The Role of Unions and Cooperatives in SEWA’s Strategy for Women’s Empowerment

In India, 93% of the labor force works in the informal economy – without contracts, without legal protection, and without social security. For women in this vast invisible workforce, the odds are even more stacked. They face exploitative wages, police harassment, caste discrimination, and a financial system that largely pretends they don’t exist. The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), founded in 1972 by lawyer and labour organizer Ela Bhatt, built a strategy to confront all of this at once – not through one tool, but two working in tandem: a union and cooperatives. Understanding how these two pillars work together reveals why SEWA’s model has become one of the most studied and replicated approaches to women’s empowerment in the world.

The problem SEWA was built to solve 🔗

SEWA’s story begins with a group of women who hauled bolts of cloth through Ahmedabad’s market on their heads, earning exploitative wages from wholesale shop-owners who paid per job and felt no accountability beyond that transaction. These women had no employer in the formal sense, which meant no union could represent them under the existing logic of labour law. When SEWA tried to register as a trade union in 1972, the state labour department refused – arguing that without an employer, there was no one to organize against. SEWA fought back, arguing that the purpose of a union was to unify workers, full stop. That argument prevailed, and on April 12, 1972, SEWA became a registered trade union.

That founding struggle set the tone for everything that followed. SEWA operates on a dual understanding: women in the informal economy face both structural injustice (low wages, no legal recognition, harassment) and structural exclusion (from markets, credit, and decision-making). The union addresses the first. The cooperatives address the second. Together, they form what SEWA calls the strategy of struggle and development.

Unions for worker rights: struggle against local injustice 🔗

The SEWA union functions as a trade union in the fullest sense – it organizes workers, builds solidarity, and fights for rights. What makes it different is who it organizes. Its members include street vendors, home-based piece-rate workers, waste pickers, construction laborers, agricultural workers, and domestic workers. These women come together as poor, as women, and as workers – three identities that mainstream trade unionism had long overlooked.

Building collective bargaining power 🔗

In a conventional workplace, workers bargain with an employer. SEWA members bargain with a much wider range of forces: municipal corporations that evict street vendors, police who confiscate goods, contractors who underpay, moneylenders who charge predatory rates, and government bodies that set policy without consulting them. The AFL-CIO recognized SEWA’s work in “organizing women in their communities, addressing gender discrimination and working to change labor law to include informal workers at the local, national and global levels.” That recognition reflects how much of SEWA’s union work happens outside any single workplace.

At the local level, the union intervenes directly in everyday injustices. SEWA Delhi, for instance, organizes 6,000 street vendors, trains them to advocate for themselves, liaises with police to stop harassment of women vendors, and sits on municipal committees that decide who gets to vend and where. These are not abstract policy battles – they determine whether a woman can earn a living on any given day.

Winning policy change through sustained advocacy 🔗

The union’s most visible victories are legislative. After decades of advocacy by SEWA and allied organizations, India enacted the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act in 2014, making it the first country to adopt centralized, progressive legislation protecting street vendors. The Act guarantees livelihood rights, mandates town vending committees, and requires that at least a third of committee members be women. Similarly, SEWA’s advocacy contributed to the ILO Convention 177 on Home Work (C177) in 1996, which recognized home-based workers as workers entitled to basic labour standards – a recognition that had not existed before.

These wins illustrate something important: the union does not just respond to injustice at the individual level. It changes the rules of the game. When a law recognizes a street vendor’s right to work, every vendor in that city becomes safer, whether she is a SEWA member or not. This is the classic public-good logic of trade unionism applied to the informal economy.

Building identity and confidence 🔗

Beyond legal victories, the union does something harder to measure but equally important: it shifts how women see themselves. As one SEWA leader and cooperative board member explained in an ILO-commissioned report on SEWA cooperatives: “Women don’t think of themselves as workers. They do the work but don’t have a self-identity as workers. We at SEWA help to build their identity as workers.” The union provides the framework – meetings, leadership training, collective action – within which that identity forms. It strengthens members’ leadership, their confidence, and their collective strength within their homes and in policy spaces.

Cooperatives for economic development: owning the means of your livelihood 🔗

If the union is about rights, the cooperative is about ownership. SEWA has facilitated over 106 cooperatives in Gujarat alone, spanning childcare, dairy, agriculture, handicrafts, construction, domestic work, healthcare, and financial services. Each cooperative is democratically owned and managed by its worker-members – the women contribute share capital, elect an executive committee, and make decisions about how the enterprise is run.

Creating jobs and income security 🔗

Cooperatives give women control over something that informal work typically denies them: stable, predictable work. SEWA Cooperative Federation, established in 1992 as a secondary-level federation supporting member cooperatives, has empowered over 300,000 socio-economically vulnerable women through its network of collectives. These include women farmers, artisans, care workers, and many others who now earn through enterprises they own.

SEWA’s childcare cooperatives offer a clear example of the multiplier effect. Studies in Kheda and Surendranagar districts found that women with access to cooperative childcare earned 50% more – because reliable childcare freed them to take on more and better-paid work. The cooperative didn’t just employ its childcare providers; it unlocked income for hundreds of other women in the community.

