July 28th, WCW Update

World Court of Women on Poverty in the U.S. – For the West

Teach-in, July 28, 2011,

1. The meeting began with introductions of those attending in person and via telephone and the web and with an overview of the agenda.   A major part of this meeting focuses on a thematic roundtable with an organizer and 6 members of United HERE local 2.

2. Ethel Long-Scott explained the history of the planning for this court, dating back to before the Detroit U.S. Social Forum.  Corinne Kumar, the founder of the Courts, had already approached the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign  (PPEHRC) coalition before the Social Forum, and over the six days in Detroit the idea was elaborated and expanded to embrace four Courts: one in the West, one in the Midwest, and one in the South, culminating in a national Court of Women on the East Coast.  The meetings organized by WEAP are for the planning of the West Coast Court.  Among the focuses of this Court are the exploration of economic security and the envisioning of a new economy.  Available on the website are the "People's Movement Assembly Resolution of Action on World Courts of Women" and the "Poverty Resolution for the Assembly to End Poverty," both key documents for the organizing process.

3. A brief video was played of Courts of Women founder Corinne Kumar, who addressed the aims and the goals of the World Court of Women on Poverty in the U.S.  She explained the difference between conventional retributive justice and the concept embodied in the Courts of Women of "justice with healing." This restorative justice replaces the concept of "equality" which flattens and standardizes people, rendering them faceless, with the concept of "dignity". If "dignity" is placed at the center of the discourse of justice, then that discourse will change. "Dignity" has roots in, and is compatible with, a diversity histories, communities, and ideas of the "human."

Similarly, the term "poverty" does not begin to describe the destitution to which increasing numbers of people around the globe are being reduced. Making distinction between "poverty" and "destitution," she pointed out that our category of poverty, like so many of our categories, is insufficient for describing the wholesale destruction of communities as subsistence is made illegal and  safety nets are destroyed.,  Increasing numbers of people have nothing but the space on the sidewalk they occupy. The Courts need to get at the history of how this destitution was created through slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and now globalization. We must rewrite that history in the interests of creating a new political imaginary.

After the clip, Ethel added that the Courts of Women are moral, not judicial, courts, that elevate and make more visible such crimes as the fundamental  immorality of tearing up workers' rights.  Our economy does not fit our wants or our needs, and she reiterated that we need a new economic paradigm.

4  Margie Waller, Professor of Women's Studies at UC Riverside, whose work on women's activism led her to the Courts of Women in l995, then summarized the history, philosophy, structure, and activities of the Courts of Women. Corinne Kumar developed the Courts idea in the company of a group of activist/thinkers active in Bangalore, India since the 1970s. Since l992 there have been over 35 Courts, all in the Global South.  The World Court on Poverty in the U.S. will be the first in North America.  Corinne also directs an NGO in Tunis called El Taller, which collaborates with the Asian Women's Human Rights Council, based within the Bangalore CIEDS Collective, on organizing the Courts. Corinne and everyone she works with have a strong sense of all the voices, insights, knowledges, and experiences that are being edited out, silenced, made invisible by dominant political, social, and ideological paradigms.  India, of course, has experienced both colonization and the imposition of the European nation-state paradigm, both of which have rendered the diversity of India difficult to see and to grasp even by Indians.

The first Court of Women was held in Lahore, Pakistan in 1992 and focused on domestic violence, ranging from dowry burning to honor crimes, rape and battering.  The second, organized in collaboration with 64 women's human rights groups in Japan, was the Court on the Violence of War against Women, held in Tokyo in l994, which linked the stories of the Japanese "comfort women" (young nonJapanese girls abducted and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II) with testimonies from women survivors of the wars in Southeast Asia and of the US military bases in Pacific. The sexual slaves of the Japanese broke a silence of almost fifty years and laid the groundwork for the determination by the International Tribunal the Hague that rape was a war crime.

The Courts interconnect issues that are kept separated from one another in conventional thinking, and they do so in new ways.  The space of the courts is therefore quite unlike the space of a regular courtroom with all its constraints.  In place of strict rules about what can be said, by whom, and in what terms, the Courts of Women are very open and invite the unexpected, the experiences for which words are hard to find.  They recognize that there are many different ways of listening and communicating and include the art, performance, singing, dancing, and poetry of the participants and their communities.  The goal is collectively to come to new understandings of where we are living, what we are going through, what we need and want.  The forms that this may take differ with the location and the participants, but the Courts have been transnational in the sense of seeing the national frame as just one among many frames.  Participants come from many different cultures and logics. Their different ways of thinking contribute to the creativity of the Courts.   The Courts allow these different ways of thinking to interact, to cross-pollinate, in ways that are very powerful and transformative.

Participants feel that they Courts are very effective and certainly healing and strengthening, as Corinne said in the clip. Some of the more tangible effects include the strengthening and networking of groups on the ground for whom the Court offers a space and an occasion for reflection on and analysis of the forces creating the problems with which they deal on a day to day basis.  A great deal of new knowledge and new information becomes available, furthermore, to local, national, and international policy-makers, with whom jury members are often in communication. Some jury members are themselves UN officials.  Former Denis Halliday, who resigned from the UN in 1998 over the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq, characterizing them as "genocide," has served on several juries, as have such prominent human rights activists, such as environmentalist Vandana Shiva.

