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Whose Labour Matters?
As millions of Indian farmers pour into the streets, threatening the global supply of grains, medicinal herbs, and spices, one question should be on everyone’s mind - whose labor matters?
Every day these protestors push the meaning of dignified work further, but the unsung song in the middle of all the chaos is that of the women. Women are the backbone of most industries, but their role in Indian agriculture has been long overlooked. Now, as photos of the millions of (mostly) men marching for an audience with the Prime Minister flood the internet, it becomes even more apparent that this fight has never included the women who are doing most of the labor.
While they own just 12.8% of all landholdings in the nation, they perform the bulk of the labor. Estimates place female participation in the agricultural sector at 73.2%. The majority of women in that position are working at the behest of their husbands and families. Forced into this uncompensated labor by economics or tradition, these women are largely unseen. This year nothing seems to be changing about that.
Men are the face of farming in the country and the face of the protests today. This isn’t the first time the farmers have shown their great discontent with Prime Minister Modi’s false promises, but it is the first time they have shown up in such high numbers. Risking their marginal profits, health, and future relationship with the government, these farmers are embarking on a journey that threatens to shake how the West in particular views labor in the Global South.
Still, the revolution isn’t about women -it’s about farmers. That distinction is crucial because we fail to address much of the root challenges to development, equality, and human rights when we fail to center women’s issues. At every level and in every industry, the problems faced by women at work are unique and necessary to create meaningful change.
The question pops up again - whose labor matters?
For me, the answer is simple women’s labor, specifically women of color in the West and women in the global south. It is the informal, unseen, and undervalued work that fuels the global economy. Whether it is the women working long hours in the maquiladoras in Latin America or the vast fields of India’s farmlands, this is the work that generates profit. On the backs of these women, fortune 500 companies, silicon valley tech bros, and the wealthiest men in the world have built their empires.
Western media have been notably silent about reporting on the injustice and civil unrest in India. Many people continue to speculate about why but the reasoning is quite apparent to me and many others in the South. Understanding the many intricate ties that bind production processes in the global south and the egregious wealth that lies in the West would probably spark massive protests.
Sure, we all understand that women and young girls make our clothes, and there are suicide nets outside the factories that make our cellphones but knowing those things and understanding the snowball effects of capitalist greed are different. It is easy and comfortable to picture these people in faraway factories benefiting in some way from our oppressive tactics; it’s another thing entirely to see them act on their frustration and rebel.
It is another thing entirely to understand how an avocado bought in LA means that a family in Chile goes without potable water, or how trade deals like NAFTA and USMCA that make goods cheap in the US mean that thousands of women die in Juarez. These are the harsh realities of Western wealth and comfort. These events are inextricably linked.
The foundations of the system that bleeds the South dry for egregious Western profits were laid long before the world we know now came to be. To understand, we need to go back to a time where the West was more explicitly enjoying the fruit of colonial exploitation.
In his book, Black Marxism, Cedric J Robinson explores the origins of African enslavement in the New World. The story he tells is one of a direct correlation between European (particularly Italian) capitalism and new world colonialism.
Before Columbus ever embarked upon his journey, slave labor was already in use within the small empires European nations were building. The colonies of wealthy Spanish and Portuguese nobility extended into the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, sprawled across the Mediterranean, and had just extended into the Atlantic Sea. The aristocrats who made their living by taking part in these colonial expeditions frequently used slavery to supplement in times of high demand. But as Italian capitalists began to conspire with Spanish and Portuguese royalty, slave labor soon became the most widely used get-rich-quick scheme in the freshly colonized island of Madeira in the Atlantic Sea.
Columbus came to the forefront of Spanish politics at a time of great change in the aristocracy. He was perfectly situated to embody this convergence of European powers, the son of an Italian merchant capitalist who married into lesser Portuguese nobility but was employed by the Spanish crown. He arrived in the new world primed for this new form of capitalist oppression. This was the preamble to the Atlantic slave trade.
