MOST OF THE WORLD’S service and retail workers, small farmers and contract workers are women. Desire for gender justice fuels their militancy. From the tomato fields of Florida to the export zones of the Dominican Republic and Rangoon, women workers are organizing. And it is not just for a living wage but for freedom from sexual violence and pregnancy discrimination.
Twenty-seven-year-old Manila fast-food organizer Joanna Bernice Coronacion is one of that new generation of feminist labor activists. Coronacion, who goes by the nickname “Sister Nice,” is a serious young woman with an easy grin. As a child, she lived in a squatters’ barangay (neighborhood) in Metro Manila, in a vast network of slums that are home to millions of displaced farmers and fishing families. Her father went abroad to work in Japan, one of more than ten million Filipinos forced to emigrate by lack of opportunity at home. Her mother did the best she could.1
Coronacion’s experiences left her with a visceral sense that the fight for workers’ rights is inseparable from struggles for women’s rights. “You can’t dismantle capitalism without dismantling patriarchy,” she says. “We have a lot of work to do.”
Sister Nice Coronacion credits her mother with politicizing her. “She was a community leader who fought for land tenure for squatters. Growing up, I called where I lived a home because, if there is love it is a home, but . . .” She pauses. “Still, I know we were lucky. We never lived in the danger zone, near the rivers where it floods.” We visit the Manila danger zone. Small children squat in the dirt, diligently sweeping makeshift drains so that no water seeps into the rooms, lean-tos, and shacks where millions of families live, eat, and sleep.
Coronacion says her life changed when the Alliance of Progressive Labor awarded her a scholarship to college. She became a fervent convert to class struggle and feminism. “My mother made me sign up for a labor youth orientation.” She was not enthusiastic at first.
“Now I’m a full-blown activist.” She laughs. “But in high school I wanted to be a Miss Universe. I wanted to be a millionaire. I wanted to be a doctor. I thought of activists as violent people who make a rah-rah sis-boom-bah in the streets, people who make traffic, people who make trouble. Everything changed for me because the labor movement gave me an education. It allowed me to learn about the world and myself.”
Coronacion has helped spread fast-food workers’ organizing across Asia. A well-known international firebrand, she was denied entry to South Korea at the tender age of twenty-two, for fear she would infect Seoul fast-food workers with her militancy. She is unabashed and unapologetic. “I have loved what I do from the get-go,” she says. “The movement captured my vision. The workers captured my interest. The movement made me a better person.”
Like many low-wage worker-activists, Coronacion is a radical Christian. Faith gives her confidence to face armed police and paramilitary amid the violence of Metro Manila. The fusion of faith with activism drives many young Filipinas, says Em Atienza. “You can give me a thousand reasons to leave the movement and I will give you a million why I never will. The movement is my breath, my rhythm, my music, my life.”
Coronacion, Atienza, and other young Filipina labor activists march against domestic violence and sexual assault. Each year, on International Women’s Day, March 8, they lead flash mobs of young women in singing, dancing protests. “We believe in socialism and feminism,” Coronacion announces. “We seek a just, peaceful society where working people are empowered through democratic processes, gender equity is recognized, and there is an equitable distribution of wealth.”2
Young Filipinas like Coronacion and Atienza were drawn into the global women’s movement through the Philippine chapter of the World March of Women, founded in Quebec in 1995, in response to the creation of the World Trade Organization. World March founders argued that globalization and neoliberalism fueled violence against women and intensified the feminization of poverty. “In an increasingly globalized world,” the group vowed to organize against “dominance of the most vulnerable” by “patriarchy” and “neoliberal capitalism,” which “sustain and reinforce one another.”3
World March has fostered conversations among women trade unionists, antipoverty activists, and peace workers worldwide, by staging transnational women’s marches every five years. In 2000, women from 161 countries marched and staged rallies from Mozambique to Morocco. They gathered five million signatures demanding an end to violence against women and remediation of the damages to women and children wrought by neoliberalism and war.
On October 16–17, ten thousand women from many countries marched to the United Nations in New York City to deliver the signatures. They met with the leaders of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations. They summed those meetings up tersely: “unprecedented, vigorous denunciations by the women and . . . bureaucratic or smug speeches by the other side.”4
Since 2000, World March has held annual gatherings in Montreal, New Delhi, Kigali, Lima, Galicia, Quezon City, and São Paulo. In Mozambique and Burkina Faso, its organizers have fought women’s disproportionate poverty and violence against women. Youth activists in other African chapters have fought for improved sexual health and reproductive education. In Venezuela, organizers fought successfully to criminalize spousal violence. In Morocco, they won a self-described “peaceful revolution,” earning women the right to divorce, raising the minimum age for marriage to eighteen, and restricting polygamy.5
In 2010, World March events involved eighty thousand participants in seventy-six countries. Miriam Nobre of the Democratic Republic of Congo was lead organizer. The march concluded with a rally of twenty thousand women in Bukavu, the site of “horrific acts of sexual violence” during Congo’s civil war. Delegates from forty-eight countries heard moving testimony from Congolese witnesses, documenting violence against women by armies on both sides.
