Reflections on a guru, mentor, colleague, and close friend of 40 years, and how the journey of the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India led to a global women in informal employment network
By Marty Chen
Ela-ben and I first met in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1976. She had come from India to Bangladesh as a UNICEF consultant to provide advice about empowering women and girls after having started the Self-Employed Women’s Association, SEWA, four years earlier in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. I was working with the women’s program at the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, later known as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, later BRAC.
Ela-ben often spoke in parables, deceptively simple stories with broader moral and political meanings.
The parable I remember from our first meeting concerned the price of bamboo and featured paper mills and a woman basket maker. Paper mills in India could buy bamboo from the government forestry department for ten paise per bamboo. But the woman basket maker had to pay 10 rupees for a single bamboo in the open market.
While acknowledging that paper mills buy in bulk and the basket-maker buys one bamboo at a time, she questioned the morality of the hundred-fold difference in price. She also worried about the difficulties and the financial burden the woman basket-maker faced in transporting the bamboo back to her village home.
Guru and mentor
Little did we know then that we would work closely together for over 40 years. Ela-ben was my guru and mentor and a colleague from whom I learned so much. Along with Renana-ben, national coordinator at SEWA, we co-founded the Women in Informal Employment, the WIEGO network.
Ela-ben was also the dearest of friends, with whom I had many deep conversations. We last spoke in late September 2022, two weeks after she suffered a stroke and died two months later. As always, she worried about women informal workers and the state of the world – not herself.
Inspired by Gandhi, Ela-ben fought for India’s ‘second freedom’ – economic freedom. In her remarks at a panel in 2016, she said that achieving economic freedom persists, and the “problems of poverty and loss of freedom are not separate.” Mentioning Gandhiji, she said that he acknowledged that political and technological change does not necessarily remove poverty and called economic deprivation a “moral collapse” of the society.
Ela-ben understood that the informal economy is the link – the pathway – between economic growth and poverty. She also understood that a significant barrier to economic freedom for the working poor in the informal economy was the mindsets of policymakers and other influential actors.
Addressing graduates of the Harvard Kennedy School in June 2006, Ela-ben said that it was in the early 1970s, when she began working with vegetable vendors, cart-pullers, and cigarette rollers in India, that she “began to question the definition of work.”
She saw women who worked from dawn till dusk; hard, back-breaking work, rain or shine, but were not considered workers in the eyes of the law. “Why? Because they had no employer. Did that mean unless someone paid you to do something, what you did was not work?”
Uniting for each other
We organised and called ourselves the Self-Employed Women’s Association. But, the government would not register us when we tried registering ourselves as a trade union. Why? Because we were not “fighting against a fixed employer.”
Noting that union means “coming together” or bonding, she questioned the need for an adversary. “We were not uniting against anything or anyone; we were uniting for each other!”
“You will run into many such absurdities in life, so keep questioning,” she told the graduates.
Ela-ben believed first and foremost in the power of organising and statistics. For her, organising the poor – in SEWA’s case, working poor women in the informal economy – was a necessary precondition for securing economic freedom. She understood the power that comes with strength in numbers – from a collective voice. She also believed that informal workers needed to organise globally – since the economy and capital are global.
Ela-ben noted the invisibility of informal workers in policy circles. She frequently said, “Their livelihoods are not perceived as work”, only factory or office work is “work”. The work of millions engaged in other labour “is not recorded, therefore, not protected, enhanced, planned, or budgeted for.” They remain conveniently invisible to policymakers, statisticians, and academicians.
She questioned how this came about and who decides what is “mainstream” and went on to explain how the use of statistics could be a “very effective weapon.”
Regarding informal workers, Ela-ben said, “They have been invisible for too long.” Without statistics, labor economists and policymakers cannot “see” them, but when you can say that the “informal economy is 94% of the country’s economic workforce, this is very powerful.”
Need to organise
A shared belief in the need to organise informal workers internationally and increase their visibility in official statistics led Ela-ben, Renana-ben, me, and several others to cofound the Women in Informal Employment network, known as WIEGO, in 1997.
The network is committed to increasing the collective voice of informal workers through organisation and representation to be visible to policymakers and fight for validity as legitimate economic actors who contribute to the economy and society. Ela-ben loved and often quoted the WIEGO ‘3V theory of change’: Voice, Visibility, and Validity.
