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To NUDE´s “Equal Rights for Domestic Workers Campaign” From the Global Women´s Strike, London
We send our warmest support and solidarity for the Equal Rights for Domestic Workers Campaign launch. As an international network of waged and unwaged women, we salute the National Union of Domestic Employees and in particular its founder Clotil Walcott, who have campaigned tirelessly to ensure that domestic workers are officially recognised as workers and protected under the law.
We are a network with co-ordinating organisations in 14 countries – including NUDE and the domestic workers´ Centro de Capacitacion para Trabajadoras del Hogar in Peru. We are campaigning for recognition for all unwaged work, and for pay equity for all women and men in the global market.
Housework and the other caring work that women do is often invisible, mostly unrecognised, and devalued – breastfeeding, cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundering, nursing, comforting, and in the countryside planting, harvesting and tending the animals. Yet this work keeps families and communities alive. Housewives do this work unwaged, domestic workers do much of it for low wages. Both create time and welfare for other people, yet both are demeaned and excluded from the protection of the law. Domestic workers are forced to work a double or triple day, taking care of other people´s families before we take care of our own. Like housewives who face rape and other domestic violence from husbands and partners, domestic workers are often also raped and beaten by employers. And often the darker our colour the worst the exploitation. Many have had to emigrate to the US, Europe and elsewhere, despite widespread racism and the threat of deportation, so we can send money back to our families.
We have not always had the support we deserve, from women´s organisations and trade unions. We are glad that some unions are now ready to fight with us and for us.
Domestic workers in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, Asia and across the globe, make an enormous but often hidden contribution to movements for labour rights, against poverty wages and slave conditions. By demanding recognition, minimum pay and sick pay for service work, fixed work schedules, an end to rape and abuse by employers, fighting for the right to stay in countries we migrate to, and an end to the scandal of being thrown out without pension or severance pay when we get older, we defend the rights of every waged and unwaged worker.
In 1995 Trinidad & Tobago helped set a new standard by being the first country to agree to measure and value unwaged work in national accounts. Spain followed suit, and in 1999 the constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, T&T´s neighbour, stated that women’s work in the home is an economic activity which produces social wealth and welfare and entitles housewives to social security. The poorest mothers have begun to receive wages of about US$160 monthly for their work.
It is time that domestic workers, the other invisible carers, also got the recognition and protection NUDE and others have so long campaigned for. In Bolivia and Peru domestic workers have won protective legislation. What about Trinidad and Tobago?
We say carers of the world unite; we have nothing to lose but our poverty. We have a world to win!
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