Our vision is that all homeworkers around the world, most of whom are women, can come together to claim their rights and earn a fair and secure wage in decent working conditions. Read our new strategy to find out how we aim to get there.
As we have highlighted in earlier updates, the Covid-19 crisis has hit homeworkers' hard, as factories lose overseas orders and close due to lockdowns, leaving informal homeworkers without work and also denied access to social security. This update from Traidcraft Exchange who is leading our Hidden Homeworkers project, highlights some of the ways the ways in which our local partners have adapted project activities to respond to the Covid 19 crisis.
There's also a great blog published here (https://www.wiego.org/blog/innovation-and-unity-how-home-based-workers-are-adapting-covid-19-world), reviewing some innovative responses to the crisis by homeworker organsiations in other parts of the world.
Homeworkers Worldwide has been working on the issue of women homeworkers stitching the leather uppers for many years, in many different countries. This report provides a more detailed look at the recent work with homeworkers in Ambur in Tamil Nadu, in partnership with Cividep.
Briefing Note 1 in our Organising Women Workers series. Across the world, women workers are concentrated in the poorest paid jobs, with the fewest rights and least job security. Often traditional organising approaches are too rigid to answer the needs of working women and new methods are needed. We want to shine a spotlight on some inspiring examples of trade unions and NGOs who are working to support the organisation of women workers in highly challenging circumstances.
Briefing Note 2 in our Organising Women Workers series. In the West Midlands in the 1980s a shift towards faster flexible fashion led to a growth in small factories and workshops employing mainly Asian women workers, under appalling working conditions. The Aekta Project was established in 1985 in response to this exploitation. Much has changed in the intervening 30 years, but the resurgence of fast, cheap garment manufacturing, means that the lessons of the Aekta Project are now more pertinent than ever.
Briefing Note 3 in our Organising Women Workers series. We want to shine a spotlight on trade unions and NGOs who are working to support the organisation of women workers in highly challenging circumstances. In Bangalore, South India, the NGO Cividep worked with women garment workers to build a women's movement and eventually a trade union with which they could claim their rights as women and as workers.
A set of three workbooks for those working with craft workers, written by Carolyn Jongeward for HWW drawing on the experience of those working with craft workers in the mapping programme and other organisations.
A5 booklet with short report of the different kinds of organising that came out of the mapping programme, illustrated with colour photos.
A set of 16 colour postcards with photos of homebased workers in a range of countries who took part in the mapping programme.
The photo pack is a set of about 20 A4 colour photos of homebased workers, with a text on the back of each explaining who they are; what country they are from and what kind of organisations they belong to. Used in early stages of working with homebased workers. Each photo is laminated and the set comes in a plastic pack.