Household Workers Association of Campina Grande

Strengthening the organizations that represent domestic workers in the state of Paraíba, bolstering the struggle for decent work as a condition for the accomplishment of human rights. Raising the awareness of maids, public authorities, unorganized workers and society in general to respect and value domestic labor in the state, offering the sector more favorable conditions to confront the overexploitation of slave and child labor and discrimination by gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and/or economic condition in the access to public services.

– Course in trade union education, on decent work and work as a human right, for twenty women to become peer educators, forming groups to lead the domestic workers union;

– Formalization of the union and legal assistance for the normalization of all documentation;

– Creating a page online to serve as a campaign tool for dissemination of the sector’s rights;

– Production and publication of virtual and printed information, directed at society, with the campaign’s agenda, information on the human right of work and the specific human rights of women, to be launched on dates relevant to the cause.

The sexual division of labor causes women to be inserted precariously into the labor market and accumulate an overload of work-related obligations, which produces an impact in terms of possibilities for decent work, quality of life, development and social and political participation.

Furthermore, the accumulation of the workday and home life reduces their time dedicated to rest and leisure. This lack of free time is a product of historical processes and transformations in the social relations between capital and labor. The inequality between men and women must be confronted and made visible as a social and political problem. In Brazil 7.2 million women work as household laborers while only 26.8% of the total are formalized and registered workers, with the number among black women, the majority, at 25.2%. In this universe, 500,000 are girls from 5 to 14 years old that lose their childhood to long, heavy workdays. Added to this is the fact that household workers possess different labor rights to those of all other workers in the country.

The Household Workers Association of Campina Grande hopes to contribute to the empowerment of the domestic workers sector with an emphasis on fighting for rights, liberty and autonomy of representation in a way that guarantees better living and working conditions for those it represents.

The Household Workers Association of Campina Grande is a partner of the National Federation of Household Workers; the Paraíba Collective of City and Rural Women, the Organized Women Network of Paraíba, the Municipal Women’s Rights Council and the State Council of Women’s Rights.

The workers participated in actions such as workshops, meetings, mobilizations and different kinds of gatherings. Other results were courses in trade union education and human rights, the formalization of the union and the production of communication material to instruct the workers and draw attention to the rights and struggles of this sector.