When a woman asks for permission to leave work, the first thing that comes to mind is that she has a family to go home to. There’s a house to clean, clothes to dry, mouths to feed and a child to see before bed. When the primary role as caregivers is placed on women, flexibility in working hours is not a reward but a need.
Surely, we have more opportunities now to attain that flexibility. The nature of work has evolved so much from the traditional 9 to 5; a lot can be done anywhere, anytime and companies are taking note. The world even seems like your oyster when you can sell your forte on Instagram or do professional work part-time. They sound good: self-employed, freelance, entrepreneurial, passion projects. But they sound good until they’re involuntary, until these jobs are actually the only viable alternatives to secure, well-paid jobs with flexibility.
While the nature of our jobs have been changing, the nature of what is valued has only been crawling. There is a trade-off between flexibility and security: the more flexible the job, the more unguaranteed the income—you’re either earning less or you’re a day away from not earning at all.
There is a darker story at the end of the spectrum. When a woman asks for permission to leave work, it’s exactly because it’s getting late. Late usually means nighttime, and nighttime is a whole world shaded by terror.
Walking out at night bestows me the hypervigilance that I wish I don’t need. For many women who are working in factories, call centres and as sex workers, travelling at night is part of what they have to deal with to earn a living. Stigmatized as easy preys, the threats of violence and harassment to women are very real, making the first step out of the workplace an opening for catcalling, mugging, kidnapping and rape. “I am afraid, but I try to put on a brave face so as to not show it,” said Dewi, an Indonesian who moved to the big city for work. Even when I work and live so differently from Dewi, she knows very well about how I feel too.
In recognizing the many faces and needs of work, ILO C190 offers a protective lens over everything that is comprised in ‘the world of work’. Work is not just in the workplace anymore, but everything related to it.
Article 8 of the convention obligates governments to do a couple of things: recognize the role of public authorities for informal workers and identify work arrangements that expose workers to violence and harassment. The ultimate goal of these is to put in place the protections that are actually needed for today’s landscape. As women involuntarily opt for insecure jobs, they should have as much security as full employment. As women expose themselves to worldly dangers just to move to and fro the workplace, they should be protected as much as they are guarded in a safe office. Recognizing that work is all of these women’s experiences is how we shift its nature to be kinder—to be more human.
But this convention is not ratified, and so much of the employment needs that the government sees are still bound in its old facade, like a simple dichotomy of formal and informal. Because of this, there have only been two sides of a coin when it comes to women who can’t get into secure, fair jobs: they’re either paid less because they have to work shorter hours, or they have to work so late that it becomes threatening. This coin is so old and rusty, you can’t even tell if it’s 5 sen or 50 sen—it’s worthless. God knows why we’re still using these coins.
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1 Pulse Lab Jakarta and UN Women, 2019, After Dark: Encouraging Safe Transit for Women Travelling at Night <https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/-/media/field%20office%20eseasia/docs/publications/2019/11/id-after-dark_final-compressed.pdf?la=en&vs=4320>
2 Bullen, K, 2018, Exploitation of Women Garment Factory Workers in Myanmar <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHJfGPp4paM&t=343s>
3 International Labour Organization, C190 - Violence and Harassment Convention, 2019 (No. 190) <https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C190>
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