The slave trade would soon see millions of Africans taken from their homeland, stripped, packed, and shipped to the faraway countries that lay on the other side of the ocean. The actual number of people who were so brutally enslaved is unknown, but estimates place it at over 15 million.
It was by taking indigenous land and enslaving once free peoples that colonial puppet masters enriched themselves and their countries. Soon England, Portugal, and Spain ballooned on the wealth they took from the colonies. England had used the expansion of empire to transform itself into a fully industrial capitalist state. The subjugation of the colonized people was central to the power and development of the new metropolises forming in Western Europe.
That was how things worked for many centuries; free labor in the Global South made for high profit margins in the West.
But, like many other capitalist endeavors, it was unsustainable. Revolts and riots forced colonists to cease slavery as a practice. Still, ever since then, white men have followed in their predecessors’ tradition to find new ways to enslave their former colonial conquests.
Today that manifests in the many multinational (that is to say, American or European based) corporations that have robbed governments of their country’s resources in exchange for short-term gain. In some ways, nothing has changed. But one thing that certainly has is the capitalist victimization of women.
While the time of slavery saw many horrible atrocities inflicted on both men and women who worked for European slave masters, women were, for the most part, relegated to domestic work. After many bids for independence and economic freedom, women have become an even more significant part of the visible labor force. Whether formally or informally, female labor is generating massive amounts of wealth in the Global South.
The South is struggling to achieve what the West has in its hundreds of years of colonialism, and it is quickly realizing that the growth the world is demanding requires oppression. It requires human rights abuses; it requires dehumanization and disconnection. At the end of the day, women are being forced to bear the brunt of the struggle.
International organizations are quick to talk of the “rise of the Global South” but slow to acknowledge the failures of implanting capitalist value systems into these countries. Slow to speak on garment factory collapses in Bangladesh or miscarriages in maquiladoras. Slow to address the severe human cost of this “rise” to Western standards. Even less acknowledged is the role of foreign investment in that development.
While foreign investment was once revered as the best way to promote development, but now more people recognize the system’s inherent flaws. It results in mega corps like Chiquita (aka “the United Fruit Company”) buying out small producers and taking the bulk of their profits. These are roundabout ways for well established and privileged people (usually men) to profit from cheap, exploited labor.
The “rise of the Global South” is coming at a cost. One we, here in the South, are not prepared to pay. It looks like women working for no pay in India, and Modi attempting to rob the few farmers who do profit of their money. It looks ugly and disturbing because this “rise” is just another form of colonial violence.
Again, the South is footing the bill for Western enrichment. And again, the question lingers- whose labor matters?
If not these women, who are laboring in the shadows - then who?
Is it the men who sit atop the fortune they are building for them? That seems to be who we value, at least with money.
As the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos is the face of labor that matters today. News media is eager to tell us his story, to sell us another falsehood about our ability to accrue a fortune like his. Yet, at the same time, we see thousands of videos from Amazon employees crying out for better pay and working conditions- to say nothing of those who provide the goods that Amazon ships.
Long hours, few (if any) breaks, constant walking- these are just some complaints pouring out of the over 100 warehouses across the US. Yet, when asked about the importance of a “work-life balance,” Bezos neatly side steps any accusation of rights violations and skips to what might be the most capitalist concept of work ever.
He talks about a “work-life harmony” because “balance” implies a strict trade-off. He goes on to talk about his own experience, saying: “I find that when I am happy at work, I come home more energized, I’m a better husband, a better dad.” The problem is that it implies that your work should either spark joy or bring you the energizing positivity that allows you to be a better person at home. But that isn’t what Amazon’s work culture promotes; a culture which he actively claims he is proud of.
He says this, and yet the work he puts forward for his employees is grueling and repetitive. It doesn’t spark joy or intrigue. It doesn’t promote balance. And it proves what we all know, the work that matters - that builds an empire, isn’t joyous, it doesn’t create harmony.
