Equality

When the 1944 Philadelphia International Labour Conference set forth to imagine the woman worker’s place amid postwar demobilization, it unearthed old fissures. This chapter explores discourses of equality in the making of the woman worker, when equal remuneration and non-discrimination came to stand for universal progress for women workers, displacing deliberation on the home as a workplace, in terms of both industrial home work and domestic service. Women inside and outside of the ILO pushed for equality measures. The “double-difference” of colonized women, however, produced a notion of “equality” with multiple and unequal tiers of meaning. Ultimately, “equal rights” would enable women in “non-metropolitan territories” to produce goods or reproduce labor power for the benefit of the Global North. The developing Cold War and institutional rivalry between the ILO and the new United Nations Commission on the Status of Women influenced agenda setting. Labor feminists won a revised maternity protection convention, which did not challenge the ideal of the male breadwinner. A shift from interwar policy occurred, but reluctantly and incompletely as a strategic measure rather than as a step toward decolonization or as an affirmation of women’s rights.

Introduction

Asking why it took a century for domestic workers to come under global labor standards, this introduction frames the ILO as a producer of social knowledge whose definitions cast the woman worker as a distinct category in law and social policy. It traces changes in the global political economy, introduces the structure of the ILO, and outlines subsequent chapters. Though not an explicitly feminist organization, legal-equality and labor feminists alike sought to use the ILO to advance their own agendas. Despite growing acceptance of formal equality, the ILO came up against women’s assumed responsibility for homes and families, including reproductive labor. By the 1970s, structural transformations rendered the male-breadwinner model inadequate, turning the ILO’s attention to the “informal” sector exemplified by women home-based workers in the Global South. With the unraveling of the employer-employee relation and legal protections, the woman worker in the early 21st century came to stand as a harbinger for a world of precarious, feminized labor—part-time, short-term, and low-waged—that the ILO seeks to combat through a “decent work” agenda, which includes improving unpaid as well as paid domestic work, both of which are essential for women’s labor force participation.

Women’s Place (in the Future of Work)

In the early 21st century, women still found in home-based labor a private solution to their need to earn income while looking after children and other family members. Even as the ILO embraced gender mainstreaming and gender-neutral standards (except for maternity), it re-inscribed care work as part of the problem of the woman worker on the eve of its 2019 Centennial. Building a new care economy emerged as the solution to winning equality and transforming paid household labor into decent work. To encourage women’s labor force participation, the ILO would remake the workplace through flexi-time and flexi-space. It continued to promulgate best practices for improving working life, adding assistance with monitoring global supply chains and encouraging corporate social responsibility. It debated a new instrument on gender violence and sexual harassment at work, including harms to LGBTQ people. Nonetheless, the unraveling of labor standards and the onslaught against worker rights spread conditions once associated with women in the Global South to men as well as women in the industrialized North. As the gig economy and computerization increasingly positioned the home as a site of commoditized work, economic justice in all worksites became bound ever more intimately to justice in the home.

Outwork

This chapter charts the road to the Home Work Convention, 1996 (No. 177), whose passage paved the way for “excluded” workers to press for rights and recognition at the ILO. Changes in the global economy led international union federations and ILO sectorial meetings to support a convention. Efforts of the Programme on Rural Women also proved crucial. The Self Employed Women’s Association of India (SEWA) led by Ela Bhatt became the most important group organizing home-based workers and documenting their lives. It lobbied for international redress as a strategy to enact and enforce national measures. However, the campaign by an emerging transnational network of women in HomeNet International required amplification by the labor federations. Research alone was insufficient to gain the attention of the Governing Body or win at the International Labour Conference, though lack of statistics served as an excuse for inaction. Support by the Workers’ group proved necessary, galvanized by Dan Gallin of the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF). Conflicts over who was an employee and rejection by the entire Employer’s group revealed cracks in the ILO’s structure.

Home

After looking at prior efforts to address domestic/household work, this chapter situates the making of the Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189), “Decent Work for Domestic Workers.” Paving the way were ILO discussions on migrant labor and the informal economy. “Decent work” and “fair globalization” initiatives framed the convention, but the ILO would not have formalized household employment without national and regional social movements, the creation of the International Domestic Workers Network (IDWN) under South Africa’s Myrtle Witbooi, and its campaign for ILO attention. Domestic workers gained a presence at the ILO, despite formal institutional barriers, aided by NGO and union allies, especially Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) and the IUF (International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations). Convention No. 189 recognized the centrality of paid care work for women’s labor force participation and the functioning of the global economy. For a new century, it boosted the ILO in a fight against the precarity and informality that were undermining the very idea of universal labor standards. Parlaying victory into better conditions would prove daunting, but IDWN (and its successor, the International Domestic Workers Federation [IDWF]) secured more ratifications in a few years than many other conventions.

Protection

This chapter explores the legacy of the interwar period by focusing on the contested meaning of protection. It contrasts labor standards as protections for workers with cultures of protection that address Western notions of morality, sexuality, gender ideals, and “civilized” behavior. It probes standards for workers who deviated from the adult male industrial norm by their gender, age, occupation, or geographical location. After discussing the promise of the International Conference of Working Women, it analyzes the ILO’s originary embrace of protection in 1919. It then compares two ILO proposals that elicited pushback from both social purity advocates and legal equality feminists: migrant women traveling alone on ships and the social welfare of seafaring men in ports. It finally turns to interwar conventions for areas under colonial rule. Amid regulation of forced and contract labor, Western women justified their own quest for equal rights by intervening to save “native” women from multiple kinds of violations through “native” labor conventions. The operation of such special protections highlights the centrality of reproductive labor for the sexual division of labor, but also for the economic, political, and cultural hegemony of the colonial powers.

Reproduction

This chapter analyzes the ILO’s Programme on Rural Women, which offered an alternative vision of development around the worth of subsistence and reproductive labor. Beginning in the late 1970s, its feminist staff moved beyond the findings of Ester Boserup on the gendered impact of development. They considered relations in the household, the centrality of women’s domestic and non-monetized work, and the significance of both for capitalist accumulation. Eschewing reliance on statistical data, program staff sought to decolonize knowledge by commissioning fieldwork and surveys by women researchers from the very places under investigation. The staff encouraged participatory action research that regarded rural women themselves as experts and empowered poor women collectively. The resulting studies, including ones by Lourdes Benería and Maria Mies, would define the field of women and development. But the program came into conflict with FEMMES, the ILO’s coordinating unit on women’s issues, over institutional domains, issue priorities, and the very meaning of equality. By the mid-1980s whether the conditions of the rural woman in the Global South would foreshadow wider precarity was unclear, but a general belief emerged that family labor created a barrier to full labor force participation.

Development

This chapter turns to the construction of a category within a category, “women in developing countries,” whose difference from the Western norm defined the severity of woman’s oppression and made her into the other of the woman worker. In the early post-WWII years, the ILO juggled a commitment to equality with designation of Third World women as the most needy of distinct programs. It promoted handicraft despite the resemblance of such labor to exploitative industrial home work. When addressing Women Workers in a Changing World in 1964, the ILO separated the situation of women in developing countries, whose income generation could be integrated into home labor, from women in industrialized regions whose family responsibilities interfered with their labor force participation. At the 1975 UN World Conference on Women, the meaning of development, like that of equality, was up for grabs in the ideological contest between state socialist and newly independent states against the former colonial states and market economies. ILO opposition to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) intertwined with its attempt to provide Third World women with substantive equality.