Does organizing informal workers into their own cooperatives help them? Most certainly. Let me tell you about two poor salt-pan workers from the Little Rann of Kutch (LRK), Gujarat, India; Bhuriben and Samiben.
Bhuriben, a salt-pan worker for more than 25 years, told me what life was like before her cooperative. “At the end of a season, a salt-farmer would be hardly left with 5,000 rupees (US$ 73) to support her family for the entire year.”
So, life was very tough for Bhuriben and over 16,000 salt-pan workers like her in the LRK. They faced two big problems – lack of direct market access that led to exploitatively low prices offered by a traders’ cartel, and the cost of the diesel fuel to operate the pumps needed for salt-farming.
Then, in 1998 something changed. India’s Self Employed Women’s Organization (SEWA) got involved. SEWA brings together more than 1.5 million poor, self-employed women who work in the informal economy. Bhuriben told me what happened next.
“SEWA helped us organize into salt-collectives and provided us with training to produce industrial salt, thereby fetching higher prices. Through our salt-collectives, we also started selling our industrial salt directly to large industries, thereby eliminating the middle-person. Thanks to SEWA and our salt-collectives, our income increased by 30 per cent.”
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