Gaps in National Labour Rights for Women and Girls: inventory of gaps in labour legislation regarding women’s labour rights in Egypt, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mozambique, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda

From 2012 to 2016, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the WageIndicator Foundation and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) are running the Labour Rights for Women project with national trade union confederations and WageIndicator teams in twelve developing countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Six African countries participate in the Labour Rights for Women project (Egypt, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda), three Asian countries (India, Indonesia and Pakistan) and three Latin American nations (Guatemala, Paraguay and Peru).
Labour Rights for Women is one of the female leadership (FLOW) projects of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and aims to empower female workers by raising awareness of labour rights, empowering women to improve their own work situation and improve legislation. In this context, the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies publishes five overview reports covering the ratification of relevant ILO conventions by the countries in the project, national legislation important to women workers, legislative lacunae in the respective countries, gender clauses in collective bargaining agreements and an inventory of the questions that women workers bring up themselves. This is the third of those reports.
In this report, we provide a factsheet for each of the countries. The fact sheet outlines the gaps in in women’s labour rights, bringing together the work of the first and second report. We show for six topics whether women workers in the twelve countries are covered by either ILO conventions, national legislations, both or none. The country factsheets in this report do not provide an exhaustive overview of all labour related legislation. For a more in depth overview of the contents of the ILO conventions and national legislation, the reader is referred to the first two reports. For a test of the extent to which your own job is in compliance with labour legislation and in line with decent work standards, the reader is referred to the Decent Work Checks of the WageIndicator Foundation.
The two page fact sheets provide a quick but brief overview of gaps in women’s labour rights in the twelve countries. They show whether there is any legislation that women workers can rely on and whether it covers all their issues. We indicate this in the tables per country, showing where legislation exists (), where it does not () and where it is insufficient (). Naturally, good legislation cannot yet guarantee good working conditions in practice. It can, however, give an indication of where to begin improving lives. Where legislation is absent or of bad quality, we suggest political action should focus on improving legislation; where good legislation does exist, actors might be better off gearing their actions towards the implementation of and compliance with the law in the workplace.