An analysis of the homeworker network in Pakistan

Using a global justice network (GJN) approach, in this article I examine the localization of a transnational network for homeworker rights. Based on my field research undertaken in Pakistan between January 2015 and December 2017, I compare different organizing approaches to establish how a politics of vulnerability may be transformed into a politics of voice and mobility. I found that, from the vantage point of the homeworker, the process of organizing rather than the results achieved is what really matters. In the case of Pakistan, union-style organizing by the Home-worker Federation, which is mindful of gender and class hierarchies, enhances the homeworkers' voice, agency and mobility, while also building translocal labour solidarities. Conversely, an NGO-led national network, with its top-down approach, perpetuates the very hierarchies it was mission bound to dismantle, thus forcing the women to stay spatially imprisoned. Without arguing that one institutional form is superior to the other, I demonstrate that for a GJN to articulate diverse local and global struggles it must be mindful of the hierarchies and boundaries that isolate and silence marginalized workers. It must also genuinely include the grassroots in the production and transference of knowledge

Contentious politics · Economic Justice · Global city · Global justice · Grassroots · Localism · Political science · Politics · Silence · Social movement · Social science · Sociology · Subaltern · Gender Studies · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact · International Labor and Employment Law · Labor Movements and Unions · Law

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