women workers can participate in union activities. Women’s insights into these issues highlight the need for quotas.
CONTRACS requires that all union trainings include 30 percent women and that collective bargaining agreements address gender issues such as child care assistance, maternity leave and sexual harassment.
See her full presentation (Portuguese).
Monica Valente opened her discussion on PSI’s gender equality strategy in Brazil by saying said she liked the term, “struggle in the struggle” used earlier to describe women’s efforts in the labor movement struggle. She went on to note that PSI has a long tradition of fighting for gender equality in the public sector, which is comprised largely of women.
Valente said many women work in the services sector because women naturally take care of people, for example, as mothers and housekeepers, and this work is transferred from the private to the public spheres.
When women make up a majority of workers in a sector, wages go down, Valente said, in part because of discrimination against women and also because it’s difficult for employers to identify productivity in the areas where women typically work. Women workers often have a double workload—at work and at home, and suffer from the lack of child care.
She described how women are at a disadvantage in traditionally male employment sectors. The job descriptions for Brazilian postal workers, for example, are written in the Portuguese masculine form, and when women say they are covered by the same language, employers may refuse to apply it to women with the excuse that the male form doesn’t apply to women.
Another male-dominated field, offshore oil work, pays well but women rarely can work the scheduled hours—12 days in a row followed by 22 days off. Valente pointed out that this schedule also is not good for men, and that all jobs must humanized for all workers. Yet until gender discrimination is eliminated, these issues will never change.
PSI’s strategies for achieving gender equality and ensuring women have their needs met at the bargaining table and in the household include developing strategies for pay equity policies and helping unions understand the gender aspect to all policy struggles, such as job outsourcing. Unions must identify obstacles women face, such as sexual harassment on the job, and PSI plans to have a deeper debate within unions.
At the next CUT Congress, women and men will each have 50 percent of the leadership positions. There still is a long way to go, but there have been real advances. When Brazil elected a woman president in 2010, that helped advance the cause.
At the national level, the Ministry of Women created by former President Lula has made an impact. For instance, state companies are required to have gender programs and unions must have seat at the table. However, not all have followed the law. Brazil also has strengthened laws addressing violence against women. The new laws followed a public outcry over a woman who was beaten to the point she was permanently in a wheelchair.
Valente also cited a few local successes, such as the small town that improved policies for women, enabling men to take their children to the doctor during work hours.
She also pointed to studies on “time poverty,” noting that the lack of free time is a powerful form of oppression for women, and discussed union’s efforts around passage of ILO Convention 156 on workers with family responsibilities, noting that the fight for its passage should be a union issue, not a women’s issue.
Valente closed by saying women have made progress in the past decade but the advances still are insufficient because gender inequality has not been addressed.
See her full presentation. (Portuguese).
Monica Veloso began by saying CNTM is part of many organizations fighting for women workers. Women are still not valued in the labor market, she said, citing UN studies showing that women made up 70 percent of those living below the poverty line in 2011. Poverty prevents women from making gains, but “through work we can overcome poverty and gain equity.” She noted that Brazil has made tremendous gains in reducing poverty, and the unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in many years and now quality of work needs to become a focus.
She noted that Brazil has not ratified ILO Convention 156, and unions must make it a priority.
Noting that metal workers unions must integrate the issues of female metal workers into overall discussions, Veloso said the CMNT and the International Metalworkers Federation held a first-ever conference of women steelworkers three years ago. Four months of maternity leave is compulsory in the metal sector, but more leave can be bargained with the employer. CMNT is looking for space in unions to address women’s issues—for instance, women must participate in the collective bargaining process.
She pointed out that Latin American countries have a low density of women in union leadership and so it is necessary that unions have quotas. Women make up 22 percent of metal workers, 40 percent of chemical sector workers and 80 percent of textile workers, she said. Notably, the textile sector includes many precarious jobs with high turnover. Typically, unions with a majority of female union are headed up by male leaders. She noted that there are 16 women leaders in the global federation, IndustriALL, which is not satisfactory.
Women workers are certainly not the weaker sex, Veloso concluded. In fact, women are often held to a higher standard. For instance, when a women makes a mistake at work, she is perceived as incompetent, while men’s mistakes are forgotten.
See her full presentation. (Portuguese).
