‘Of Course People Will Hire the White Person’: Social and economic inclusion of migrant women in Vancouver, Canada

Written on 28 June 2022.

This report presents the findings of a research into the experiences of migrant women in Vancouver, Canada, with accessing the labour market and integrating into Canadian society. Women shared that their limited ability to speak English and the fact that their education and work experience from their home countries were not recognised in Canada were major obstacles to finding good employment. Several also shared experiences of racism or discrimination, including for seemingly minor reasons such as being unaccustomed to having small talk with customers. All this meant that migrant women often could rely only on their co-nationals for work, accommodation, and socialisation, which increased the risks of being subjected to exploitative working conditions. Overall, however, women tended to perceive Canadian society as just and fair and blame themselves for any difficult situations they faced.

The research was conducted in 2020-2021 by GAATW member SWAN, a community organisation for im/migrant sex workers in Vancouver. It involved thirty women from China, Chinese Taipei (the island of Taiwan), Chile, Mexico, Guatemala, India, and Iran.

Read the report here.

Our Work, Our Lives, issue 8: Songs that Women Sing

Written on 30 March 2022.

Dear friends,

The March issue of Our Work, Our Lives focuses on music. Songs and music have always been powerful tools to inspire and mobilise people. They have been an integral part of social justice movements and the feminist movements have a treasure chest of powerful songs. So we thought that in March, when we celebrate International Women’s Day, it would be good to learn about the songs that our colleagues have been inspired by and use in their work. We are delighted that friends from so many countries shared songs, old and new, that they have used in their movements – for protest marches, trainings, celebrations, and solidarity gatherings. These songs raise their voice against patriarchy, discrimination, injustice, and extractivism and call for peace, freedom, and equality. Many songs are creations of groups. Some are full of humor and sarcasm. Some have anger. All are simple and powerful.

Songs have also been important for workers, including women workers. A lot of work that women do is repetitive, monotonous, time consuming, and taxing. They need patience, grit, imagination, love, and care to carry out their tasks, day in and day out. Women workers in traditional societies, like their male counterparts, have made up songs to go with work. They have sung while planting, weeding, cleaning, grinding, knitting, weaving, and putting their babies to sleep. Our friends from Aaina in Odisha, India shared a song performed by a woman farmer which is sung while planting rice.

Many songs have travelled across time and place. Bella Ciao, which many of us may know as a resistance, anti-fascist song, has its roots in the paddy fields of Po Valley in northeast Italy. The original singers of Bella Ciao in the nineteenth century were women mondine (literally “weeders”), who were bemoaning their harsh working conditions. Now the song is available in multiple languages and part of the social justice movements in many parts of the world. Even in the pre-digital era, songs like Bread and Roses and We Shall Overcome, had crossed geographical and linguistic barriers and become global. More recently, the protest march titled “el violador en tu camino” (A rapist in your way) organised by a Chilean feminist collective, LASTESIS, has gone viral and inspired women to hold street protests in many parts of the world including in Delhi and Nairobi.

Our Work, Our Lives, issue 7: Women workers and the climate crisis

Written on 28 February 2022.

Dear friends,

The February 2022 issue of Our Work, Our Lives focuses on the climate crisis. In preparation for this issue, some self-organised groups of women workers within our alliance and our colleagues working with them held group discussions on the topic of climate change and its impacts on lives and livelihoods. We wanted to know what kind of changes women workers have observed over the years, how it impacts them, and what steps they take to address the challenges.

Interestingly, the topic of climate triggered memories of natural disasters among many groups. Kala aur Katha’s group discussion focussed on the super cyclones in Odisha in 1999 and 2019. Malati Behera remembered that fateful day when she lost her husband and 6-year-old daughter to the cyclone. Reminiscing about cyclone Fani that hit the state two decades later, women artisans from the Dom community in Odisha pointed out how even during a cyclone the horrible practice of untouchability was not forgotten.

Jannath Ferdaus, a Bangladeshi migrant worker in the garment sector in Jordan, recalled how the frequent floods and cyclones in her village displaced her family and eventually resulted in her overseas labour migration. Jane Nungari Njoroge, a Kenyan migrant domestic worker in Jordan noted that state support often does not reach to the people in need. The women’s group that Shramajivi Mahila Samity works with shared that the weather pattern has changed: “Summers are longer and harsher than before. The time of sowing of paddy has also changed, forests are no longer dense. The variety of forest produce is also slowly going down”, they said. Badabon Sangho has highlighted the link between the climate crisis, land rights and violence against women.

Sustainable Reintegration – What Do Women Migrant Workers in the South Asia-Middle East Corridor Say?

Written on 18 February 2022.

The aim of this report is to highlight the challenges that women migrant workers from South Asia who returned from the Middle East experience when trying to resume their lives upon return. It highlights gaps in the implementation of policies and programmes for sustainable reintegration of migrants. It identifies opportunities for improvement based on migrant women’s own desires and ambitions, as well as the work of civil society organisations working with them.

The report is based on research conducted between July 2020 and March 2021 with 486 returnee migrant women from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Most had worked as domestic workers in Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon for between several months and several decades. The research employed participatory methods and explored women’s experiences with return, work and income upon return, access to government programmes, and relationships within the family and community.

Read the report here.

Read Policy Briefing: Women migrant workers are building our countries’ futures

Our Work, Our Lives, issue 6: Hopes and dreams for 2022

Written on 28 January 2022.

Dear friends,

Greetings of the New Year! Even though so far 2022 feels like Twenty-Twenty-Too, let’s hope that the situation will improve during the year. Hopefully the vaccination rates will increase significantly around the world and some degree of normalcy will return soon.

Our Work, Our Lives has reached its sixth issue which is very encouraging for a publication that relies completely on women workers and our colleagues who work closely with them. The women workers who write for the magazine are part of self-organised or community-based groups. They are at different stages of their collectivisation process. All of them meet regularly to carry out various collaborative activities. Some have facilitated discussions on various social issues and learning themes.

For the January 2022 issue of Our Work, Our Lives, we requested our sisters to share their collective hopes and dreams for the New Year with us. We made some suggestions on how they could go about their Collective Dreaming processes, but each group also had complete freedom to plan their own session in a completely different way.