In her opening speeches at the founding meeting of WIEGO in April 1997 in Bellagio, Italy, and at WIEGO’s fifth and tenth anniversaries, Ela-ben focused on the importance of collective organising. She felt that such organising empowers women workers in several ways. It also helps them learn about their rights and obligations and gain recognition as producers, traders, or service providers. “They can gain a sense of solidarity leading to collective efforts and a stronger bargaining position.”
She said that international unionising has become a necessity, “cutting across all sorts of borders to stop exploitation by employers, contractors, middlemen, touts, traders, governments, the global community, and the ‘system.’”
Recognising and strengthening organisations, like market traders, street vendors, or home-based workers, to reach large numbers and strengthen their capacity for self-governance and regulation is important, as she said AT A WHAT in Bellagio, Italy, 2007.
“The overall goal is to secure sustainable livelihoods for informal workers and to channel power and resources to the workers through their organisations.”
“Organising for visibility and voice is a continuous process,” Ela-ben said in a speech at Ahmedabad in 2002. It is a movement that produces numerous organisations at the village, district, state, national, and international levels. In the process, more organisations are born and take root. “It is like the banyan tree whose branches take root and grow into independent, self-reliant trees throwing out more branches.”
She knew there was no shortcut or alternative to organising. “It is the precondition to social change.”
The ‘Nets’
Together, SEWA and WIEGO supported the formation of four global federations of informal worker organisations: the International Domestic Workers Federation, HomeNet International, StreetNet International, and the International Alliance of Waste Pickers. They promoted an international statistical definition of informal employment and the improved measurement of informal employment worldwide.
Along with the ‘Nets’ we successfully advocated for two International Labour Organisation (ILO) conventions on informal workers (home-based & domestic workers) and other global norms in support of informal workers (new agenda of Habitat III, ILO Recommendation 204 on formalisation; the Just Transition agenda, the movement for universal social protection); national legislation in support of informal workers in several countries; and promising models of inclusion of informal workers in urban planning.
Ela-ben witnessed and celebrated 50 years of SEWA – which now has over 2.5 million members. At SEWA’s 50th anniversary celebration, Ela-ben encouraged her SEWA sisters to look ahead to the next 50 years, not backward towards what SEWA had achieved.
She was most concerned about ‘Mother Earth’ and thought we should all work towards clean air, clean skies, clean water, and a balance between growth and regeneration. She underscored two of her abiding concerns: her call for a nurturing economy, rather than an economy that exploits labour and nature, and for Anubandh – the recognition that we are all linked to each other and the world and need to stop and recognise who produces our daily needs for food, shelter, and clothing.
Ela-ben also lived to celebrate 25 years of WIEGO and take pride in what SEWA and WIEGO had achieved. It had become a global movement of informal workers – four global networks with affiliates in 90 countries for over 10 million members.
The first-ever global estimates of informal employment (published by the ILO in 2018) confirmed that 61% of all workers globally are informally employed: 90% in developing countries, 67% in emerging countries, and 18% in developed countries.
Twenty-three years ago – in 2000 – in Kathmandu, Nepal, Ela-ben oversaw the adoption of the Kathmandu Declaration of Home-based Workers and the formation of HomeNet South Asia at a regional conference of home-based workers organised by SEWA and WIEGO in partnership with UN Women and the Aga Khan Foundation, Canada.
She would have taken great pride that in April 2023, representatives of 75 organisations of home-based workers from 33 countries and five regions will be gathering in Kathmandu, Nepal, for the first physical congress of HomeNet International to adopt a constitution and elect representative leaders.
Also, she would take great pride and satisfaction that the ILO will publish updated global estimates of informal employment in early 2024.
Ela-ben, your legacy lives on. We pledge to live up to and honor your legacy. May your beloved, blessed, pioneering, and visionary soul rest in peace.
Dr Martha Chen is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, an Affiliated Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and International Coordinator of the global research-policy-action network Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising (WIEGO). She is also an advisor to Southasia Peace Action Network or Sapan. This piece is an adaptation of her tribute to Ela-ben Bhatt at the India International Center, New Delhi, on 3 April 2023. She organised a tribute to Ela Bhatt at the Harvard Kennedy School on 21 September 2023 – see the Allied Event at the Sapan website.
Lead image – Ela Bhatt meets young Palestinian women in Ramallah Photo credit: Haim Zach
*Southasia: Borrowing from Himal Southasian, Sapan uses ‘Southasia’ as one word, “seeking to restore some of the historical unity of our common living space, without wishing any violence on the existing nation-states.”
This Sapan News syndicated feature is available for republication with due credit.
The article appeared in the Sapan News Network.