Jul 30, 2013
Labor Historian Dorothy Sue Cobble discussed women’s long history of union activism. Credit: Matt Hersey
Labor Historian Dorothy Sue Cobble discussed women’s long history of union activism. Photo: Matt Hersey
Panelists
• Dorothy Sue Cobble, Distinguished Professor, Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations and the Department of History, Rutgers University, U.S.
• Sally Choi, Project Coordinator, Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU)
• Gertrude Mtsweni, Gender Coordinator, Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)
Moderator
• Chidi King, Equality Department, International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)
Chidi King opened the panel by saying the conference is timely because “this is a time when the trade union movement needs transformation.”
Dorothy Sue Cobble began by overviewing the women’s labor movement, which she described as having “a rich and vital history,” one that is inspiring because it is a long story of transformational leadership. Labor union foremothers forged a distinctive vision of social change, and a working women’s political movement. Labor feminism differs from more elite feminism because it:
• Pursued full development of each individual—women workers are truly free only when all around them are free.
• Saw individual and collective progress as intertwined—one cannot be accomplished without the other.
• Sought to go beyond gender equality. Labor feminism believed women workers faced discrimination and other injustices and wanted to dismantle multiple sectors of economic inequality.
• Offered a global vision.
Sally Choi: “As feminists, we believe the pesonal is political.” Credit: Matt Hersey
Sally Choi: “As feminists, we believe the pesonal is political.” Credit: Matt Hersey
Cobble then overviewed her findings from a 2012 Solidary Center-commissioned report, “Gender Equality and Labor Movements: Toward a Global Perspective.” She noted that there is a “startling lack of global data” on women’s membership and leadership in trade unions and even less data on women’s membership and leadership in new worker movements around the world. She also noted significant problems with data, including unrealistic, inflated, different definitions of union/union membership; and underestimation of women’s collective organization outside “official trade unions.” Some of her findings include:
• Women are the new majority of union members in one-third of countries surveyed.
• Women make up more than 40 percent of the population in two-thirds of countries.
• Women are under-represented in only one-third of countries surveyed.
Women have made progress in unions but “we are progressing at two speeds. “There’s a fast lane and a slow lane, with one wing of the labor movement having made a lot of progress and another wing where there is actually very little change,” Cobble said. Unions making most progress or the “best practice” cases rely on top-down pressure— “reserve seats” for women and other measures—as well as bottom-up pressure, “self-organization” among women and active women’s committees, conferences and other woman-only spaces.
• Read her full remarks.
• Read Cobble’s report, Gender Equality and Labor Movements: Toward a Global Perspective
Sally Choi noted that “as feminists, we believe the personal is political,” and provided two narratives to illustrate her evolution as a labor feminist. In the first, she described her own early sense of the need to fight for gender equality and how her vision was shaped by Yim Yuet Lin, who founded the Hong Kong Women Workers Association in 1989, the first organization in Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China for rights of women workers.
In her second narrative, Choi discussed the formation of the HKCTU women’s committee and its efforts to achieve legal reforms addressing sexual harassment for workers who provide services goods and facilities providers. She also noted the need to focus more outreach efforts among the increasing numbers of women workers in the informal economy and the benefit of empowering strong and vocal women leaders as well as committed activists who may be less vocal but are key power builders in the movement.
Choi emphasized the important role of feminist activists outside and inside the labor movement in pushing unions over the years to integrate women’s concerns more deliberately and effectively.
See her full PowerPoint presentation.
Gertrude Mtsweni pointed out that “transformation is still a challenge.” In South Africa, both the female-dominated agriculture sector and the male-dominated manufacturing sector need transformation.
Mtsweni described herself as a gender activist with a trade union background. She started participating in union actions in the 1980s during apartheid, a time when women—especially because of gender, race and class—but also men, were highly exploited. Women working as domestic workers and migrant workers sometimes were not paid wages, but given shelter and food. She struggled against stereotypes in a male-dominated environment and within sexist structures that saw women as objects.
“The working-class will never receive their rights on a silver platter, but must fight bitter struggles to secure, to defend and to advance their rights,” she said. She praised the Solidarity Center for “coming on board to move away from theory to action.”
Showing a photograph of a woman beaten for going on strike in 1995, Mtsweni said the struggle for gender equality is part of the broader story—therefore all working class women and men must make up the struggle equally. She said that in South Africa, capital is doing everything to reverse workers’ gains—even legal gains. Another key challenge is elimination of traditionalist attitudes and resistance to change by women and men. The union movement also must dismantle broader organizational structural inequalities.
