Informal labour market a threat to employed women

Labour market informality has accelerated with the trend towards precarious employment growing which means that more and more women are likely to be unemployed and face income security and for those employed, their wages would fall.

This was expressed by Priti Darooka, Senior Asia Researcher and Representative, Business and Human Rights Resources Centre, New Delhi making the keynote address at a conference on ‘Addressing Labour’s Precariousness in Sri Lanka and Beyond' organised by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) in Colombo last week.

She indicated that there is a boom in precarious and informal work, virtually in all the countries and insecure forms of work undermines women’s rights and perpetuates gender inequalities in societies and dampens the prospects for sustainable economic progress.

The audience was transfixed when a transgender person from Heart to Heart Foundation, Sri Lanka spoke on ‘Struggles on Transgender Sex Workers in Sri Lanka. She narrated their plight with courage and determination but in a voice mixed with anger and grief explaining the brutal inhuman treatment meted out to them by the country’s law enforcement authorities under cover of the law.

She said: “I was standing on the road one day in the daytime and was arrested by the police, my telephone was taken, asked where I live and hauled to the police station. I was kept on the bench of the station until 10 pm and then it was recorded that I was loitering.”

“When they were to put me in a cell, I cried and resisted as I have committed no crime and there were five men in the cell and feared they would sexually attack me.”

She was produced before the Magistrate, pleaded not guilty. However when the police advised her that she was knocking her head on a rock, she changed her plead to that of guilty. She said that she hoped other young transgender persons on the road would not face the same humiliation.