Providing financial services 🔗

One of SEWA’s most consequential early moves was establishing the SEWA Bank in 1974 – a cooperative bank that gave low-income women access to savings accounts and credit for the first time. Before SEWA Bank, most members relied on informal moneylenders charging exploitative interest rates. The bank changed the terms on which women could participate in economic life, and is widely credited with helping to birth the microfinance movement globally. Today, SEWA’s cooperative ecosystem includes insurance cooperatives like VimoSEWA, which provide members with health, life, and asset insurance – protections that are virtually nonexistent for informal workers outside of SEWA’s reach.

Becoming worker-owners: the democratic difference 🔗

What separates a cooperative from a regular employer is governance. Each cooperative is governed by a democratically elected executive committee of workers. This isn’t a token gesture – it means women who previously had no say in their working conditions now vote on pricing, working hours, reinvestment decisions, and who leads the enterprise. This form of collectivism enables women to take ownership of their trade through democratic decision-making, which builds managerial capacity alongside economic security. SEWA has organized its members into 4,813 self-help groups, 160 cooperatives, 15 economic federations, and 3 producer companies – a tiered ecosystem designed to scale worker ownership from the grassroots up.

The complementary relationship: why joint action works 🔗

A union alone can win rights but cannot always turn those rights into economic reality. A cooperative alone can create economic opportunity but remains vulnerable without legal protections and political voice. SEWA’s joint strategy of unions and cooperatives has been effective in organizing hundreds of thousands of workers to strengthen their employment and income security, food security, and social protection. The two structures reinforce each other in ways that neither could achieve alone.

The union creates the conditions for cooperatives to thrive 🔗

When the union wins legal recognition for street vendors or negotiates minimum wage protections, it creates a more stable environment in which a cooperative can operate. Women who feel legally protected are more willing to invest their savings in a cooperative, take leadership roles, and expand their enterprise. The union’s work in reducing harassment and securing policy change directly lowers the risks that cooperative businesses face. In other words, the union does part of the business development work – not through market interventions, but by making the market environment less hostile.

Cooperatives give the union something to build toward 🔗

A union that only struggles against injustice can exhaust its members. Cooperatives offer a concrete, positive vision: not just “stop exploiting us” but “we will own this ourselves.” SEWA describes this as the strategy of struggle and development – the struggle is against constraints imposed by society and the economy, while development activities strengthen women’s bargaining power and offer new alternatives. The cooperative is the development side of that equation. It gives members something tangible to work toward and sustain across generations.

Shared identity links both structures 🔗

Perhaps most importantly, both the union and the cooperative are built on the same foundational identity: the worker. The union is the primary identity for women, as workers and as SEWA members. This shared identity means that the same woman who marches with the union for minimum wage also sits on the cooperative’s board and votes on how profits are reinvested. There is no contradiction between her roles – both are expressions of the same claim: that she is a worker, she has rights, and she is capable of running her own economic life.

SEWA describes itself as a confluence of three movements: the labour movement, the cooperative movement, and the women’s movement. The union represents the labour movement’s tradition of collective action. The cooperative represents the cooperative movement’s tradition of worker ownership. And both are guided by the women’s movement’s insistence that gender justice is inseparable from economic justice. Joint action is not a bureaucratic arrangement between two departments – it is the organizational expression of a political commitment to address women’s exclusion from both rights and ownership at the same time.

SEWA’s model beyond India 🔗

The proof of the model’s strength is its replicability. SEWA’s sister-to-sister organizing model has been replicated across trades, sectors, and countries. The ILO has received requests from its constituents globally to better understand and adapt SEWA’s approach. Organizations working with informal women workers in South Asia, South Africa, and Latin America have built their own SEWAs using the same dual-structure logic. SEWA also directly inspired the founding of WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing), a global research-policy network, and SEWU (Self-Employed Women’s Union) in South Africa – extending the reach of joint union-cooperative action well beyond Ahmedabad.

What travels is not just a set of tactics, but a way of seeing informal women workers – not as passive recipients of aid, but as workers with rights and as entrepreneurs with the capacity to own and manage their own economic organizations. The union and the cooperative are the two institutional forms that make that dual vision operational.

What do you think? Given that over 90% of women workers in countries like India are in the informal economy with little to no legal protection, does the union-cooperative model offer a template that governments and international organizations should actively fund and scale – or are there structural barriers that limit how far it can travel to different contexts? And in places where women’s mobility and financial independence are more severely restricted by social norms, which part of SEWA’s model – the union’s rights-based struggle or the cooperative’s economic ownership – would need to come first to make any real change possible?

References

1. https://www.sewa.org/about-us/
2. https://www.sewa.org/about-us/history/
3. https://www.aflcio.org/about/leadership/statements/2005-george-meany-lane-kirkland-human-rights-award-self-employed-womens
4. https://sewadelhi.org/advocacy-campaigns/street-vendors/
5. https://www.wiego.org/informal-economy/articles/informal-workers-and-law/
6. https://www.sewafederation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/ILO-SEWA-report_final_web-version.pdf
7. https://www.sewafederation.org/about-us/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_Employed_Women%27s_Association
9. https://www.sewafederation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Annual-Report-2023-24-web.pdf
10. https://www.sewabha.org/sewa-movement/