Much of the work that makes his “work-life harmony” possible takes place on the ground floor in overheating warehouses, places he never has to see. Therein lies the problem, the work that generates wealth is far removed from those that keep it.
Slavery was built on disconnect and the dehumanization that comes with racist, imperial, and ultimately capitalist mindsets. That is what allows us to make choices that directly impoverish and oppress our fellow humans. Bosses are removed from their workers, consumers are removed from the supply chain, and the meaning is removed from those who labor.
Globalization and the nature of this increasingly globalized world have to make us ask - whose labor matters. We have to keep questioning that and questioning how best we can make sure that the money ends with those working. Moreover, we need to keep pushing our governments to ensure that the workers who matter are getting paid like it.
What that looks like for you or your country might be different, but what is essential is that we are all seeking to close the gap between pay and the labor that matters.
Hayley Headley is an emerging writer and journalist who works hard to create work that is fiercely feminist, anti racist and anti oppression on a whole. You can check out more of her work and content on her instagram @hayley.headley
Las Pandillas: Women on the Run
In 2018, as an abnormally large number of migrants marched to the US border, they couldn’t have known the hell that would soon befall them. Now, in 2020, the issue has fallen to the background of US politics and out of the public consciousness. Though the so-called “crisis” on the border remains a major challenge to women’s rights on both sides of the line.
The vast majority of migrants on the border are women and minors coming up from the Northern Triangle, a notoriously fraught region. The NTCA refers to the three most tumultuous and low-income countries south of Mexico - El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Two of the most significant challenges to progress and development in these three nations are economic inequality and gang violence. These are harshest on the women in the region. Domestic violence is endemic, and recent years have seen gangs deliberately targeting women and children to extort further the communities they torment.
Artwork by Lucia Torres
To get a better picture of the current violence that is so widespread in the region, we need to understand a bit of history. The area has been rife with political, socioeconomic, and colonial conflicts for centuries. Military coups and a series of US interventions have kept the region unstable for decades. Long before the gangs, social and economic inequality manifested in all-out civil wars as the poor attempted to usurp their elitist oppressors. The tale of violent conflict within the region is a long and complex one, but the critical event that most informs the turmoil we are seeing today began in the late 1970s in the streets of El Salvador.
Socioeconomic divides that began brewing long before the nation’s independence spilled over into the 1900s and manifested in an attempted coup in 1930. The failure left the poor and wounded under the toe of a brutal military force controlled by the elite they sought to overthrow. Tensions continued to rise, and a string of attempted coups and assassinations came to a head in 1979 when a leftist military junta seized control of the country. After they failed to fulfill their promises to the working class, the five largest guerillas rose up to fight off their new oppressor. Under the National Liberation Front banner, these guerillas began a conflict that soon plunged the nation into civil war.
The war dragged on until 1992, and by then, the country had been decimated. The blood of 75,000 Salvadorans marred the empty streets as El Salvador attempted to rebuild with a crippled population, no government, and no clear way forward. Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled during the 12-year long war, many of them leaving their children and seeking out better lives elsewhere. They most commonly arrived on the US border; many of them crossed illegally after failing to claim asylum.
The US had played a significant role in the war itself, providing arms and funds for the authoritarian regime who they chose to legitimize. It was with US sponsored arms and training that the regime would go on to commit 85% of the atrocities against their own people in the war. Though they fueled the most severe human rights violations they felt they owed nothing to the Salvadorans at the border. Their ignorance and ineptitude in dealing with the thousands of people flowing into the country left these refugees destitute. Forced into poor neighborhoods with no papers and no ability to get them, they fended for themselves in inner cities riddled with the kind of organized gang violence that plagues El Salvador today.
These Los Angeles neighborhoods were the birthplace of Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio Deciocho, gangs that now sprawl across the NTCA. They had innocent beginnings. They were a way for the Salvadoran community to defend themselves from the surrounding gangs that frequently harassed them. However, they soon became full-fledged drug trafficking operations, and while they continued to protect their community, the lucrative business was attractive for all these fresh and jobless refugees.