“Gender relations transformation is not about attitudes, but about broader organizational structural inequity,” she said. “Therefore the main focus of the organization must be to dismantle the structure of gender inequality.” Mtsweni listed COSATU’s numerous efforts to institutionalize gender equality and its campaigns for policies to support working women.
Mtsweni concluded that a sexist struggle cannot produce a society free from sexism. “Addressing gender issues sometimes means you have to tackle unpopular decisions because we understand the class issues.” Gender issues are linked to other development issues, she said, and multinational companies should not use gender as a tool to weaken workers’ movement internationally. She also pointed to the need for unions for increase their focus on assisting workers in the informal economy, and the need for international and cross-border solidarity. In sum: “Gender equality is a ‘struggle within a struggle’.”
Jul 30, 2013
Solidarity Center Shawna Bader-Blau: “We must fight for workers at the bottom of the supply chain, starting with women.” Credit: Matt Hersey
Keynote
• Shawna Bader-Blau, Executive Director, Solidarity Center
Welcome
• Rosana Sousa de Deus, Executive Committee, Central Única dos Trabalhadores, CUT
• Cássia Bufelli, Women’s Secretary, União Geral dos Trabalhadores, UGT
• Maria Auxiliadora dos Santos, Women’s Secretary, Força Sindical
• Lais Abramo, Director, ILO Brazil
Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau opened the July 29-30 conference, Women’s Empowerment, Gender Equality and Labor Rights: Transforming the Terrain, saying that gender equality is the “unfinished business of the labor movement.”
“The strategic exploitation of women workers for the economic gain of business is one of the key global dynamics driving down wages and working conditions, and keeping working people from their rights across the globe. If we want to stem the unrelenting race to the bottom, we must fight for workers at the bottom of the supply chain, starting with the women,” she said.
Bader-Blau overviewed women’s increasing role in the world economy and pointed out that wages and job quality have not kept pace with their entrance into the labor market. This is especially true for women working in agriculture and light industry, two of the conference’s three themes.
But when workers have a voice on the job through a union, they have a way to fight for better livelihoods and rights, she said. Unions help facilitate women’s equal access to resources and improve their social and political status in many ways: by pushing for minimum wage increases, by providing a voice at work that offers a mechanism for women to fight sexual harassment and by helping workers in the informal economy, who are disproportionately women.
Yet these steps are just a small portion of what unions can do, said Bader-Blau. The degree to which labor unions consciously take on women’s priorities is “the challenge for us and I think this gets back to the other theme of this conference, the need for transformational leadership.”
Read her full remarks.
Rosana Sousa de Deus welcomed the 90-plus participants from 20 countries on behalf of all Brazilians. She went on to discuss the country’s recent large mobilizations which she described as “completely different than other mobilizations over the last 30 years with participation of 5 million workers, women and men.” (Beginning in June 2013 with small protests against increases in public transportation fares, Brazilians by the millions waged weeks-long rallies in cities across the country, a movement that grew into a mass mobilization encompassing much of Brazilian society and broadening to include citizenship issues such as state inefficiency and corruption.)
She pointed out that the demonstrations were organized through the Internet with leadership from young people. “These actions have helped us to rethink structures of union movement.” As part of these mobilizations, the union confederations represented at the conference demanded improved housing and transportation, and women union leaders made it clear that transforming capitalist society must address gender and age discrimination. “Capitalism uses gender, age and race discrimination in all societies to maintain its power, making labor relations very precarious.”
The CUT has a long-standing commitment to address inequality in society and within the labor movement, she said, pointing out that CUT has contributed to recent advances in women taking a more active role at the workplace, changing conditions from semi-slavery to more equitable conditions in which women breadwinners now have access to better wages.
“We have to think about building politics with the actual presence of women in the union structure” to create union policies with a gender perspective. Access to better wages is not just about presence, it’s about participation. “Women have to participate in the union, federation, confederation. We have data that prove that less women participation in union results in fewer advances in gender policies. When we don’t negotiate collectively, women’s issues are not addressed in collective bargaining. So we need women present in union policy making. This is still a sexist movement.”
For instance, she pointed out that union meeting schedules can determine whether women can participate in unions because often these meetings have no child care space and are held during hours women have work or family duties.