Witnesses linked global capitalism to lethal conflict, condemning corporations who funded the war in Congo by purchasing “conflict minerals”—tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold. They called on Apple, Google, Amazon, GE, and Victoria’s Secret to stop using these to make smartphones, lightbulbs, and underwire bras. (Congress did include a provision in the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill banning conflict minerals in products sold in the United States.)6
They also composed a “Women’s Manifesto for Peace,” in which they argued that “the language of violence, at the root of capitalism and patriarchy, and supported by transnational companies, mercenaries and paramilitary forces, brings about war.” Women and girls are turned into weapons and commodities, trafficked and sold to profit competing armies, they said, and they blamed politicians who make “false speeches about safety . . . and the war on terrorism, while meanwhile, the arms industry, the installation of military bases and the privatization and destruction of natural resources keeps growing.”7
Women must continue organizing globally, they concluded, because “in different regions of the world, our experiences and testimonies are similar. Women and girls are sexually harassed at military control posts, raped by groups of armed men, to be then rejected by their own communities. Women flee their homes, under a sky of bullets, carrying their belongings and their children on their shoulders, moving towards shelter or an unknown destination, far from their culture and their history, with the hopes of a new dawn.”8
Five years later, during the 2015 World Marches, women activists aided refugees fleeing a new generation of wars. They helped build women’s libraries in Kurdish regions of Turkey and brought books to refugee camps for women fleeing the Syrian civil war. They brought seeds and helped mothers plant nourishing grains and vegetables for their families. Over seven months, thirty thousand women staged 89 street protests, 147 performances, and 163 public meetings in Greece, the Balkans, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal.9
The young women of the Manila-based RESPECT Fast Food Workers Alliance enjoyed and adapted some of these performative forms of protest. On International Women’s Day, they staged flash mobs in shopping malls across the Philippines. Posing as shoppers, young activists filled mall atria. There they sang “Bread and Roses,” adapting lyrics written about women mill workers in 1912 Massachusetts to conditions faced by twenty-first-century Filipinas.
Dancing as they sang, they shocked shoppers by stripping off white button-down shirts, only to reveal pink undershirts that said: “Stop Corporate Land Grabs and Enforce the Reproductive Health Law.” RESPECT had fought hard for a new reproductive justice law that was being blocked by the Catholic Church. “No to Corporate Occupation of Our Lands,” they chanted. “No to Occupation of Our Bodies.” Said one protester: “It’s all colonialism.”
Then they read their manifesto: “We celebrate the joys and triumphs of women all over the world advancing struggles for land, food, water, reproductive rights, and for a life free from violence, marginalization, and discrimination. . . . Urban poor communities are demolished with no regard for the dignity of women and children; as government pursues relentlessly corporate-led privatization, public hospitals are privatized, public lands are now to be developed. . . . Farmers and indigenous peoples defending their lands are harassed, even killed. . . . Give us peace, equity, equality, and opportunities. Give us bread. Give us roses!”10
Jamaia Montenegro uses the idea of bread and roses in organizing Manila domestic workers. The soft-spoken, dark-eyed woman emigrated from the southern Philippines to Manila because she needed income. But she also wanted roses: a college education. She was determined.
Many domestic workers in Manila are Visayan speakers forced from their lands by foreign mining, lumber, and palm oil companies, she says. Like her, they end up as servants for Tagalog-speaking Manilans who see them as “less than,” she says: “less smart, less capable of learning.” Montenegro defied that stereotype, attending university classes while organizing and working. Still, employers mocked her Tagalog accent, she says. She learned to speak English because “it rolls off my tongue with less pain. Tagalog is a language of colonizers.”
Montenegro’s experience with wage theft turned her into an organizer. “The woman I worked for still hasn’t paid me. I was humiliated by her. The husband was always leering and touching me. I stayed because I loved the children and because I needed a place to live. I was a very long way from my home.11
Montenegro reached out to the Alliance of Progressive Labor. Through them, she found the International Domestic Workers Federation, the first global union founded and led entirely by women. On the ground in Manila, she organized four hundred domestic workers into a new union.
Though it is difficult to organize domestic workers, Montenegro had a plan. She designed and handed out leaflets at bus stops in barangays where she knew women from the southern islands lived. “I would figure out who was a domestic worker. She was taking a bus to a rich neighborhood. I knew what they were going through. I lived it. That’s why they trusted me.”
Montenegro attended international domestic workers’ conferences where she learned from other activists. Yim Sothy, who organized eight hundred domestic workers in Phnom Penh, negotiated an agreement with Maid in Cambodia, an agency that matches domestic workers with employers. Now anyone who hires a worker from that agency must sign a contract promising decent wages, hours, and safety standards. The contracts also expressly forbid sexual overtures.
Montenegro says she learned immeasurably from these meetings. “I was amazed by how much our experiences are the same. The pain in our knees and backs, the harassment, the wage theft—everything.”
