No one works more hours than grassroots women. In a survey of women’s time use in 2004-2005, grassroots women in Red Thread followed the workdays of over 100 other grassroots Indo-Guyanese, Afro-Guyanese, Indigenous and mixed race women. This is what we found: In all race groups the typical working day for most women was 14 to 18 hours, with very little leisure or free time for themselves. Many women had workdays up to 21 hours. Most started work from early in the morning. One Afro-Guyanese woman had to get up by 3am to cook in order to start selling at 8 am; when the rest of the household got up she looked after their needs. And one Indo-Guyanese woman got up at 3.30 am to cook her husband’s breakfast and lunch before he left for work as a cane cutter at around 5.30 am, then dealt with her three small children. Find the racial division here!
Many women had no breaks at all in a day. This included as many as 50 percent of the Indigenous women. When they didn’t have electricity they had to pack their work into the daylight hours, and when they didn’t have running water nearby they had to go to the creek several times a day to wash clothes, bathe themselves and children, and to get water for drinking and cooking. For all of the women, whatever their race, the working day stretched even longer when a child was ill and needed care through the night. Grassroots women have three workdays every day:
* the housework, childcare and subsistence work we don’t get any wage for;
* the work we do to get a little money; and
* the various kinds of caring work we do for our communities and religious places and everywhere else, again for no wage.
But in the recent budget debate who spoke for us? Who said any of these facts of life? Who demanded that the planners look at the economy from where we are, from the point of view of the household we women have to keep together? Who said that the economy must meet our needs? Who spoke about what happens to us and our children when we can’t afford the cost of the electricity or when there isn’t even any electricity in our community? Who mentioned that when we don’t have access to running water we can afford that it’s harder not only to care for our children and keep them healthy, but to look after the kitchen gardens and the stocks our households depend on?
Not the women in Parliament who form one-thirds of the Parliament because many grassroots women, including us in Red Thread, fought to put more of them there.
They are not the same class as most of us. Yes, we women all have things in common. All of us walk in fear that we may become victims of sexual violence or get blows at home. All of us are disrespected by those who think that men should be in charge. But there is a class division between us. It is obvious in houses, offices, shops, restaurants, bars where women employ or manage other women as domestic workers, cleaners and security guards, or as shop assistants, waitresses and bartenders, and pay them low wages, deny them time off to take a sick child to hospital, fire them (if they can get away with it) when they get pregnant. They don’t think that our weaknesses affect them, but they are WRONG. If our rights are not respected as women, theirs will never be.
During our successful campaign to get the basic goods and services we use zero-rated under VAT, over and over again we talked about the starvation incomes of grassroots women. Pensioners get $3,500 a month. Shop assistants often get $4,000 a week. The same for many domestic workers, cleaners, security guards, bartenders, to name just a few. The minimum wage in the public sector – that is, for the levels where you find mainly women – is less than $7,000 a week. Women in the informal sector are often making a bare turnover. The cost of rent, light, and water alone eats up that money. In the face of this, a rise in prices of $1,000 a week, whether the culprit is the greedy businessperson or the effects of the VAT itself, is unpayable.
And still grassroots women continue the struggle to keep our households going. That is what we meant in one of our open letters when we said that “In the daily struggle to stretch our low incomes we (grassroots women) are the ones “living on the frontline”.
But which women except Red Thread and that brave fighter Ms Eileen Cox, agitated to make VAT less unfair to us?
Nobody.
Where is the defence of the women selling outside Stabroek Market threatened with the loss of their livelihoods?
Nowhere.
So this is our position: We cannot depend on parliamentarians, political parties, or other ‘leaders’, because our needs as grassroots women are never their priority. We cannot depend on the trade unions who show no respect for how hard and long women work. We have to depend on ourselves. Grassroots women in Guyana have to build a strong movement – a movement for all in spite of our differences, beginning with age, disability, political party and race. A movement for all, including those who are not grassroots, but who are ready to take grassroots direction, not be in charge of us once again.
This is our call to women in Guyana on International Women’s Day 2007.