A Federation for Informal Workers: Networking Workers Across Global Labour and Global Production

This paper positions the Federation of Homeworkers Worldwide (FHWW) as a new organisational form within the global labour movement.  The FHWW collaborates with a range of union and NGO organisations to support new organizing amongst informal, low paid women homebased workers in a broad range of sectors and global regions, although a large extent of its work has been in the textile, garment and footwear industries.

The over-representation of women in informal and precarious work suggests that the gendered nature of global production remains an important site of investigation. This is further informed by the challenges to understand how workers may gain legitimacy or assert influence in the global production network (GPN). The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse the role and activities of FHWW within the global labour movement, to understand how it supports women’s networks to build new labour organizing for women. Through our examination of the efforts of FHWW in India, we illustrate some recent initiatives to establish and build organisation of Sumangali and camp labour textile workers in Tamil Nadu, India.  Trade unions appear to have little presence in these mills and have been further marginalised by the employer strategies to keep unions out.  NGOs in the Tirupur region have been actively campaigning on this issue since the early 2000s, but little progress has been made towards collective organisation.

The paper explores the question of why there is a need for a federation of informal workers and examines how it functions with minimal resources to work with informal worker groups, which in turn reveals important lessons for unions and labour rights groups around the possibilities of organizing with few resources and employing participatory, grass-roots strategies as opposed to top-down approaches.