Stopping Gender-Based Violence and Harassment at Work: The Campaign for an ILO Convention

By Jane Pillinger, Robin R. Runge and Chidi King

Women across the world experience gender-based violence and harassment in the workplace. In the context of globalization and neoliberalism, work plays an important role in constructing and maintaining the economic, social and cultural systems of oppression that women face. Women in insecure, precarious employment and women not protected by trade unions are the most at risk of violence and as the #MeToo movement has shown, it stretches across societies rich and poor.

In June 2019, the International Labour Organization adopted a ground-breaking global Treaty on eliminating violence and harassment in the world of work. This historic vote was the result of more than a decade of campaigning and lobbying by women trade union leaders and their allies across the world. Chidi King, Robin Runge and Jane Pillinger played a key role in the campaign and the negotiation of the Convention. Combining both their activist and academic backgrounds, this book documents their unique insights into and experience of the campaign and its landmark achievement in international labour law, global policy and the cross-movement building of workers’ and women’s rights, which has reignited the role of trade unions, and particularly women in trade unions, in global advocacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Release date: Feb 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788213707

Jane Pillinger

Jane Pillinger is an independent researcher and a former visiting professor in gender studies at the London School of Economics and a senior research fellow in the Department of Social Policy and Criminology at the Open University.

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Stopping Gender-Based Violence and Harassment at Work

Women’s Work

Series Editors: Jasmine Gideon and Alejandra Ramm

This series focuses on what work means today for women. It publishes research that charts its contested meanings across different geographical contexts and among diverse groups of women (and men). By seeing work as a sustained effort, involving continuous repeated operations, directed to a particular purpose, the series is able to bring women’s traditional work – typically unpaid and performed out of coercion or need – into its account, along with women’s activism and struggles to improve their lives.

Published

Stopping Gender-Based Violence and Harassment at Work

Jane Pillinger, Robin R. Runge and Chidi King

Stopping Gender-Based Violence and Harassment at Work

The Campaign for an ILO Convention

Jane Pillinger, Robin R. Runge and Chidi King

This book is dedicated to the women workers across the world who campaigned for an ILO Convention and Recommendation to eliminate gender-based violence and harassment in the world of work. We also dedicate the book to two women leaders who inspired many of the campaigns and the women featured in this book to take action to end gender-based violence at work and continue to do so: the late Jin Sook Lee (BWI) and the late Lisa McGowan (Solidarity Center).

© Jane Pillinger, Robin R. Runge and Chidi King 2022

This book is in copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2022 by Agenda Publishing

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ISBN 978-1-78821-368-4

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Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations and acronyms

1.Introduction

2.The campaign for a binding global labour standard, 2009–19

3.Gender equality at the heart of decent work

4.The campaign leading to the meeting of experts in 2016 and a framework for a Convention and Recommendation

5.The build-up to and negotiations in the first ILO Standard-Setting Committee, 2018

6.The campaign between 2018 and 2019, and the negotiations in the second ILO Standard-Setting Committee, 2019

7.The campaign for the ratification and implementation of C190

8.The collective voices of women workers and what C190 and R206 represent

9.Conclusions

Appendix A: responses to the questionnaire in the ILO’s yellow report

Appendix B: list of people interviewed for the book

Notes

References

Index

Preface

We have written this book out of a profound commitment to and belief in the power of women workers’ struggles to outlaw gender-based violence in the world of work. The global campaign for a binding International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention to end gender-based violence at work is, for us, one of the most important workers’ campaigns we have witnessed and also had the privilege to be involved in. We wanted to document the campaign, celebrate it and learn from it. We decided to take on this project, on top of our already pressured work schedules in 2019, just after ILO Convention No. 190 and Recommendation No. 206 were overwhelmingly adopted by governments, employers and workers at the International Labour Conference. For us, it has been a great honour to revisit the campaign, interview many of the inspirational women who led the campaign and reflect back on what was achieved. The examples of global, regional and national campaigns that we draw on in the book aim to show a cross-section of countries and the different ways that women built campaigns and advocacy. As feminists and activists, we are aware of the importance of situating our research and learning in our experiences, enabling us to reflect on what was achieved during the campaign, and through this to document the intersectional and diverse voices, experiences and leadership of women workers. As we make clear in the opening chapter of the book, our focus is on the campaigning by women workers and their involvement in the negotiations for a binding Convention, who, through their diverse experiences and expertise, spoke for all workers.