Thirty-one-year-old Vun Em says that she too was educated and politicized by her exposure to global feminism. Vun was a teenage garment worker in Phnom Penh when she encountered an Australian Oxfam-funded NGO called Womyn’s Agenda for Change (WAC). Soon she was organizing for a labor coalition they founded, United Sisterhood Alliance, and performing in an all-woman music group called the Messenger Band, singing about the lives of women garment workers.
Vun moved to Phnom Penh at sixteen from Kampong Cham province. Like so much of Cambodia’s rural population, Vun’s family was struggling to eke out a living growing rice. Then Cambodia leased one million acres of land to foreign companies for rice, sugar, and rubber plantations. Vun’s family was no longer able to earn a living. Products grown for export were replacing subsistence farming. Farm families were violently evicted and tropical forests were cleared. Vun would later sing about those experiences.12
Like so many other young Cambodian women of her generation, she moved to Phnom Penh to find work in the garment industry to help support her family. At night, she returned to a labyrinth of windowless rooms enclosed by a six-foot-tall cyclone fence. When she learned that English classes were being offered by Womyn’s Agenda for Change, Vun began burrowing under the fence for 5 a.m. classes. “Other women couldn’t understand why I wanted to go to school so early,” she says, “but I needed to learn. And I did.”
WAC funds programs to empower garment and sex workers and Vun became deeply engaged. “You could say I grew up in United Sisterhood,” she reflects. She and her colleagues are militant about advocating for sex workers and challenge anyone who stigmatizes either profession. Young women stranded in the city may have few other options, she says. Sell their bodies or end up on the streets. Garment and sex workers both suffer from misogynistic violence. Both have families in the countryside desperate for the cash they send. United Sisterhood fights for both, says Vun. And it also works to create other opportunities. They help seamstresses and cooks start their own businesses. They promote Cambodian women’s crafts abroad, as another income option for rural families.13
Vun also records garment worker stories and turns them into songs and music videos that she plays for workers, farm families, and schoolchildren. Setting off in crowded vans, the women of the Messenger Band bounce down pothole-pitted roads through the countryside. They help rural parents understand the lives their daughters lead in the city and encourage those facing displacement to write and stage plays about their lives.
In a country where violence against activists is systemic, says Shalmali Guttal, director of Focus on the Global South, these young activists show remarkable courage. Dissidents have been beaten and murdered with impunity in Cambodia. “I tell police and soldiers I am just a musician,” Vun says coolly. “This is just a concert.” The willowy young woman, who is training to become a yoga teacher, flashes a brave grin. “It’s worked so far.”14
On November 25, 2016, Vun Em, Nice Coronacion, Kalpona Akter, and millions of other women labor activists took part in a Global Day of Action to Stop Gender-Based Violence in the Workplace. It was organized by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), created in 2006 to promote transnational worker organizing. Headed by Sharan Burrow, an Australian woman unionist, the ITUC links the IUF, which represents fast-food and hotel workers, IndustriALL, which represents manufacturing employees, and UNI Global Union, which represents Walmart and other retail workers. The ITUC claims 181 million members in 162 countries. Burrow leverages that global heft to give workers a “voice” at World Bank and International Monetary Fund negotiations, demanding stronger protections for workers and an end to demands that poor countries privatize public utilities.
Under Burrow, the ITUC has foregrounded issues of sexual violence, human rights, and labor slavery. The ITUC is campaigning for an ILO convention banning gender-based violence in the workplace. “No workplace is immune from harassment and violence—whether it’s the anchorwoman at Fox News, or the leaf picker on a tea plantation.”15
As part of the global campaign, women janitors in Los Angeles have demanded protection from sexual assault on the job—a constant threat for those who work alone, late at night, in large office buildings. In Johannesburg, Accra, Providence, Karachi, and London, hotel housekeepers demanded lighter duties for pregnant workers, and panic buttons that housekeepers can push to bring help if a man corners them inside a room. In Chicago, workers staged “Hands Off, Pants On” protests. Before the protests, UNITE HERE released a study showing that half of hotel housekeepers and three-quarters of casino workers experience unwanted sexual advances. The need is clear.16
Philippine garment union organizer Asuncion Binos held a press conference condemning politicians for placing corporate profits over the safety of women workers. “It is lamentable that our lawmakers have always struggled to pass laws and craft policies for . . . global competitiveness,” she said, “but leave behind women’s protection.”
Failure to grant generous maternity leave harms women and children, she said. “Studies show that mothers need 120 days to fully recover from giving birth, to breast-feed and establish the routine for her newborn, and to make arrangements necessary for a smooth transition back to work.” Binos is part of a global network of women trade unionists working to pass labor laws in their own countries to help women workers. “If we can get countries to pass good policy,” she says, “then we can use those to push for global standards.”17
Kalpona Akter says the campaign against workplace violence is an urgent priority. “Women workers get raped, get touched inappropriately by men. If you talk you are the bad one,” she says. “We organize against it all—the beatings and the mental pressure—every way we know.” It will be a long slog to pass an ILO convention, she says. Even if they get it through, women trade unionists will have an uphill battle pushing their own governments to ratify it. But the ILO gives workers international presence, she says, and a legal basis for struggle. In countries where wages are low, protections few, and governments repressive, that is worth fighting for.18