Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy

Naila Kabeer is Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, London University. She has extensive experience in research, teaching and advisory work on gender, poverty, labour markets, livelihoods, social protection and grassroots citizenship. Her publications include Reversed Realities: Gender hierarchies in Development Thought; The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka; and more recently, Gender and Social Protection in the Informal Economy. She has also edited a number of books, including Inclusive Citizenship: Meanings and Expressions and Institutions, Relations and Outcomes: Methodologies for Planning and Case Studies from the Indian Context, both published by Zed Books.Ratna Sudarshan is Advisor (Research and Projects) at the Institute of Social Studies Trust, New Delhi, where she was Director from 2003 to 2011. She has researched and published on women in the informal economy, with a special focus on home-based work, social protection and local economic development; gender and education; research and policy linkage; and gender and evaluation. Other recent publications include a co-edited special issue (on 'Evaluating gender and equity') of the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 19, 2 (June 2012).Kirsty Milward founded and co-manages Suchana Uttor Chandipur Society, an organization offering education focused on social and gender equality amongst the Adivasi communities where she lives in West Bengal, India. She is also a freelance consultant providing writing, editing and evaluation services and specializing in gender and rural development. She has a particular interest in various organizational formations inspiring action to advance social and economic equality. Kirsty has an MA in gender and development from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.

• Introduction. Beyond the Weapons of the Weak: Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy - Naila Kabeer, Kirsty Milward and Ratna Sudarshan1. Women and Rural Trade Unions in North-East Brazil - Ben Selwyn2. Understanding the Dynamics of an NGO/MBO Partnership: Organizing and Working With Farm Women in South Africa - Colette Solomon3. Organizing for Life and Livelihoods in the Mountains of Uttarakhand: the Experience of Uttarakhand Mahila Parishad - Anuradha Pande4. Negotiating Patriarchies: Women Fisheries Workers Build SNEHA in Tamil Nadu - Jesu Rethinam5. 'If You Don't See a Light in the Darkness, You Must Light a Fire': Brazilian Domestic Workers' Struggle for Rights - Andrea Cornwall with Creuze Oliveira and Terezinha Gonçalves6. The Challenge of Organizing Domestic Workers in Bangalore: Caste, Gender and Employer-Employee Relations in the Informal Economy - Geeta Menon7. Power at the Bottom of the Heap: Organizing Waste Pickers in Pune - Lakshmi Narayan and Poornima Chikarmane8. Sex, Work and Citizenship: the VAMP Sex Workers' Collective in Maharashtra - Meena Seshu9. Gender, Ethnicity and the Illegal 'Other': Women from Burma Organizing Women Across Borders - Jackie PollockEndnote. Looking back on Four Decades of Organizing: the Experience of SEWA - Ela Bhatt

While acknowledging the organisational challenges faced and overcome, the essays in this important book mount a concerted challenge to the popular notion that certain kinds of informal workers are too isolated and invisible to be organised successfully. A must read for all looking to understand the organisational strategies which transform powerless labourers into worker citizens.