In the early 90s, the Clinton administration pushed for tighter restrictions on refugees arriving to and currently living in the US. This came with a wave of negative attention that soon saw many gang members deported back to a home with no infrastructure. Deportations began in 1993, with just dozens of gang members, but only two years later, the Clinton administration had forcibly removed 780 members from the country.
They arrived to an El Salvador with no ability or will to monitor and control them. Their operations flourished. The wave of migrant parents fleeing and leaving their children behind had created thousands of orphans, and with little else to occupy their time and no family that was fit to provide, the gangs became their refuge. The country was littered with weaponry that soon fell into the hands of the warring gangs that began to carve up the country. In lieu of a formal policing force and a well-established government, with thousands of lost children and abandoned artillery in their midst, Barrio 18 and MS-13 soon became the most notorious gangs in the region, spreading across borders and becoming a powerful economic and societal force.
El Salvador was brought to the brink of disaster in 2015 as its murder rate spiked to 104 per 100,000. That was a wake-up call for the government. After a series of trial and error policies, attempts to control and quell the swell of gang violence are finally yielding success. But as the war on the gangs in the NTCA continues to rage on, and even if the government wins, the seeds of future class struggle have already been sown. Like the nations surrounding it, the country is burdened with the lasting impact of colonial and imperialist oppression.
Economic inequality across the world is rising, but it poses even greater stress on women and girls in the global south. Burdened with all that femininity carries everywhere; caring for children, being economically viable partners, and being good homemakers. The weight of womanhood is extra heavy on women who are attempting to make lives in impoverished neighbourhoods plagued by violent crime.
Gangs are a symbol of fear for every member of society, but women have been uniquely made targets of their brutal acts. Gender-based violence has become just another weapon in the toolbox, and the victimization of women has become imperative to territorial control and power.
Women have been forced into hiding. They barricade themselves in their homes, avoid public life, and are still expected to provide for their children. The obstacles are continuing to mount. Femicide rates in the NTCA, particularly in Honduras and El Salvador, are the worst in the world. In 2018, 6.8 of 100,00 women in El Salvador died - the highest femicide rate in the world at the time. In that same year, Honduras topped out at 5.1, while Guatemala saw 2 per 100,000 women die because of their gender. These crimes are ruthless. The thousands of women who were found to be victims of femicide were mutilated and often found to have experienced some form of sexual violence before their death.
Artwork by Lucia Torres
The UN has made many reports that cite gang violence as a key factor in these crimes. Yet, a culture of machismo that glorifies the oppression of women prevents the police and the government from addressing these issues in earnest. As these governments wrestle with gang violence, women’s causes routinely fall between the cracks. Their policies fail to intervene in the places women need community and government support.
Femicide is just the tip of the iceberg. The gangs have taken up a policy of forcibly “recruiting” women by making them “novias de la pandilla (girlfriends of the gang).” These relationships have been referred to as modern slavery, marked by sexual and physical violence. Las pandillas in the NTCA have been known to extort families by threatening to take their daughters. They often kidnap these girls with or without the money, making these young girls bargaining chips in this sick game of chance. In this unique context, women have become more than products; they are a currency that ensures community submission to gang rule.
The options are simple - flee or pay and hope for the best. As the economic situation worsens in the region, and governments remain incapable of containing, punishing, or even rehabilitating gang members, the second is no longer feasible.
Again, all eyes turn to the United States. A country whose increasingly limited and nationalistic rhetoric continues to shut the door in their faces. Migrants coming up from the NTCA know this. They are well aware of the politics at play in the US and the many challenges on their long journey. They are conscious that this path is laced with violence and their success (or lack thereof) is up to fate. Still, they leave not out of any genuinely independent will but out of necessity. Economic hardship, widespread gang violence, and the overwhelming sense that change will never have spurred them into action.
