The pandemic is making clearer the historical and social problems of society, how it is deteriorating to the point of triggering its own decline. Fighting for another society that cares for women and life is a necessary task for our future.
The question of whether parents and grandparents should receive a wage for childcare within the family has been asked repeatedly for at least half a century.
Home-based workers are not even officially recognised as workers, so there have been no special schemes set up for them. Our people have no social security, no pensions and no insurance. Now there’s no work which means no income.
Students tend to measure fair compensation on two scales. How many years of training and/or dollars of tuition did a worker have to invest to become “qualified” for the job? And how important is that worker’s labor to the rest of society?
Domestic work and care work have historically been underpaid and overlooked, and the fact that even today this labor is often referred to as “help” rather than conceived as professional labor betrays the long devaluation of women’s work. T
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Novelita Palisoc became a domestic worker to support her family in the Philippines. She now is president of a local union affiliated with the International Domestic Workers’ Federation, a global organization of half a million domestic workers.
When the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act were enacted in the 1930s, both excluded domestic workers.
Only 25 countries have ratified ILO convention 189 that declares domestic workers should enjoy the same rights as other workers. Nonetheless, important advances in their struggle have been made world-wide.
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