As authors, we supported the campaign and the negotiations for an ILO Convention in varying ways. Chidi, who at this time was head of the Equality Department of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), was the first in line of support and information for the spokespersons during all the negotiations and as lead ITUC official responsible for the global campaign. Jane, as a global expert on gender-based violence (GBV), academic and feminist researcher with over 25 years of working at national, European and global levels with international organizations, trade unions, employers and social partners, provided detailed reports, data, case studies and evidence, first during the 2016 tripartite meeting of experts and then during the negotiations in 2018 and 2019 with information and data to support the negotiations. Robin, as a lawyer, women’s rights and anti-gender-based violence advocate, one of the trail-blazers in advocating for the rights of victims of GBV in the workplace in the United States, with over 25 years of experience, including as an academic and most recently co-director of the Solidarity Center’s Equality and Inclusion Department, acted as an expert during the preparation for and during the negotiations held at the International Labor Conference in 2018 and 2019. In her role at the Solidarity Center, based in Washington, DC, she coordinated its global support for the campaign to end gender-based violence in the world of work and its support for union partners to advocate for the adoption of, and later ratification and implementation of, C190 through the Americas, eastern Europe, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. She drew on decades of experiences as a workers’ rights advocate, lawyer and law professor to inform the campaign and negotiations.

We have many people we would like to thank for their support, expertise and insights during the writing of the book. First, our thanks go to the many women and men we interviewed whose involvement in the campaign give the book such rich insights. In addition, many people gave us wider support, encouragement and advice. We would like to thank Jo Morris, Nora Wintour, Nicola Yeates, Ross Fergusson, Gen Gencianos, Veronique de Boysson and Mark Murphy for their insights and support during the writing of the book. We also thank Lisa McGowan, without whose vision, guidance and tenacity the campaign and this book would not have been possible. Our thanks also go to Alison Howson, our editor at Agenda Publishing, who gave us much-appreciated support and insights during the writing of the book, and who has gone beyond being helpful. Finally, our unending appreciation goes out to the workers around the globe who continue to fight every day for the eradication of gender-based violence and harassment in the world of work.

Abbreviations and acronyms

1

Introduction

Overview

This book is about the remarkable global campaign that played a formative role in the adoption of a landmark global binding standard by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Violence and Harassment Convention No. 190 (known as C190), supplemented by Recommendation No. 206 (known as R206). ILO members overwhelmingly voted to adopt C190 and R206 on 21 June 2019 at the International Labour Conference (ILC). The ILO is the United Nations (UN) agency with a mandate to address and monitor international labour standards. It is, uniquely, a tripartite organization, with a governance structure made up of governments, employers’ organizations and workers’ organizations, which agree and monitor the implementation of international labour standards, centred on a set of core fundamental rights at work, and principles for decent work and for social justice. Established in 1919, the ILO was the first international organization to include gender equality at work within its founding constitution. For the past century ILO Conventions have played a strong normative role through the establishment of international labour standards. As with other human rights instruments, international labour standards have the potential to create new social norms, forge change and empower transnational and national advocacy networks (Brysk 2018). Despite patriarchal vested interests from ILO constituents, there has been a shift in perspective and, over time, an evolution in ILO policy, from a protectionist approach towards women’s participation in work to an approach rooted in social justice, decent work and gender equality (Boris, Hoehtker & Zimmerman 2020; Boris 2019; Beghini, Cattaneo & Pozzan 2019).

We document the global campaign to end gender-based violence¹ in the world of work through worker-led organizing strategies and coalition building deeply rooted in feminist and intersectional perspectives, historical divisions based on sex, class and race, and the voices of women and other marginalized workers who are disproportionately affected by GBV. We show how women’s union leadership, especially from the global South, disrupted institutional patriarchy, leading to the adoption of an international binding labour standard that is unprecedented in its inclusiveness of all workers. In telling the story of the campaign and the formal negotiations, we document how women workers and activists used their collective power to build a global movement to end GBV at work. For some, this was a result of many years of feminist trade union action and advocacy for gender equality by preventing and addressing all forms of GBV. For many, the campaign was the first time that the epidemic of GBV at work was brought out of the shadows and talked about, bringing women workers into transnational networking and campaigning.

