I'm Nalini Nayak, and I come from Kerala. I work with the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), which is a trade union of women workers in the informal sector. It's a national union and it's also a central, independent trade union. Our politics is on women's rights and women's spaces in society. In India there are numerous trades in informality. Each has their own trade committee within SEWA, and it is within these trade committees that they take up issues specifically related to that trade. But then, as a union, we have a common agenda for the entire union.
SEWA's is the first union in the country which is made up only of informal workers. This means that it's also a union which has been very difficult to build up, as it's more difficult to collect dues in the informal sector than the formal sector. But that's been the way that SEWA has been organising: building up organisations off the workers themselves.
Just by collectivising and organising, workers have been able to get higher than the government-regulated minimum wage.
