Women Fight for Rights: Labour movements in the Global South

Globally, the International Women’s Day marks women’s battle for rights recognition, including labour rights. In this seminar, we will discuss the multi-level discrimination that paid domestic workers in Brazil and India have to contend with.

Join us at Jekteviksbakken 31 or participate via Zoom

We analyse and compare the social-and labour movements that seek to organize and mobilise this group of informal workers as they fight for their rights to legal recognition of their work, to labour protection and to fair and decent terms of employment. And we discuss how the struggles seek to counteract the deep-seated socio-cultural stigma and devaluation meted out to these groups.

Join us to hear about the contours of domestic work labour scapes in the Global South and how women are constructing and becoming agents of change in the fight for equality and the right to dignified work, lives and personhoods.

PANEL
Larissa Cristina Margarido is a PhD candidate in Law and Development at FGV Sao Paulo Law School (Brazil) and a guest researcher at the Center on Law & Social Transformation – LawTransform (CMI/UiB), with support from a CAPES-PrInt grant. She holds a master’s degree in Law and Development from FGV from her research on the positions and strategies of Brazilian paid domestic workers unions and the Federal Deputies who participated in the process of drafting, discussing, and approving the “PEC das Domésticas”, a constitutional amendment project for guaranteeing more labour rights for the category. Her dissertation was published in 2022 by Margem da Palavra in Brazil.

Padmaja Barua is an Associate Professor of Social Work at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Bergen. She holds a PhD in Gender and Development from the University of Bergen, a master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Delhi, and a master’s in Gender and Development from the University of Bergen. Padmaja’s doctoral work critically engaged with the field of paid domestic work in India – both looking at tensions and contestations between domestic workers and their employers within private domestic labour arrangements in Indian homes as well as examining the contours and impact of trade union organisation and mobilisation on paid domestic workers in the Indian metropolis of Mumbai. She has published widely on these themes.

The panel discussion will be moderated by Siri Gloppen, Professor at the Department of Government, University of Bergen, and co-director of LawTransform.

Photo: Olivia Gay