Sousa de Deus said this is a very important moment in transformation of the lives of Brazilian women who are demanding quality of life. “Unions are pushing for quality housing facilities and universal public child care facilities, which will help women participate in the labor market.” Unions also are engaging in a debate over International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 156 (Equal Opportunities and Equal Treatment for Men and Women Workers: Workers with Family Responsibilities), because family care prevents women from participating in the formal economy and unions. “Child care facilities must be universal, whether in the labor movement or not. We must discuss this.” If women are responsible for all caring tasks at home, they don’t have access to the labor movement. She wants Brazil to ratify and implement Convention 156 so women can get access to the labor movement.
Pointing out that women make up 51 percent of Brazil’s population, she said, “We are fighting against violence, for feminist education for women because women need to dialogue on issues and be at the center of the debate to build a just society with full participation of women and young people.”
Cássia Bufelli agreed with Sousa de Deus that women’s participation in unions is important, and noted the UGT has achieved several advances in this area. For instance, the union’s statutes include quotas for women. “We have an issue with quotas, we’d like not to depend on them, but they’ve been decisive in getting women in leadership roles,” she said. The union laid the groundwork for women’s increased participation first by establishing a female presence, “but then we needed training and debate on an equal level. I need to be empowered to discuss the national economic policy as a woman. What’s the point in having a debate if I as a woman, can’t take part?” she asked. The UGT holds training courses and “bringing in young men and women has made a huge difference—changing their opinions, developing new leaders. Education for women leaders has been vital, she noted. Women in union leadership “are educated, aware of nuances, prepared to sit at the table and participate on an equal basis. We have to ask, without a 35 percent salary gap between women and men—how different would the economy be?”
The Lula administration’s creation of a Women’s Ministry was also vital. UGT brought the government to the debate through creation of a tripartite group. The union pushed for legislation to remove all forms of discrimination, and promoted the government’s first national conference on decent work with key women participants. The Women’s Department and these actions have helped frame the debate to include women’s issues and broad equality. Women made a difference at that tripartite event. “We can rewrite the history of our country.”
Maria Auxiliadora dos Santos reported that Força Sindical recently held a week-long congress with 2,700 delegates from across Brazil. Women make up 51.5 percent of Brazil’s population, or 100 million, and have higher formal education levels than men, she said. Yet women are under-represented in politics and unions and “our workdays are longer, our wages lower.” Of the 500 largest companies in Brazil, women comprise 13.7 percent of executives, 22.1 percent of management, 26.8 percent of supervisors and 33.1 percent of employees. “This exposes a stark reality of Brazil,” she said.
“We have fought very hard, we Brazilian women, to take up the spaces of power.” The labor movement is trying to address this vast inequity, dos Santos said, but “we must look at unions themselves—confederations, federations, local unions. Where are the women in the labor movement? They are at the lower rungs of leadership.” “The leadership of our organizations speak in our names,” she continued, “but they don’t mean it, it’s not true. Men do not have the power to speak in our name. In practice, they don’t put their money where their mouths are.”
Creating a National Women’s Policy Department in Força Sindical was “a major achievement,” she said. Women worked to shape the labor movement’s demands in national mobilizations on July 11, 2013 and May 1, 2013, to include gender equality, only to have it removed by male leaders. “From the union demands in these marches, you would guess that there are no working women in our country. This is absurd. Any demonstration we have, any struggle we conduct, equality has to be on the agenda. Finally, our brothers admitted that this was a point.”
Força Sindical also has worked on the issue of domestic workers in Brazil by promoting ILO Convention 189 on domestic workers. “We worked hard and created the National Department of Domestic Employees in our confederation,” she said, Further, it is important to train men and women on gender, “or else we will never have equality in our movement.” Dos Santos said women in Força Sindical are thinking about gender more carefully, to have more victories within our structures, but “our brothers don’t get it yet. The argument we keep hearing is ‘What about the rest of us?’ Hopefully in the future, equality will go beyond speeches to action.”
Lais Abramo thanked conference organizers for “creating this debate space with participation from activists from around the world.” She went on to describe how gender equality and the issue of women’s rights has been a theme since the ILO’s founding nearly 100 years ago. The 1919 ILO founding conference after World War I highlighted conventions on the work week, child labor, employment protection and protections for maternity rights (not including domestic or agricultural workers). All of these conventions are still relevant.
“You cannot have socially sustainable development if the capacities of women aren’t made the most of because of discrimination,” she said. Gender equality is an integral issue that cuts across all themes: human rights, poverty reduction, social justice and access to decent work. It is also an economic development issue, because discrimination affects the productive capacity of women and a decent work agenda.
