Address by Dan Gallin, Chair, Global Labour Institute

Introduction
The Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) is a trade union with headquarters in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, founded in 1972. It is an organization of self-employed women workers: workers who are not wage earners in regular employment yet depend on their own labour for survival. They are poor, often illiterate and vulnerable to exploitation and oppression by employers and authorities. Typically, they might be hawkers and market vendors, home-based workers like weavers, potters, garment workers, women who process tobacco products or food products at home; or casual and contract labourers in agriculture and construction, or domestic workers and laundry workers. Of the female labour force in India, more than 94 percent are in this so-called “informal” sector.

The core leadership group of SEWA, headed by Ela Bhatt, its first general secretary, originated in the Women’s Wing of the Textile Labour Association in Ahmedabad. It left the TLA in 1981 to organize more effectively. It now has over 215,000 members (nearly two-thirds in Gujarat, others in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Kerala). Through its supportive services and institutions, such as the SEWA Bank, the SEWA Academy and a network of cooperatives, SEWA assists its members in fields such as savings and credit, health care, child care, housing, insurance, legal aid, capacity building and education. It describes itself as “both an organization and a movement”, in fact a “confluence of three movements: the labour movement, the cooperative movement and the women’s movement.” Together with other unions representing unorganized sector workers, SEWA established the National Centre for Labour (NCL), which was registered as a national center in 1995.

SEWA was instrumental in securing the adoption of the Home Based Workers’ Convention at the ILO in 1996. Internationally, it is affiliated to IUF, ICEM and ITGLWF. The SEWA Academy is an affiliate of the IFWEA. Since last year, SEWA cooperates with Harvard University and UNIFEM (UN Fund for Women) in a new initiative called WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing) which aims to bring informal sector women into the mainstream through research, statistics and programs leading to changes in policies.

Self Employed Women’s Association, SEWA Reception Centre, Opp. Victoria Gardens, Bhandra, Ahmedabad 380 001, India
tel. (+91 79) 550 64 44 and 550 64 77; fax: (+91 79) 550 64 46;
e-mail: sewa.mahila@axcess.net.in
General Secretary: Mirai Chatterjee

Dan Gallin was in Ahmedabad from April 30 to May 10, 1998 to cooperate in a film on SEWA produced and directed by Patricia Plattner, Light Night Productions, Geneva, Switzerland, due for release in September 1998 under the title: Made in India. On May 1, 1998, he addressed the May Day meeting of SEWA in Ahmedabad. The text of his address is given below.
May Day Address by Dan Gallin to SEWA, May 1, 1998

My Sisters,
When I last gave a May Day speech it was in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small industrial town in Western Switzerland. This was in 1991, the year the Swiss Trade Union Federation had called a women’s strike on June 14, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of a constitutional amendment instituting equal rights for women in Switzerland – and to protest the fact that nothing much had happened in the ten years since this amendment was passed to make equality a reality.

Women were still earning a third less than men for work of equal value, house work was still unrecognized for social security purposes, women were still excluded or underrepresented in important jobs.

So that May Day was special – it was specially dedicated to the struggle of women, as a part of the general struggle of the labour movement.
Not all the Swiss unions were enthusiastic about this women’s strike, which was actually more a nation-wide demonstration than a strike: there were some local strikes, lots of meetings, celebrations. But some of the unions and the local labour councils were not supportive, even hostile, and ignored federation policy.

I therefore had to point out in my speech that a majority of workers in the expanding service industries, which the unions had been unable to organize, were women, and I had to say that if the unions did not make an effort to change their culture, to open themselves to women, to become more receptive to women’s concerns and to democratize – because, if you in practice exclude half the population, you are not democratic – they would continue to lose strength and credibility, together with any chance of changing society for the better.

So, as I said, this was a special May Day, but I had a sense that it was at the same time very much in keeping with the traditional meaning of May Day, which is the day where the labour movement all over the world not only asserts its identity, its unity and its strength, but also its determination to change society for the better, for more equality, justice and freedom.