The journey northward is long and arduous. Migrants are guided by “coyotes,” people who have made it their life's work to smuggle hundreds of migrants each year from their nations to the US’s southern border. They charge thousands of USD to make you a part of their group and often raise the price at will. Many families save for years for the chance to send just one person to safety.
Millions of migrants make the trek each year from the NTCA to the US’s southern border. In 2019 it was projected that 1% of the population of Guatemala and Honduras would attempt to make it to the US border. Less than half of them will actually get asylum. The US government will repatriate the rest, but commonly migrants don’t get far enough to stake their claim.
Today, women and children are occupying the lion’s share of migrants showing up at the border. This is indicative of the violence they are facing at home and the many challenges they are facing to obtaining legal status in the US.
Under the Trump administration, both Mexico and the US have tightened their border security. As the US becomes more isolationist in its policies, it places increased pressure on its allies to do the same. The crackdowns on the Mexican border with Guatemala have forced refugees into even more perilous routes. In these areas, they face extortion from regional gangs, victimization by human traffickers that kidnap these women and girls for sexual and domestic servitude.
There isn’t enough being done to protect these women, and this isn’t work they can push for alone. This unique trap has been constructed around them for decades, and escaping won’t be easy. Both international and national efforts to protect these women have to be focused on them - not on the gangs, not on money, or immigration. It has to center on the women who are dying and being enslaved because it is only through giving them justice; we can show them that there is hope.
The situation in the NTCA is getting better, but the gangs are also getting smarter, and unlike the general public, they are watching every move the government makes. Whether it be more lax immigration policies or harsher anti-gang patrols - they are preparing for it. And that preparation only puts more stress on these women and their families.
What a woman has to be is constantly changing, but in the NTCA, it is unclear if womanhood will ever not be tied to victimhood. There is so much more to being a woman in a society primed and accepting of the violence it enacts against you. It requires a fortification of self, a bravery that is unfathomable to most. These women’s stories may never be told in full, but their experiences represent what most of us can see so clearly - there is no justice without care for women’s rights.
Hayley is an emerging writer and journalist who works hard to create work that is fiercely feminist, anti racist and anti oppression on a whole. You can check out more of her work and content on her instagram @hayley.headley
Lets talk…..Period.
To help keep a healthy body and mind during the second lock down, I have been walking each day. I wrap up warm taking along a flask of coffee. Last week my walk ended abruptly. I felt the familiar wet warmth down below and a cramp crept around my lower stomach - I had an unexpected visit from Aunt Flo, the crimson tide, mother nature’s gift, and any other euphemisms you wish to call it. (Personally, I like to call it the pain in the arse!) Muttering under my breath as I turned back, I grumbled how unfair life was. I know, I know, but in my defense, I am extremely irritable when it is my time of the month.
Do you know what I did when I got home? I had a warm soapy bath. Afterwards I grabbed a sanitary pad; a hot water bottle and made a sugary cup of tea. Then as I stretched out on the sofa with cushions popped behind my back, a water bottle on my belly and a hot cup of tea in my hand, I had a reality check. Here was me pissed off that my walk was caught short, yet I can come home and have everything at my fingertips. What do people do who are homeless or on low income? What does a person do when they are on the street or have to decide that milk Is more important for the kid’s cereal?
When thinking of hygiene products for the homeless: soap, razors and toothpaste spring to mind. Why has tampons and pads eluded me? Why did I not think of these essential items? I decided to investigate further and started exploring campaigns and charities that help with distributing hygiene products.
There are many organizations and charities working hard to raise awareness and trying to put an end to period poverty. After an internet search I could see there were many worthwhile causes such as Blossom Project, Dignity-Matters, and Bloody Good Period to name but a few. However, the one that resonated with me was Tricky Period who are based in London.