The global campaign for the landmark ILO Convention is a remarkable and historic example of the effectiveness of women-led transnational coalition building and advocacy on behalf of all workers (see Photo 1.1 for the campaign logo, which became a recognized symbol for workers across the world). In documenting the struggle and process involved, we have identified key strategies and actions taken by the campaign with its allies and partners that were particularly effective in ensuring that the voices and experiences of women and other marginalized workers remained at the centre of the Convention and Recommendation. We also situate the campaign in the context of the challenges in the current and dramatically changing world of work, including how work is organized and performed, the increasing fissuring of the workplace and the effects of Covid-19. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, three crises – health, economic and an increase in GBV – added a sense of urgency to the need for governments to ratify C190 (ILO 2020a) as the devastating effects of the pandemic led to a global crisis and backtracking on gender equality (UN Women 2020a, 2020b; ITUC & GUFs 2021a; ILO 2020a; European Commission 2021). The Covid-19 pandemic reinforced the deeply structural nature of gender inequalities and unequal power relations and how these are exacerbated by unequal globalization (Ozkazanc-Pan & Pullen 2020). Furthermore, the pandemic added further challenges arising from increased employment insecurity, job loss, poverty and lack of economic security, and rising levels of all forms of violence and harassment, including domestic violence (ILO 2020a).

Photo 1.1 ITUC campaign logo (reproduced with permission from the ITUC)

The last two decades have seen the emergence of advocacy, campaigns, networking and legal and policy developments on ending GBV at work in many countries across the world. Increasingly, women workers have asserted their voice and agency about their precarious working situations, and about other risk factors that make them even more vulnerable to GBV (Yeung 2018). An important forerunner to the successful global campaign for C190 was the highly effective campaign of trade unions and domestic workers’ organizations around the world (Fish 2017; Mather 2013; Boris 2019), leading to the adoption in 2011 of the Domestic Workers Convention, ILO Convention No. 189 (International Domestic Workers Federation [IDWF] 2011, 2021; Marchetti 2018). This campaign and the Convention not only advanced language recognizing non-traditional workers and workplaces, in which the private space of the home can be a workplace, but also identified violence and harassment as abuses that are prevalent for domestic workers, paving the way for inclusive language in C190 and R206.

In addition, transformations taking place within trade unions, such as the recognition of the importance of inclusive organizing led by women workers, have led to changes in union priorities. In some countries and sectors women increasingly outnumber men in union membership, and women are increasingly found in union leadership positions. This follows decades of organizing by women in trade unions and, more recently, the feminization of and transformations in trade union rules, structures and decision-making (Pillinger & Wintour 2019; ILO & Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] 2020), including in the informal economy (WIEGO 2013, 2016; Bonner & Spooner 2012; Trade Union Development Cooperation Network [TUDCN] 2018). These shifts are a direct result of women’s organizing and a sense of being united in a global movement to end violence and harassment against women, and it came specifically from women worker leaders who prioritized the organizing of women in union membership to prevent and address sexual harassment, among other priorities. In trade unions, policy advocacy and negotiations are resulting in a growing number of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) incorporating language to prevent and address GBV at work. Policy developments, legal reforms and the strengthening of collective bargaining on GBV have been prioritized by unions in, for example, Europe, Honduras, South Africa, Australia and Canada. Inspiring developments, including campaigns and bargaining, are to be found in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the global union federations (GUFs), and their respective global and regional women’s committees, put significant resources, time and effort into supporting strategies and advocacy led by women workers in a wide spectrum of sectors in which they disproportionately experience GBV, including sectors with low trade union presence. Campaign strategy building, union cross-movement coalition building, training and awareness raising frequently dovetailed with union-building and -organizing designed to strengthen union power building and development. Union organizing around GBV helped build an advocacy movement led by women union leaders and at the grassroots, spurred on by the political backing from the global labour movement for a worldwide campaign for a binding ILO Convention to end GBV at work.

