Self-Employed Women’s Association

The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) is a trade union of self-employed women workers—the first in India to gain legal recognition for self-employed women in the informal sector. Since its establishment in 1972, SEWA’s membership has grown from a few hundred women in Ahmedabad, Gujurat to almost two million women today. SEWA’s members span regions, languages, and sectors: they are fish vendors and clothes hawkers, home-based potters and bidi rollers; they are cattle rearers and salt workers, domestic cleaners and construction laborers. In many ways, the work of these women underpins India’s economic functioning: 64 percent of the nation’s GDP is accounted for by self-employed workers, and self-employed women are often also expected to perform household and domestic labor, in addition to earning income.

Despite the foundational role they play, women workers in India’s informal sector face deep-rooted and material discrimination on the basis of caste, class, and gender. Unlike workers in the organized sector, they don’t have access to regular employment, benefits, or welfare, and as a result often work long hours doing hard labor for little to no eventual pay. To make matters worse, it is often impossible for these women to demand fair wages or protect themselves from exploitation, because they lack realistic ways to take their employers to court. At its core, SEWA aims to organize women workers to collectively demand their rights, with an emphasis on two goals: full employment and self-reliance. Full employment, to SEWA, means ensuring that members also have the foundational rights of job security, income security, and food security. The emphasis on self-reliance stems from SEWA’s roots in the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi, and a firm belief that women—as individuals and as a collective— have the independence, resources, and decision-making abilities to sustain themselves and their families.

SEWA’s organizational structure underpins its pursuit of these two goals. It is an open organization, with minimal barriers to entry: although more than half of SEWA’s current member base is located in Gujurat, union membership is open to self-employed women all over India, with a low annual fee of five rupees. Further, SEWA operates through a combination of decision-making systems, with varying levels of direct and indirect control.

This is done in two ways: First, under the SEWA umbrella, informal workers formed hundreds of individual, economically independent cooperatives (of about 100 women each) and producer’s groups (of about 15-20 women each). These are largely governed through directly democratic procedures, with marketing, production, and processes determined by the relevant members. Second, every 200 members elect a representative to state- and national-level trade councils and program committees that together determine SEWA’s national priorities, ensuring that the direction of the organization is responsive to community needs without requiring excessive time or resources from individual members.

Through this structure, members have formed healthcare, housing, childcare, and farming cooperatives, as well as savings clubs, social security organizations, and educational institutions such as information technology training centers. The organizing of support services for poor women by poor women is a challenge, and capacity-building is a consistent focus of the organization. But the struggle has also created a powerful and resilient network, and deep-rooted organizational capacity across SEWA’s many initiatives.

SEWA’s strategy has two main components: struggle and development. The struggle is against a society and an economic system that holds back women through traditional systems of patriarchy, class, and caste. This struggle in turn fosters development, as learning to collectively resist oppression and fight for justice as a group of workers naturally leads into developing alternative economic and social structures.

The organization itself initially grew out of a partnership with the Textile Labor Association (TLA), which was set up with Mahatma Gandhi’s encouragement in 1918. While there were significant breaks with the TLA after the first decade, the Gandhian legacy remains SEWA’s guiding force. It follows the principles of satya (truth), ahimsa (non-violence), sarvadharma (integrating all faiths, all people), and khadi (promotion of local employment and self-reliance). These principles are closely tied with the needs and priorities of SEWA’s members and inform SEWA’s daily activities.

Groups of anti-caste and anti-capitalist activists have also pushed SEWA beyond the Gandhian legacy, toward adopting more clearly liberatory and anti-caste frameworks in its organizational mission and structure. In addition, as SEWA grows, its federated decision-making process has in some ways been strained by layers of representation, with some workers finding it difficult to raise concerns or have their needs prioritized within the structure. Rather than taking away from the path-breaking work of SEWA, these ongoing tensions represent an opportunity for SEWA to continue to redefine cooperation and collectivization. SEWA shows that large-scale cooperative organizations can have the flexibility and capacity to grow and adapt, thereby serving the changing needs of their members, communities, and the movement for labor rights and justice at large.