The Courts bring broad spectrums of people together, cutting across differences of culture, class, race, faith, language, history.  They open blocked channels, operating without hierarchy, with judges, and with a great fluidity in roles. A jury member may also be a witness.  NGO workers may themselves be "victims".  In the case of jury member Amina Mama, now an academic in South Africa, the testimonies she heard in 2001 at the World Court of Women Against War and For Peace held in Cape Town, stirred up painful memories from her own childhood in Nigeria.  Much care is taken to support all participants, particularly witnesses who generously and courageously share stories whose retelling could otherwise be traumatic rather than healing.

Ethel picked up on several of Margie's points and amplified others. The jury to which Margie referred usually consists of 7 to 9 members. The Courts themselves usually last between 3 and 5 days.  There are usually about 30 witnesses and multiple languages. She emphasized that the Courts need to be accessible to those with disabilities. In answer to questions from the group, Margie added that the Courts are increasingly partnering with the World Social Forum, the Africa Social Forum, and the UNDP, as well as with their over 500 affiliated NGOs around the world.  They also work closely with the world-wide Women in Black movement, which consists of self-organized local groups who protest against violence by standing vigil, dressed in black, once a week in many locations thoughout the world.  The Israeli and Balkan region Women in Black have been particularly effective in keeping alive resistance to state violence in their respective regions. Margie also spoke of the Nepalese Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Nepal who after serving on a Courts of Women jury in Sri Lanka became instrumental in getting property rights changed to allow women to own property in Nepal.

(Both El Taller and the AWHRC [Asian Women's Human Rights Council] have extensive websites through which more background and information can be found)

4.  Thematic Roundtable: Workers' Rights/Women's Rights

Organizer Michael Floyd and several women members of Unite HERE Local 2 presented the history of the organization and stories illuminating their current campaigns. In the 80s, the movement was started by the mostly African American women who worked as hotel housekeepers and who revolutionized the industry.  They successfully challenged the corporations, which have increasingly taken over the ownership and management of hotels.   The union members won contracts, benefits, and particularly health care coverage.  Hotels have largely replaced these women with newly arrived, non-English-speaking immigrants, hoping to roll back these gains. But the immigrant women, who mostly come from Asia, Mexico, and South America, have resisted this pressure, not only on their own behalf but also on behalf of nonunion workers.

Hyatt  is the current focus of Local 2 because it has refused to sign the contract negotiated by the union. For two years housekeepers worked without a contract, and they were asked by hotels to pay for health insurance at a cost of up to $200 a month, up from $10 a month previously.   The union members fought hard and won a new contract that increases wages, raises pensions, and rolls back health care insurance to the original $10 a month.  Not only has Hyatt refused to sign, it also has the highest rate of injured workers among corporate hotels and includes many forms of abuse among its practices. Two of the women in the delegation told their own stories of abuse.  Their testimonies covered mistreatment they experienced at a Hyatt and at another hotel. One woman told of being manipulated into signing a letter saying that she would have to return to work 5 days after having a c-section. She asked for support in reading the documentation she was signing because she couldn't read English.  She asked a manager to translate, and he didn't tell her what she was signing. Upon returning to work she was forced to work under conditions that caused her pain, and she pleaded for more time off. They told her if she didn't come to work she would be fired.

The other woman told a similar story. After returning from stomach surgery, she was discriminated against for being hurt and was not given shifts. Instead of receiving support for her recovery, she was accused of lying about the surgery and had to show her manager her scars as proof.

The delegation seeks support for their campaign to mobilize communities against the kind of behavior practiced by the Hyatts in their areas.  The campaign urges communities to tell Hyatt that until they change the way they treat these women and others, they will not be welcome in their communities.  Unite HERE #2 has also led a boycott over the past two years of 18 Hyatt Hotels in the Bay Area, and they have organized many demonstrations. The week previous to this meeting 1100 people demonstrated in front of one hotel, and 80 of them were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience.  Unite HERE asks that organizations hosting conferences at Hyatts reschedule their meetings at other venues (the Unite HERE local 2 website offers advice and alternatives).  The delegation indicated that they would like to endorse and to participate in the World Court of Women on Poverty in the U.S., and have asked their executive board to vote on this.

A participant in the meeting responded to this presentation with the insight that corporations think workers are replaceable, are not human, and do not have rights. They have clearly been miseducated.

Ethel underscored the centrality of single payer health care to this complex of issues.  As things stand, health care is being held hostage in labor negotiations. Health care should be taken out of the market and recognized as a right.

5.  Rana Halpen, Development Director for WEAP, then updated the group on the endorsements that have come in.  She listed and described the different committees that will be involved in planning the Court.  People are encouraged to read these descriptions and to think about who in their respective groups could work on which committee.