As we describe in this book, the global campaign made GBV at work visible, bringing one of the most prevalent human rights violations out of the shadows. We give examples of successful advocacy efforts and draw on insights from over 45 interviews that we held with key leaders from the campaign, who have shared their perspectives on why the campaign was so successful and what it has meant to have been a part of the continuing campaign. We describe how women bravely shared their experiences of GBV at work and led their unions to talk about this issue, often for the first time, prioritizing it as a major barrier to gender equality and decent work for all. Women in the campaign have shown the transformational potential when women stand in their own power and are able to exercise voice and agency. The issue has helped to generate new questions about power, social justice, inequalities and discrimination, including the structural causes of inequality, multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination and the pervasiveness of institutional sexism at work. It has made visible the gendered nature of unequal globalization, and the vulnerabilities faced by women in global supply chains. One of the great success stories is that the campaign focused on gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) became a central pillar of C190 and R206. In this sense, it marks a significant historic achievement in international labour law, workers’ and feminist and women’s rights cross-movement building, global networking and campaigning, reigniting the role of women in trade unions in global advocacy on this important issue.

In documenting this impressive campaign and advocacy, we show how it bridged an important gap in international labour standards and national law and practice. It gives global recognition to the fact that all workers have the right to work in freedom from violence and harassment, including GBVH. It has helped women to join the dots between the persistence of inequalities, discrimination – including multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination – and the role they play in reinforcing unequal power relations that cut across the workplace, the community and the home. It is an example of an evolving and expanding frame of reference for global governance in addressing structural power inequalities that lead to violence and harassment, and particularly GBVH.

Our approach

We have written the book to document this historic global campaign led by women workers from the perspective of those women workers. Our shared commitment to documenting a landmark in contemporary women’s labour history, activism and grassroots struggle led us to come together to write this book. As authors, we draw on our academic, legal and workers’ rights experience and expertise, and our work with women’s rights and human rights organizations, trade unions and the global trade union movement. The collective expertise and experience have informed our observations and insights about the global campaign, advocacy and strategy, the national and international networks and coalitions created and the process of negotiation and decision-making for an ILO Convention centred on the needs and experiences of the most vulnerable and marginalized workers. We do not claim to speak for all those involved in advocating for this Convention, including the many champions among employers and governments around the world who advocated for and supported a strong Convention to eliminate violence and harassment, centred on GBVH. However, we do include examples of instances when successful alliances were built and effective advocacy undertaken at a tripartite level between governments, employers and trade unions. We hope that others will be able to take some learning away from this process, to apply in developing and launching other global labour campaigns – in particular, that women workers are effective leaders and advocates for all workers in national and international decision-making, and that it is necessary to ensure that they are in decision-making spaces so as to create more inclusive and effective policies and programmes to address the issues that they know best and work best for all workers. We recognize and pay tribute to the women workers across the world who led the campaign, many of whom come from the global South, in their roles as leaders, activists and workers.

Our normative standpoint is that eliminating GBVH in the world of work is and must be rooted in human rights, gender equality and social justice, such that all workers have the right to decent work, non-discrimination, gender equality at work, safe and healthy workplaces and the right to organize and bargain collectively. We firmly believe in the power of women’s collective organizing and agency in the context of challenging unequal gender power relations, structural inequalities and multiple forms of discrimination. Central to this are women’s roles as agents of progressive economic and social change. In the context of work, our conviction is based on the need to address structural inequalities through a transformative gendered and intersectional social policy approach (Williams 2021), based on economic and social emancipation (among these are access to gender-responsive public services, equality at work and recognition of women’s care roles, and the sharing/socializing of childcare and other care services). This is combined with gender-responsive employment standards and Covid-19 recovery, decent work and fundamental rights at work.

The book is set in the context of globalization, neoliberalism and how existing structures of inequality in the world of work play an important role in construction and maintenance of economic, social and cultural systems of oppression of women, at the heart of which is GBV. Although women in all occupations and sectors are affected by violence and harassment, some groups of women are more vulnerable to GBVH because of the type of work they carry out or because of their precarious employment situation. Women informal workers, migrant workers, women experiencing multiple and intersectional forms of inequality and discrimination, women in precarious and insecure employment, women working in customer-facing occupations that put them at risk of violence and harassment, and women not protected by trade unions face some of the greatest risks and vulnerabilities to violence and harassment at work.

The main themes running through the book

Conceptually, the book focuses on several key themes linked to the campaign for C190 and its ratification, rooted in women’s voices and leadership. Through these themes we give a detailed insight into how a global treaty on violence and harassment in the world of work was agreed through tripartite social dialogue.

The power of the diversity of women’s voices in leading the successful global campaign for C190

The first theme is that of the power of the diversity of women’s voices and experiences – something that was previously thought to be impossible – in a successful global campaign for a binding labour standard to eliminate GBVH in the world of work. We locate this in both an intersectional and a transnational approach, recognizing the intersection of gender, class, race and other inequalities in the context of economic and social inequalities globally.