Tricky Period was set up by Caroline Allouf and a small team of volunteers who were already working to support homeless people on the streets of North London for Street Kitchen. Caroline wanted to address the horror for many women that live on the street and are unable to afford basic period products. At Street Kitchen Caroline and other volunteers were regularly hearing stories from women with no choice but to shoplift, skip meals and use newspaper to provide their monthly protection.
‘None of these things we say are an exaggeration,
I mean in the terms of people literally having nothing.
Coming in stained, having to steal, using leaves in knickers.’
It was then that Caroline realized that something had to be done and the grassroots project was born at the beginning of the year (2020).
Caroline and the gang launched Period Poverty at the Vagina Museum in Camden London in February 2020. The Vagina Museum is about erasing the sigma around the body and spreading awareness of gynecological anatomy. Caroline said, “this felt totally apt”.
The gang distribute pads, tampons with applicators and without, wipes and disposable bags to women’s shelters, refuges, mother and baby units as well as the women on the streets via breakfast outreach. Tricky Period have teamed up with ShowerBox London, a free and secure shower and changing rooms which travel around London providing support for the homeless and this makes for a good partnership. “It’s a great opportunity to start conversations with the women” said Caroline, and notes that throughout outreach she has noticed a rise in homeless women. “Sadly, and this is a non-scientific approach from being out there, but there are noticeably younger women”. Some backdrop of these cases are of domestic violence, leaving home and then having nowhere to go in lock down. Caroline has come across women that will sleep with men just for a bed for the night.
Photo by Anna Shvets.
Tricky Period are working with a growing number of council libraries who are acting as product pick up points. They have been collaborating with libraries to provide period products to those experiencing homelessness and poverty. “It’s a model that can be replicated,” explains Caroline. The free supplies to libraries enable the women to come and get what they need under a no questions asked policy. Caroline says “the idea of libraries is that it is one of the few places in the community where everyone is welcome and safe – especially the homeless, people can walk into a library and not be looking over their shoulders or feel self-conscious.” Anyone who needs to use the service can tick off the items on a form and hand it over to a librarian. Caroline adds, “Just like they would go out the back to find a book that wasn’t on the shelf they then come out with the products in a bag”. She is keen to reiterate that this is a no questions asked policy.
With COVID-19 closing libraries Tricky Period have had to adapt in the lockdown and have been able to use family centers with open access. The future of Tricky Period is to focus on a space where women can feel safe, have a coffee, and enjoy the company of others. “Not just between 3pm and 5pm, and we are already connecting people to make that happen.” She is also excited to expand the library model.
I asked Caroline to describe the essence of Tricky Period:
“Tricky Period are just human beings building trust and relationships.
There are other projects, amazing projects out there. What matters to us
is that the people are getting what they need. We want to be able
to develop relationships with the most vulnerable women and support them.”
The realization of the lack of access to sanitary products is shocking. Many low-income and homeless women often don't have access to tampons and pads at all. Women confront the demoralizing task of finding resources to soak up blood and then having to find privacy to change and dispose of used items. Menstruation is not only a physical challenge for vulnerable people, but it’s also a psychological and social issue. I have never had to make the decision on either spending money on food so that I am not hungry or spending it on pads so that I am comfortable and dry. I’ve never had to use napkins from McDonald’s, and I don’t need to rip up a t shirt to line my knickers.
Pads, tampons, and liners are desperately needed. Initiatives, charities, food banks, and shelters distribute them, but they're often in short supply. Even more so in the current climate (COVID-19). Please check out and support your local and regional organizations and if you can please donate.
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Justina Jameson is an emerging writer from the UK. When she is not writing at the weekend, she can be found holding down a 9 to 5 as a Senior Administrative. Justina has a Social Welfare and Community Degree which examines the quality of human life in a society in all its dimensions. She feels strongly in female empowerment and believes that women should make personal and professional choices that they want and not let society make them very guilty about those very choices. Justina likes art,dogs, books, laughter and lives with her long tern partner and their dog Cooper-Star.
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