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The Egypt YCW Fights Sexual Harassment
The IYCW international team was pleased to welcome Sabah Eskandar, a former member of Egypt YCW, who visited the international secretariat in Brussels on Saturday February 9th.
In her visit, Sabah was accompanied by Milad Mikhael, a former international team member for the Africa region (1998-2002) and by George, an Egyptian activist.
The meeting, which lasted about 2 hours, provided the opportunity to discuss the current situation in Egypt and YCW in this post-revolution period. Sabah explained that conditions in Egypt now are not really stable in all spheres of life. The change in the country’s government did not significantly improve the social and political situation. The prices of goods are higher and people are increasingly suffering.
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For years now, YCW Bavaria has been actively campaigning for the protection of Sunday to be free from work. It aims for the workers to have time to spend with family, play soccer with friends, establish relationships with the community, go to Church, participate in social voluntary work and build organizations. The action is against big shops that open on Sunday and some shops that extend the closing hours until 11 in the evening.
Sundays and legal holidays are defined as days of rest protected by the Basic Law and the Bavarian Constitution. However, some shops open during sales periods, Sunday markets and feast days, and on other special occasions, taking advantage of community activities to open.
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Promoting the Rights of Informal Workers and Unemployed Youth
The India YCW has been carrying out a campaign for an increase in the minimum wage of informal workers and for the right to employment for the unemployed. In order to raise awareness among the civil society on those issues and bring those demands to the attention of the local government, the India YCW organised a bicycle rally covering four rural areas (Pallappatti, Ethiload, Silukuvarpatti and Nilakottai) around Dindigul in the district of Madurai, Tamil Nadu, on 16th February.
32 members of the YCW took part in the bicycle rally, holding placards with their demands and explaining the objectives of the rally and their demands to the public through distributing handbills and holding street corner meetings.
The demands the YCW put forward towards the local, state and central government were the following:
- Implement the social protection policies and programs for informal workers;
- Increase the wage of appalam making workers from Rs. 18 to Rs. 30 per kilo;
- Set up a perfume factory in Dindigul and give jobs to the unemployed;
- Set up monitoring bodies for the proper implementation of the 100 days job per year program;
- Increase the salary of workers employed in the 100 days job per year program from Rs. 132 to Rs. 200 per day;
- Increase the number of 100 days per year to 200 days per year.
At the end of the rally, the YCW leaders met with the district administrator of Nilakottai, presented their demands and asked for a follow-up by the state and central governments. Representatives of two organisations participated in the rally and supported the demands of YCW. Around 800 workers and people were reached out through this rally.
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109 years ago, the Second International Conference of Women was held in Copenhagen, the demand for universal suffrage for all women was reiterated and, at the proposal of Clara Zetkin, 8 March was proclaimed International Women's Day. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the labour movement maintained a traditional patriarchal position on women's equality and demands. It was in the middle of the nineteenth century when the women's movements became stronger, with the struggle for women's suffrage, the demand for equality, the denunciation of social, family and labour oppression.
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The future starts today, not tomorrow. Pope Francis
The Network of the Catholic Inspired Organizations, together with the Commission of the Bishops Conference of the European Union (COMECE), organized panel debates at the European Economic and Social Commission last November 27, 2018. The Conference discussed what the future of work looks like for the next generation in the midst of digitalization and robotization, as we know that the world of work is facing many transformative changes, accelerating globalization and the rise of artificial intelligence on the one hand, and ecological challenges and a rise in unemployment on the other hand.
Various panel experts underlined the importance of work from an inter-religious dialogue perspective, and John Harley of Eurofound presented a research on the issue of accessibility to work, unemployment, opportunities and threats. The statement of Ms. Sarah Prenger, the International President of the International Young Christian Workers (IYCW) who read testimonies and realities from many young workers in Europe, describing the challenges they face every day, was a good opportunity to confront those data and research.
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The Caritas in Veritate Foundation recently presented their tenth working paper. Recent decades have witnessed the consolidation of a global economic system strongly characterised by exclusion and inequality as a result of a largely excessive and misplaced trust in the omnipotence of the markets. Today, the distortions and dysfunctions of the free market economy tend to adversely affect the lives of individuals and communities more than ever before. Consequently, work itself, together with its dignity, is increasingly at risk of losing its value as a “good” for the human person and becoming merely a means of exchange within asymmetrical social relations. This calls us to rethink and reconsider what labour is and what it means for the economy, society, policy.
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“I am Fatima Hussain from Pakistan. I am 24 years old. I live in Lahore. I applied for many jobs in different factories but in vain. In our society, it doesn’t look good for a girl to have a job, people don’t like women workers.
I ended up deciding to work as a domestic worker because it is easier to get a job in this sector. But domestic workers are not paid well. They are paid PKR 1,500 per home (US$ 15). I was very disappointed by the low pay and the volume of extra work. I had to fulfill tasks that were not related to my job.
One day I met the YCW – that was a very beautiful day. In a meeting, I shared my experience as a domestic worker and the extra work.
We as YCW group wrote a letter to the Labor Council and requested it to increase my wage and make restrictions for no extra work for domestic workers. After a month, the management of the housing society where I work received a letter from the Labor Council saying that domestic workers had to be paid PKR 2,000 per home (US$ 20) instead of 1,500 and could not be given extra work. Now I earn PKR 8,000 for 4 homes. Although it is not enough to meet my daily needs, I am very happy and I attend the YCW meetings on a regular basis, hoping that I can do something more to change my life and that of other workers.
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