Self-Employed Women's Association
| Full name | Self-Employed Women's Association of India |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1972 |
| Members | 1,916,676 (2013) |
| Affiliation | ITUC |
| Key people | Ela Bhatt, president |
| Office location | Ahmedabad |
| Country | India |
| Website | www.sewa.org |
Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), meaning "service" in several Indian languages, is a trade union based in Ahmedabad, India that promotes the rights of low-income, independently-employed female workers. With over 2 million participating women, SEWA is the largest organization of informal workers in the world and largest non-profit in India (Chen et. al. 2015). Self-employed women are defined as those who do not receive a salary like that of formally-employed workers and therefore have a more precarious income and life. SEWA is framed around the goal of full employment in which a women secures for her family: income, food, health care, child care, and shelter. The principles behind accomplishing these goals are struggle and development, meaning negotiating with stakeholders and providing services, respectively.
SEWA was founded in 1972 by Gandhian and civil rights leader Ela Bhatt as a branch of Textile Labour Association (TLA), a labour union founded by Gandhi in 1918. The organization grew very quickly, with 30,000 members in 1996, to 318,527 in 2000, to 1,919,676 in 2013. Contemporaneous with this uptick in members is a change in India's economy and society. Liberalizing the economy to foreign trade in 1991 caused a huge migration of rural inhabitants to Indian cities that then forced urban dwellers into informal occupations. Since the financial crisis of 2008 , over 90% of India's working population is in the informal sector(Shakuntala 2015); yet 94% of working women in 2009 worked in the informal sector (Bhatt 2009). India's history and modern culture of female subjugation also contributes to this disparity because traditional gender roles exclude women from regular, secure forms of labour.
SEWA originated in 1972 as the Association's Women's Wing of Textile Labour Association (TLA), which was established by Gandhi in 1918. SEWA is located in Ahmedabad, India, the city where Gandhi's ashram still exists and once served to facilitate much of the Mahatma's work. Gandhi's ethos of collective mobilization led to the founding of TLA, which is a labour union generally concerned with textile labourers in the formal sector. Around the era of SEWA's establishment, Ahmedabad youths were enthusiastic to interact with the poor because of Gandhi's legacy in the city. While not explicitly stated, low-income labourers in the formal sector are more likely to be men because of cultural practice putting men in positions of security and higher status. There were no unions protecting individuals who worked outside the formal sector, which tended to be women. As a young lawyer for TLA in the 1970s, Bhatt saw these women outside textile factories and created a department within the Women's Wing of TLA specifically devoted to women in the informal economy.
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