Lead Researcher: Terezinha Gonçalves
This project has traced how some of the most marginalised workers in Brazil came to unionise, press demands for professionalisation to the government and achieve a major policy shift. The project draws out broader lessons on how marginalised workers can gain rights, security and wellbeing, addressing the intersections of race, class and gender.
This is a website set up by FENATRAD, the organization of domestic workers for workers to post their own thoughts and comments about their lives and work. …
The organization of women domestic workers in Brazil reveals a process of collective empowerment at work in a society where gender, race, and class inequalities intersect, giving rise to complex mosaics. Analysing processes of empowerment in these circumstances calls for abandoning universalizing visions of women and recognising differences and inequalities beyond gender in multiracial and multicultural societies. Women domestic workers face class contradictions in establishing harmonious relationships with women bosses, who are also participants as workers in unions and other political spaces. This contradiction creates difficulties in constructing a common agenda for the advancement of domestic workers' labour rights. …