Stating that “there have been many advances over the past 10 years in Brazil,” she noted that the 1991-2013 human development atlas of the United Nations Development Program demonstrates a major leap forward for Brazil. “This is not a coincidence,” she said, “but due to policies undertaken by the government of Brazil. Lula stated in his first press conference, ‘If at the end of my first term, if I achieve that every Brazilian can have three meals a day, I will be satisfied.’ This required a huge transformation, because at that time, 40 million people were living in poverty. Abramo said government programs, such as direct income transfers to women who head up households, have helped women.
The success of the Brazilian experience has to do with the eradication of poverty—a combination of social protection and labor market policies. The policies generated jobs for women in the formal economy, which represents a great advance, because women were overrepresented in the informal sector. “We still have a high proportion of informal sector workers, but we had an improvement of the minimum wage so Brazil’s income gap has been lessened between genders and races,” she said. The improved minimum wage is the result of social dialogue with labor movement, and has simultaneously addressed the issue of gender equality with racial equality.
She closed by saying that Brazil still has two challenges, one of which is addressing the labor rights of female domestic workers. Abramo congratulated the unions that helped push for Brazil’s passage of Convention 189 in March 2013. “The new law is vital, a great accomplishment,” she said. The second challenge involves young workers. Despite Brazil’s many advances, nearly “20 percent of young people today neither study nor work. There is a very strong gender component to that. Why? Either they are mothers needing to look after kids, or they are looking after siblings. We need to reconcile family and work life.”
Lisa McGowan, Solidarity Center Senior Specialist for Gender Equality closed the opening plenary by saying the gains made in Brazil over the last 10 years “were not by chance. It was a super intentional process. It took a huge effort. Part of what we want to talk about at this meeting is the huge efforts that people in this room have intentionally brought about in order to decrease inequality. What women have done to bargain and fight for themselves. To help women talk for themselves. To help men understand their role as partners, allies, comrades in this struggle. And to understand what is the problem, its nature and why does it exist? Why are we in this situation and how are we going to address it?”
Jul 30, 2013
In July 2013, the Solidarity Center hosted a meeting of nearly 100 worker/activists, union leaders, and academics to share experiences and ideas for advancing women’s labor rights and gender equality. The conference focused on three themes: women’s labor rights in agriculture and light manufacturing—two sectors that between them employ hundreds of millions of women around the world and which are central to the economic development of many countries—and transformational leadership in unions. Transformational leadership is a way of leading based on inclusion, power sharing, participation, and collective analysis that enables and relies upon workers’ voices to be front and center and readily embodies gender equality as a core principle.
Participants’ inspiring and insightful presentations and discussions reflected the scope, power and depth of women’s leadership in the international labor movement.
Read the Conference summary.
Scroll down to read the full conference proceedings.
AGENDA
July 30
Plenary
Opening Remarks and Welcome
Plenary
Leadership, Transformation and Labor Rights: The Essential Vision and Role of Women
Concurrent Workshops
• Union Strategies to Increase Women’s Participation in Brazil: Perspectives from Industrial, Public and Service Sectors
• Allies and Partners: Role of Men in Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality in Trade Unions
• Utilizing Legal Mechanisms to Fight Gender Discrimination and Support Women Workers Rights
• Young Workers: Challenges Now and in the Future
Plenary
Women Worker Rights in Agriculture: The Reality, Challenges and Opportunities
………………………….
July 31
Plenary
Women Worker Rights and Gender Equality in Light Manufacturing: What Way Forward?
Plenary
Bringing Back the Heart: Gender Action Learning Process with Four Trade Unions in South Africa
Concurrent Workshops
• Organizing Women in the Agricultural Sector
• Brazil’s Integrated Education and Solidarity Economy: Opening Pathways to Income and Citizenship
• Strategic Alliances for Working Women’s Rights: Unions and NGOs
• Decisions in Union Organizing: Applying a Gender Analysis to Organizing Campaigns
Concurrent Workshops
• Building Women’s Power in Times of Political Change: Examples from MENA
• Mechanisms for Increasing Women’s Participation in Unions: Education, Policies, Quotas and Budgets
• Women Workers Organizing: Examples from India, Brazil and Liberia
Plenary
Conclusions Panel: What Did We Learn/Where Do We Go From Here?
