TURC Held a Training to Build Awareness of Home Workers Rights

From 21 to 23 September 2016, Trade Union Rights Centre (TURC), supported by MAMPU, conducted a training on building awareness of the homeworkers’ rights in Cirebon, West Java. The training was attended by 30 women homeworkers in Cirebon.

This event was held due to an increasing phenomenon of homeworkers. It is an advantage for company for labor practices at home that the company can reduce production costs between 40-50%. Moreover, employers also do not have to pay wages in accordance to the minimum wage, accident insurance, health care, taxes and give holiday allowance. This phenomenon began to spread in several provinces in Indonesia, such as: Jakarta, Banten, Central Java, Yogyakarta, East Java and North Sumatra.

Being homeworkers are problems of its own. In addition to lack of decent working conditions, they are also less recognition and limited voice. It happened because they work in a private room and disorganized, so they have barriers to be involved in the workers organisation.

In addition, the majority of home workers are women with low education levels. This means they have limited knowledge and access to information to improve their working conditions. Therefore, in order to empower homeworkers, the establishment of workers’ organisations is required to make them more organised and have representation to advocate their working conditions’ improvement.

Thus, the training aimed to raise awareness of homeworkers about their rights as workers, provide knowledge to organise and understand the importance of cooperative. Hopefully, this training can increase the capacity and quality of homeworkers’ organisations.

One of the speakers in this training is Yohanes Haryono, representatives from the Department of Industry, Trade, Cooperatives and SMEs in Cirebon, who explained about cooperative.

Since 2015, TURC has been motivating and assisting women homeworkers in Cirebon, Jakarta and Tangerang to establish and do activities together regularly. There are still many things that need to be improved to support the capacity of homeworkers in organising and voicing their rights.

Reported by: Talita Rahma (TURC)