Hester Eisenstein Natascia Boeri CUNY Graduate School University Center
This doctoral dissertation project will examine the changing dynamics of women?s societal roles as a result of their participation in the informal economy, focusing on the experiences of home-based workers. Over 90 percent of the Indian workforce is in the informal economy. Almost all are overlooked by social policies, despite the vulnerabilities associated with this sector. Informal workers are more likely to be living in poverty, less likely to be organized, and are disproportionately women. Home-based work is the largest subgroup of non-agricultural informal work in India, and is overwhelmingly taken up by women. Research will be conducted at Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), a labor union for informal workers in Ahmedabad, India. The main research question addressed in this study is: can women's empowerment through participation in a labor union have consequences on their roles at home and work? The specific aims of this study are (1) to examine how a labor union for informal workers addresses women home-based workers' needs; and (2) to investigate how women?s participation in the union enhances their agency and ability to affect their work and home environment. In particular, the research will uncover what mechanisms might transform the home and work setting from a site of exploitation to a site of empowerment. Importantly, this research includes women's experiences beyond their economic value by addressing how they negotiate and construct their identities as women, workers, and union members across the social institutions of family, market and civil society. The multi-method research design includes five types of data collection: survey, in-depth interviews, spatial analysis of home and work setting, secondary data analysis of government and policy reports, and participant observation.
Broader Impacts Home-based work is a sector that remains especially hidden to both applied and scholarly research because of its characteristics. By addressing the multiple sites of inequality women experience across social institutions, this research will contribute to sociological theory on women, work, and development. In addition, this study?s collaborative research design with SEWA, noted for its activism and grass roots approach, will provide a unique contribution to programs and strategies that support women in the informal sector. The broad term goal is that findings of this research will inform governments, non-governmental organizations, and multilateral organizations of the specific needs of women in the informal economy in developing countries. Importantly, it strives to support a gender and development model that addresses the multiple locations of unequal social relations.
This doctoral dissertation project examined the changing dynamics of women’s societal roles as a result of their participation in the informal economy. It focused on the experiences of home-based workers who were members of a labor union for informal workers. I was interested in uncovering what mechanisms might transform the home and work setting from a site of exploitation to a site of empowerment. This research examines how women negotiate and construct their identities as women, workers, and union members across the social institutions of family, market and civil society. Research was conducted over a period of nine months, from September 2013 to May 2014. The multi-method research design included survey, in-depth interviews, spatial analysis of home and work setting, secondary data analysis of policy reports, and participant observation. The staff at SEWA provided invaluable assistance by contacting and arranging meetings with home-based workers. A researcher at SEWA assisted me with translation during interviews. One hundred home-based workers were surveyed for the first part of the research. The survey asked about socioeconomic status, work characteristics, and care responsibilities. Of these participants, a purposive sample of thirty women was selected with whom to conduct the in-depth interviews. Photographs and map drawings of the participants’ homes were collected for a spatial analysis of their home and workplace. Secondary data was collected in the form of SEWA’s text and multi-media documents and interviews with ‘experts,’ including SEWA Directors, and local professors, activists and researchers knowledgeable about my topic. While data analysis is continuing, there are a number of preliminary findings that address the intellectual merit and broader impacts of this project. First, the importance of including women’s multiple roles and sites of inequality when addressing their economic and social empowerment is apparent after preliminary analysis of the data. During analysis, I explored the process of meaning-making in constructing women’s multiple identities as workers and women. Despite the acknowledgement that their income from home-based work was a necessity for their household, they still viewed their household and care work as the most important. This work was profoundly gendered and the fact that they had to do this work was unquestioned, as exemplified by their surprised reactions when I would ask if men helped with these tasks. They had positive attitudes towards their paid work because it provided much needed money, but this work was seen as secondary, completed after their unpaid work. These preliminary findings begin to illustrate the various meaning-making processes of home-based workers as they balance work and family in the same setting. The participants’ position in the household had significant consequences for their everyday experiences. The majority of women expressed difficulty in balancing both their paid and unpaid work. However, one’s status makes a difference on the degree of unpaid work. Their workload is especially high if they are the sole adult female in the household, or if they are the daughter-in-law. These findings speak to the importance of considering the multiple sites of inequality women experience. The spatial analysis of the homes also revealed the significance of place for the women. Their home workplace had two consequences for constructions of a worker identity. First, the women viewed their work identity as secondary. Since they were at home their wages was seen as pocket money; yet, they would often schedule their care activity around their work. And second, their work tools and material could have symbolic significance for their sense of worker and community identity. Lastly, as often happens in qualitative research, a new interest arose as I was conducting the research that concerned organizational structure and strategies. This interested was aided by my discovery of a video library archive at SEWA. The videos, produced by the organization between 1984 and today, document SEWA’s efforts to organize women in the informal economy. I conducted a content analysis of the videos to examine the transformation of an organization in relation to the changing economic contexts in India, and the consequences of this transformation on SEWA’s approach to organizing informal workers. This research contributes to the scholarly work on women, work and globalization by expanding our examination of sites of inequality to include the interaction of women’s multiple identities. These findings, as well as the focus on labor unions for informal workers, also speaks to the broader impact of this research in developing family and work policies in transnational contexts.