Through the leadership of the ITUC campaign Stop Gender-Based Violence at Work!, and subsequently the campaign for ratification #RatifyC190, there was unprecedented engagement, participation and mobilization on the part of millions of workers across the globe. We show how one global trade-union-led campaign, if not the biggest in the history of unionism, had at its core the leadership of women, the mobilization of women at the grassroots level and in workers’ organizations, and engagement with, support from and alliances with NGOs, human rights and feminist organizations.

The campaign’s strategy was twofold. First, it enabled and supported worker and union advocacy directed at lobbying and raising awareness among workers, governments and employers about the need for a Convention. Second, it grounded the campaign in the collective voices and experiences of women workers through awareness raising and building women’s participation at the grassroots and in the leadership in their unions, ensuring that the campaign reached out and was relevant to and inclusive of the lives of all workers. This, in turn, provided the evidence base needed to convince and remind governments and employers of their responsibilities and the benefits to them of a supported and adopted ILO Convention. Through this we draw out the lessons of what was pivotal about the campaign. As we mentioned above, we show that the campaign built on decades of women workers’ activism in both the trade union movement and feminist campaigning, globally, nationally and locally.

Campaigns that are rooted in women’s experiences and collective organizing are more likely to be successful than those that are top-down or at a distance from women workers themselves. In this sense, the global campaign for C190 enabled women to realize that their own individual experiences with GBV were collective experiences, and that by building solidarity globally they could more effectively mobilize for change. The sense of agency and power that came from this is palpable, showing how the power of women’s collective voice helped create a new model of power building for women and their unions through women’s leadership in responding to the impacts of Covid-19.

The campaign revealed a broad continuum of violence and harassment faced by women workers, and it created spaces to break through the multiple barriers that have led to silence and a lack of awareness of the pervasiveness of GBV at work. It enabled women to name the problem and to speak about the impact it has had on their lives, and the fact that many did not complain for fear of retaliation, physical violence or job loss. In companies in Western countries with established complaints systems, women spoke about not wanting to make complaints or take cases through lengthy procedures and investigations, in which trust was low and they risked not being believed. It was felt that companies would act to protect high-value male employees with power, leverage and access to resources. But women were clear that they want the prevention and ending of violence and harassment to be sanctioned and backed by strong laws and workplace policies that make explicit their role in preventing violence and harassment.

A campaign rooted in unprecedented women’s leadership, and intersectional and diverse voices and experiences

The leaders of the global campaign and the discussions for a binding international labour standard applied an intersectional framework that recognizes the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism and classism) combine, overlap and intersect. The term intersectionality, defined by African American lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) to refer to the intersection of gender and race, has since taken a wider meaning around multiple and overlapping forms of discrimination. This is especially relevant to the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups and how relationships and power dynamics between social locations and processes (e.g. racism, xenophobia, classism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, sexism) are linked and change over time and are different depending on geographic settings. This intersectional approach recognizes that various categories of discrimination interact on multiple levels, creating multiple forms of oppression, and that a women’s racial or ethnic origin, caste, class, migration or refugee status, age, religion, sexual orientation, marital status, disability or HIV status will influence what forms of violence they suffer and how they experience it (UN 2006: 41). The much greater recognition of the multiple intersecting and distinct forms of discrimination experienced by different workers ensured that the intersectional nature of gender inequality and the compounding of discrimination based on different grounds, or intersectional discrimination, [which] can have a significant impact on the ability to access and progress in paid work, remained central during the negotiations for C190 (Beghini, Cattaneo & Pozzan 2019).

The global campaign involved unprecedented leadership and participation from Black women, indigenous women and other marginalized women, who make up the majority of garment workers, domestic workers and agricultural workers, and women in informal and precarious work globally. This ensured that the intersectional and diverse voices of women were prominent and influential in the negotiations at the ILO Standard-Setting Committee in 2018 and 2019. The negotiations were led by an almost all-female Workers’ Group. The workers’ spokesperson and many of the committee members are Black women, and their stories and experiences were central to the campaign and the lobbying of governments. Their presence in the negotiations ensured that the final document reflected the lived realities of women workers. As Marie Clarke Walker, the spokesperson for the Workers’ Group during the negotiations in 2018 and 2019, a Black woman passionately committed to equality, a trade union leader and secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), made clear in her interview: An important part was the recognition that not everyone is experiencing the same problems and that vulnerable workers need to be recognised, and that indigenous women, racialised women migrant women, they have a higher rate of violence and harassment and they were the women we needed to hear from.

