15.09.2011 Sri Lanka

Integrating workers rights, health and nutrition

A trade union in the legal vacuum of Sri Lanka’s global market factories

Katunayake Free Trade Zone is 30 kilometres from the capital Colombo. ‘Eighty per cent of those employed here are women,’ says Anton Marcus from medico’s partner the Free Trade Zone and General Services Employees Union (FTZ&GSEU). The women live in cramped boarding houses, three to a room, with an open fire for cooking outside and a couple of showers. Working conditions are tough, the supervisors are ruthless and the wages are so low that most of the women ‘volunteer’ to do overtime.

Following years of operating illegally, FTZ&GSEU is now the strongest union in Sri Lanka’s free trade zones. It is concerned not only about wages and employment law, but also its members’ health. The workers simply do not have the time to go to the state hospitals – and a visit to a private doctor would easily cost an entire month’s salary. The union provides assistance twice a week, supported by medico, at its own offices and after the end of the working day. One doctor and one assistant doctor attend around twenty women per session and a small pharmacy provides the most important medicines. The service even includes a cookery course for which the union recruited a popular TV chef.

How and what can the women cook when they only have half an hour in the evening to prepare meals in the flickering light of the kerosene cooker? The TV maestro’s main message is that the women need to share the shopping and cooking and – just as with the fight for wages and employment rights – you can’t do it alone.