Campaigning for the rights of women workers in South Africa: Michelle Hatch speaks to Pat Horn

Abstract

abstractPat Horn is the founding International Coordinator and current Senior Advisor at StreetNet, an International Alliance of Street Vendors. Her career has centered on organising disempowered individuals into unions and alliances where collectively they have a more powerful voice. As a student activist, adult literacy advocate and trade unionist in the 1970s and 1980s she fought for the rights of South Africans discriminated against under the apartheid regime. During her time in the trade unions she actively worked towards female economic empowerment and became increasingly aware of the plight of the vast number of women working in the informal economy. By forging links with SEWA (the Self-Employed Women’s Association) in India, she established the first trade union for self-employed women (SEWU) in South Africa in 1993. Her association with SEWA lead to her becoming the first International Coordinator for StreetNet, an international alliance formed to improve the lives of street vendors, market vendors and hawkers (the majority of whom are women), around the world. She is in conversation with Michelle Hatch, an academic economist and single mother, whose doctoral thesis explored how motherhood and childcare responsibilities affect the socioeconomic and subjective well-being of women in South Africa.