Amidst dialogue this week on ending domestic violence and creating gender equality, a group gathered on Monday to speak of two other global phenomena that are affecting women: migration and climate change.
Moderated by Carol Barton of the United Methodist Women (UMW) Immigrant/Civil Rights Initiative, the hour-long event featured reports from a wide range of migration and human rights groups including the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), Domestic Workers United (DWU) in New York, and the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR).
The dialogue was held as a side event in conjunction with the U.N.’s 54th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which is taking place in New York from Mar. 1-12.
Opening the talks was Gemma Adaba, ITUC representative to the United Nations (U.N.), who spoke about the commoditization of labor and its impact on human rights.
“We have integration in terms of products and production, and services as well…and what is happening in this global arena is that this movement of people is being treated exactly like this movement of goods and services,” Adaba said.
“We must remind these global policy makers that labor is not a commodity,” she added.
Regarding the impact on women in the process, Adaba pointed out areas like education, health and domestic work where recruiting agents, or “middle men,” recruit women for work but force them to pay large sums of money for their visas. She also spoke of human trafficking as the low point of such recruitment efforts.
In combating these practices, Adaba said that a challenge must be made to the “liberal framework” underlying the situation, including notions that “circular migration,” or temporary migration, is good for development of non-industrialized countries.
“We propose to say that development is good for migration,” Adaba countered, adding that a focus should be placed on Millenium Development Goal (MDG) number eight which refers to a “partnership in development” between rich and poor countries.
Adaba argues that such an approach would provide for real growth in developing countries and allow migration to become a personal choice rather a compulsory one.
“If people want to migrate they can, rather than it being a forced issue, where the situation is so dire in their country,” Adaba concluded.more
*Source: www.ecumenicalpress.com
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