8 March 2009
TRIVANDRUM - Women’s liberation movement in the southern Indian state of Kerala has taken a new course with housewives floating a union on Saturday to seek recognition for the ‘unwaged’ housework.
“An Indian housewife cooks for the entire family, washes clothes, takes care of husband and his aged parents and raises children. She works three to five hours more than men. Yet her labour is not recognised”, says Sulochana.
She says men are able to involve themselves fully in the production process since women shoulder the burden at home. This is an indirect contribution to the labour. The gross domestic product will come down drastically if women stop working.
Therefore, Sulochana wants the government to calculate the value of the work done by housewives and fix a minimum wage in relation to their contribution to the GDP, which she claims will be between 30 to 40 per cent of the output. The women’s activist said that the union will lobby for legislation in this regard. “We will form the units of the union in all districts in Kerala and other states and begin a country wide campaign,” she added.
Several women’s organisations have rallied behind the union in taking forward the campaign.
The UN Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1990, called on governments to calculate the value of women’s unpaid work and include it in conventional measures of national output, such as GDP.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) has estimated in 1990 that women have been doing two-thirds of the world’s work for 5 per cent of the income. The women’s unpaid and underpaid labour was worth $11 trillion worldwide, according to the UN Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report for 1995.
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