PRESS RELEASE
Ramallah
10/10/2016
Ramallah – The Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development (PWWSD) completed a series of workshops on how to organize and establish trade unions targeting female workers in beauty salons. The workshops were held in Nablus, Ramallah, and the Gaza Strip, as part of the project for “Enhancing the Rights and Freedoms of Palestinian Workers”, conducted in partnership with the Democracy and Workers’ Rights Center (DWRC) and COSPE, and funded by the European Union.
The workshops aimed to increase the participants’ knowledge of how to form and organize in union bodies to advance the rights of beauty salon workers, raise their awareness of the laws governing the right to organize, as well as emphasize the significance of union organizing, the steps needed to form a labor union, and the structure of a union.
The workshops addressed many topics, including the rights and duties of beauty salon workers and how to demand them legally, legislation related to union organizing in the Palestinian context, the challenges and obstacles facing Palestinian workers when organizing in unions and finding solutions to address them, strategies and mechanisms for organizing workers, including elaborating internal statutes, preparing for union meetings and conferences, and the technical aspects of forming new representative bodies.
The workshops targeted 62 beauty salon workers, 28 women in the West Bank and 34 women in the Gaza Strip. The workshops resulted in the formation of two establishing committees for a union of beauty salon workers, one in the West Bank with 8 workers, and one in the Gaza Strip with 9 workers.
PWWSD’s project coordinator, Hana Qaisi noted that there is a substantial percentage of Palestinian women working in beauty salons, but most of them receive very little pay, work more than eight hours a day without pay for overtime, with many of them being hired without a contract or health insurance. Qaisi noted that some beauty salons lack occupational health and safety standards, such as masks to protect workers from chemical fumes. Thus it is important for beauty salon workers to form a labor union that will fight for their labor rights.
Qaisi added that these efforts are a continuation of PWWSD’s past work with beauty salon workers, which they targeted through awareness meetings as part of the project for “Enhancing the Rights and Freedoms of Palestinian Workers” as well as other projects, to raise their awareness of their labor rights and labor law, before starting to work on forming their own labor union.
The project for “Enhancing the Rights and Freedoms of Palestinian Workers” aims to contribute to the protection of human rights, freedom of association and assembly in Palestine. Its specific objective is to strengthen the capacity of trade unions and CBOs to defend fundamental rights and freedoms of female and male workers, and advocate for abidance with international human rights law. The project targets a wide spectrum of workers, prioritizing workers newly organized in labor unions, unorganized workers, marginalized workers, low-income workers, young workers, women workers, unionists, and independent democratic unions in private and public sectors.
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For more information, please contact:
Hana Qaisi
Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development
Phone: 02 2981977
This project is funded by the European Union