Another inspirational women leader from the campaign was Rose Omamo, general secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Kenya Metal Workers (AUKMW), affiliated to the Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU), who was a key trade union leader in the campaign and negotiations for C190. Her experience was rooted in three decades of working in a male-dominated sector in which sexual harassment was a normal part of the job; in her interview, she said:

I worked in an assembly plant for 29 years. In that male-dominated plant there were only two women in production out of 480 workers. Being two women, you can imagine what we were going through with 478 men surrounding you. We had problems even with the toilets – we had to go very far to use the general toilets up at the gates as there were no women-designated toilets at the plant. We were putting on overalls and boots – remember: this is not an office job, where you’re sat at your desk; it is a manual job. There are instances, for example, when you want to open up a dashboard, there’s a connection you want to look at, you must come the two of you, somebody must hold the torch for you, you may have to lean on one another, and then you see sometimes [when] these men lean on you they start talking to you to try to convince you to be their girlfriend, want to touch you the way they want, want to sleep with you. You couldn’t complain, you wanted to continue working, and no one would listen to you because you are the two of you, there’s no witness to what’s happening. For that reason, I was, like, When will we have a time when women can have their freedom, even in a male-dominated area? […] So, when I got the information that this Convention is coming up for negotiation, I did all I could, no matter the cost for me, to be part of the negotiations.

The resurgence of #MeToo, globally bolstering the campaign for C190 and its ratification

In 2006 Tarana Burke, who had been working with Black women survivors of sexual violence in the southern United States, began using the phrase Me too to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and assault in society. After national media in the United States reported allegations of widespread sexual abuse of female actresses and staff by movie producer Harvey Weinstein over decades in October 2017, the actress Alyssa Milano tweeted #MeToo when she shared her experiences with gender-based violence and harassment in the film and movie industry and encouraged other women to share their stories. This combination of events led to a relaunch of the #MeToo movement and disclosures of sexual harassment in the workplace and elsewhere by millions of women and men on social media around the world over the coming months, revealing decades of structures of power and control, sexual aggression and the toxic and complicit control over women by powerful figures in the workplace, politics, media and entertainment (Kantor & Twohey 2019; Jaffe 2018). In November 2017 the leadership of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, which had been working to address sexual harassment in the field in the United States for decades, sent a letter of support and solidarity to women in the movie industry on behalf of 700,000 women farmworkers, stating: Even though we work in very different environments, we share a common experience of being preyed upon by individuals who have the power to hire, fire, blacklist and otherwise threaten our economic, physical and emotional security (Time 2017).

Although the global campaign for C190 preceded the relaunch of the #MeToo movement in 2017, the relaunch added a sense of urgency to the need for a binding global labour standard just before the first set of negotiations, in May and June 2018. No government or employer wanted to be accused of complicity, or not to be seen publicly condemning sexual harassment. However, #MeToo was less relevant to and impactful for many working women around the world, with some women feeling left out of the conversation, silenced or self-censored due to fear of their entire ‘communities’ being judged (Kagal, Cowan & Jawad 2019). As Ajayi (2018) argues, Would white women in the US have supported #MeToo in the same way if it had been started by women elsewhere in the world? Many women were unable to participate in the #MeToo movement as they had no access to social media, or because it was not in a language they understood or because the recriminations would be too great. It had little relevance to domestic workers in India, for example, many of whom had not heard of #MeToo or had no access to social media (Marron 2018). As Zarkov and Davis (2018: 8) assert:

While it certainly took courage to come out on #MeToo, it was also a platform for individual women who were confident enough to stand up and powerful enough to be heard. Many of the women were well-known celebrities and they situated themselves as agents, not as victims … [which differs from activism that] frames sexual violence as a collective issue facing all women, which requires raising public awareness and involving both women and men in grassroots activism as well as transforming institutions which condone violence against women.

Importantly, as Levine (2018) argues, it does not redistribute power. Power shifts only with institutional change, and institutional change does not happen without political organizing. As a result, she argues: "Collective action empowers workers to overcome the structural,