May Day originated in the last century out of the movement for an eight-hour day. The demand for the “three eights” (eight hours work, eight hours leisure, eight hours sleep) was raised repeatedly in the 1870s by the International Working Men’s Association – yes, “working men”: a sign of the times; it was also called the First International and lasted from 1863 to 1876. The “three eights” soon became a widespread demand of unions in many countries.

In the United States, the National Federation of Trade Unions called for a nation-wide campaign of strikes and demonstrations on May 1, 1886, in support of the demand for the eight-hour day.
The campaign started early, and a great many strikes were called in the first months of 1886, particularly in April. By the end of April, 130,000 workers had already won the eight-hour day. But in a number of cities the employers, backed by local authorities in most cases, resorted to police repression.

In Chicago, the situation was particularly tense because of a lock-out at a major agricultural machinery plant, McCormicks. There were bloody clashes with the police on May 3, and at a protest meeting called on May 4 at Haymarket Square a bomb was thrown among the police (to this day, no one knows by whom) killing eight policemen. The police opened fire and killed four workers.

Eight trade union leaders were arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder the policemen. Although the prosecution was unable to prove that any of the accused had the remotest connection with the bomb explosion, the jury returned a guilty verdict carrying the death sentence for all the accused.
Four of the eight were hanged on November 11, 1887; one died in jail under unclear circumstances and the sentences of three were commuted to life imprisonment. They were pardoned six years later.
Despite the repression, the American unions continued to struggle for the eight-hour day and decided on a new campaign where all unions would demand the introduction of the eight-hour day on May 1, 1890.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the American struggles had caught the attention of the leaders of the socialist and trade union movements. The idea of declaring a specific day as an international day of struggle for the labour movement began to surface at trade union meetings in different countries.
At the Paris congress of 1889, which reconstituted the Labour International, it was decided, on the proposal of an American delegate, since the American unions had already fixed that day, that May 1, 1890 should be the day for an international demonstration for the reduction of working time.

It is unlikely that many delegates were conscious of the importance of the resolution they had adopted.

It was only in the course of the preparations for that first international May Day that its wider significance emerged, not least because of the reactions it called forth among the ruling establishment, and it was as a consequence of preparing for May Day that the idea of an International Labour Day began to spread.

When May Day 1890, the first international May Day in history, came around, it turned out to be a more impressive and forceful demonstration than its organizers had dared to hope and the Labour International was revealed, to its enemies and to its own members, as a new political and social reality.

There were strikes (May 1 fell on a Thursday) and demonstrations all over Europe, in the United States, in Mexico and in Cuba, for the most part peaceful, except where violence was provoked by the state.
In a number of countries where no workers’ organizations existed the propaganda for May Day led to establishment of the first labour parties and unions, starting in 1890 and following in later years. So May Day became an organizing tool. May Day 1890 marks, in a practical sense, the birth of the modern labour movement.

In Asia, May Day was celebrated for the first time in Indonesia – then the Dutch East Indies – in 1918, in China in 1920, in Japan in 1922 and in India also in the 1920s, in Indochina and in the Philippines as from 1930; in Iran in 1947.

The strength of May Day comes from its international character. It is the day on which the labour movement asserts its universal values, the foremost of which is solidarity. It has been celebrated in many different circumstances, including the most difficult: under the gun of military and colonial occupation, in jails, in labour camps, by small groups meeting secretly in fear of arrest, as well as in mass demonstrations and mass meetings where workers had the right to do so, or took the right to do so. It has been celebrated in every corner of the earth. It is almost a spiritual bond between workers.
For the last hundred years, it is the day on which the working class remembers that, beyond its immediate demands, its task is to change society, when it rises to its feet and proudly proclaims: “I was, I am, and I shall always be”.

So, my sisters, it gives me a very special pleasure to spend this May Day with SEWA, a union through which you have emancipated yourselves. Just never forget that, once you have done this, the task remains to emancipate all the others, men and women, who are still in bondage.

Thank you.