Campaign to protect Women Workers Rights as Part-time Workers and Homeworkers (an update)

In July 1998, CAW initiated a signature campaign to demand Asian government to ratify the ILO convention on Part-time workers and on Home workers (for details refer to July 1998 issue of the AWWN). Given below is a brief update of the campaign along with the names of the supporting organisations.

The signature collection for the campaign was concluded by December 1998. In total 4,630 individual signatures and 114 organisational signature was collected from 24 countries around the world. We would like to thank all the signatories for having supported the campaign.

The signatures collected were compiled and send to the representative government bodies in the first week of February . In Asia it was send to the representative government of 15 countries, in Europe to 4 countries while in other regions it was send to 5 countries. It was also forwarded to the ILO main office in Switzerland as well as the regional offices in Nepal and Thailand.

In Japan, our network group Asian Women Workers Center (AWWC) has been actively involved in this campaign. They have collected 2011 Japanese signature and along with the other supporting signatures from other countries they made an independent petition to the Women labour section chief of the labour department in Japan. In Japan, the council has been discussing the revision of the Part-time labour law from summer 1997. However, in February 1998, the council reported that the law will not be revised immediately. Alternatively, the council proposed two initiatives, namely, to form a study group to clarify the concept of "equal treatment of part-time workers with regular workers", since at present the concept is ambiguous. The second proposal was to revise the guideline of "Part-time Labour law" so that some of the labour conditions could be improved. A partly revised bill of guideline was released on 2nd February'99.

In the CAW secretariat, we have received letter of acknowledgment of the petition from few countries. Details of the governments response, if any, to the demand will be published in the next issue of the newsletter .