Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), meaning "service" in several Indian languages, is a trade union based in Ahmedabad, India, that promotes the rights of low-income, independently employed female workers. Nearly 2 million workers are members of the Self-Employed Women’s Association across eight states in India. Self-employed women are defined as those who do not have a fixed employer-employee relationship and do not receive a fixed salary and social protection like that of formally-employed workers and therefore have a more precarious income and life. SEWA organises around the goal of full employment in which a woman secures work, income, food, and social security like health care, child care, insurance, pension and shelter. The principles behind accomplishing these goals are struggle and development, meaning negotiating with stakeholders and providing services, respectively.
SEWA was founded in 1972 by labor lawyer and organiser Ela Bhatt. It emerged from the Women's Wing of the Textile Labour Association (TLA), a labour union founded by Gandhi in 1918. The organisation grew very quickly, with 30,000 members in 1996, to 318,527 in 2000, to 1,919,676 in 2013., and nearly 2 million in 2023. Even before the financial crisis of 2008, over 90% of India's working population was in the informal sector (Shakuntala 2015), and 94% of working women in 2009 worked in the informal sector (Bhatt 2009). India's history and patriarchal systems also contributes to this disparity because traditional gender roles exclude women from regular, secure forms of labour.
History
TLA and Gandhian roots
SEWA originated in 1972 as the Association's Women's Wing of Textile Labour Association (TLA), which was established by Gandhi in 1918. SEWA is located in Ahmedabad, India, the city where Gandhi's ashram still exists and once served to facilitate much of the Mahatma's work. Gandhi's ethos of collective mobilization led to the founding of TLA, which is a labour union generally concerned with textile labourers in the formal sector. Around the era of SEWA's establishment, Ahmedabad youths were enthusiastic to interact with the poor because of Gandhi's legacy in the city. While not explicitly stated, low-income labourers in the formal sector are more likely to be men because of cultural practice putting men in positions of security and higher status. There were no unions protecting individuals who worked outside the formal sector, which tended to be women. As a young lawyer for TLA in the 1970s, Bhatt saw these women outside textile factories and created a department within the Women's Wing of TLA specifically devoted to women in the informal economy.
Gender discrimination was apparent in TLA, whose leading figures were all male during the time of SEWA's involvement in the organization.
Despite the rift between TLA and SEWA, there are clear influences of the Mahatma in SEWA's principles of truth, non-violence, and integration of all people that shape the organization to be so successful. Driving SEWA's every decision are satya (truth), ahimsa (non-violence), sarvadharma (integrating all faiths, all people) and khadi (propagation of local employment and self reliance), which all helped Gandhi organize poor people in the Indian independence movement.
Ela Bhatt
In 1972, SEWA materialized first as a collective of women that worked outside the textile mills and other formalized sources of income—individuals not targeted by TLA. An early survey of SEWA members found that 97% lived in slums, 93% were illiterate, the average member had four children, and one in three were the primary bread-winner. Its first large project was the SEWA Cooperative Bank, established in 1974 to provide loans to low-income members.Behind all these accomplishments was SEWA's founder Ela Bhatt. Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad on 7 September 1933 to a Brahman caste family of lawyers and was, herself, a lawyer for TLA beginning in the early 1950s. Bhatt found that poor women in Ahmedabad were not just domestic workers, but conducted a variety of businesses at home—as hawkers, street vendors, construction labourers—and were not being represented in India's economy. Incredibly enough, 94% of Indian working women were self-employed in 2009, yet it took until 1972 for any sort of informal labour union to form. The former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saw Elaben Bhatt as one of her role models. Hillary visited SEWA first in 1995. In one of her speeches, she described Elaben as soft-spoken and a visionary leader.