“Inequality, precariousness, invisibility, poverty. All these words are written in feminine and they also bear the face of women in our society.” Thus begins one of the articles that Barabara Educació has published in relation to the implementation of his project Women Against Precariousness. We interviewed the president of this social initiative cooperative, Raquel León, to explain her goals and what impact they expect.
What is Barabara Educació and what kind of projects do you develop?
Barabara Educació is a cooperative of associated work, social initiative and non-profit that was born at the end of 2013. Barabara means path, and it is a path that we started with the will to contribute to social transformation through training and development of the social competences and skills of people, enhancing the critical, supportive, professional and committed spirit with the community. We are a team of professionals with a trajectory and experience of more than 25 years in the field of project management, training and development.
We develop training projects, career guidance programs for unemployed people, equality, preparation of pedagogical materials and pedagogical proposals, advice and consulting, educational proposals in cooperative learning and projects to accompany women in long-term unemployment situations.
Recently, Women Against Precariousness has been launched. What situations have you detected through your daily work that explain the need to promote this project?
The Women Against Precariousness project, with the support of the Barcelona City Council, is a program in which the participating women are the protagonists of its process, both in design and implementation and in evaluation. Since the cooperative’s beginnings, at Barabara Educació we have worked with women’s groups to facilitate empowerment processes so that the participants (in long-term unemployment and many of them, over 45 years of age) are always active agents of their future. We start from the vital exploration of the past and the present; we explore the environment to identify the key elements of the vital and social context; we recover resources, from identifying personal and professional skills and competences; and we accompany women to define their own vital and professional project as a projection, experimentation and decision-making strategy. The result over the years has been very positive with insertion results, professional re-orientations, entrepreneurial processes, etc.
It is necessary to rethink socio-labor integration projects and active employment policies that, apart from not having a gender perspective implemented neither in their design nor in intervention or evaluation, perpetuate productive roles and models based on precarization.
What objectives do have?
Our objective is to create a space for reflection on the job insecurity of women, with different entities, associations, groups of formal or informal women in the territory, with representatives of ESS entities and with individual women who work with the insertion and / or socio-labor orientation of women.
We want to be a space where we can generate ideas and reflections on the current context, face challenges, question the current model of women’s labor insertion, improve our work strategies, generate joint proposals that transform the quality of life of women in the workplace. and contribute to the fight against job insecurity.
Women Against Precariousness places special emphasis on the need to form networks and add different voices. With which organizations are you collaborating and why do you consider this shared path a priority?
We have created a space for reflection that we have called a benchmark women’s group, and in which they have participated either on a personal basis or on behalf of entities such as: Lola you are not alone, ACAF, Infinita dona, Associació Fita, Fundació Formació i Treball, Hèlia, CatNova, Sabors de Dona, Mujeres P’alante, etc.
Despite having coincided with the pandemic, the built space has been valued as positive. A women’s space where women are discussed. We have accompanied each other in the streaming sessions during the confinement, due to the situation we have had to live through. But a lot of work has been done in this process. And as they say in the final assessment: In this process we have built many things, we have done a good job. Although we have missed the face-to-face component. This has only just started, now it is necessary for the pilot test to be launched to accompany women from the methodological tool that has been built among all. Then it will be necessary to see if the expected results have been achieved.
What impact has the Covid19 crisis had on this job insecurity? Has it intensified, has it been made visible?
Women have assumed a large part of the COVID crisis19. The care work that we carry out, in a naturalized, not natural way, is now the center. The most precarious jobs, often very feminized, are at the forefront of crisis management: cleaning workers, supermarket cashiers, workers in nursing homes, health workers, workers in the internal care sector … Jobs that they are basic to move the world, not only in this crisis; care work not considered work, invisible and carried out mostly by women. The precariousness was already before the pandemic, the virus has worsened the situation and has found a society with many structural deficiencies. The coronavirus has worsened what was already very precarious and has further highlighted inequalities and the need for changes in political management that put people at the center and not economic benefits, which truly incorporate a gender perspective, in order of straightening out inequalities, rather than aggravating them.
In a changing and constantly moving world like ours, what are the new challenges posed by this fight against women’s job insecurity?
Long-term unemployment has numerous impacts on people and at various levels, it has impacts on health, time structure, personal relationships, mental health, addictions, etc. The social construction that since the industrial revolution has developed around the individual’s employment position, as the center of his social world, is affected when this position suffers a vulnerable situation in which everything sinks. Thus, today, we can speak of a paradigm shift in the conceptualization of the labor market, the values of the traditional model decline and this affects the identity of people, with the fact of having a recognized social place in the world. In this way the identity built from work is diluted and becomes volatile and unstable.
We must promote that people acquire and develop professional and personal skills that can equip themselves with more tools and resources that allow them to manage the situation of a constantly changing labor market. The dynamics of destructuring and disqualification suffered by people who have been unemployed for a long time make their reintegration into the labor market even more difficult. If dynamics of disaffiliation and exclusion typical of the lack of economic resources are added, in all areas, what is generated is an increasingly excluded population with situations that can easily skip generation.
The need for institutions and companies to work to provide access and maintenance opportunities in the labor market is indisputable. The sexist culture creates organizational barriers that hinder the access, permanence and promotion of women in companies as employees and as owners or members of the same. The company acts as an agent of socialization, producing and reproducing inequalities. For this reason it is important to work for a change in the conventional business culture and thus promote a social and solidarity economy that not only does not seek to deconstruct existing inequalities but also seeks to eliminate the sexual division of governance and work, changing power relations. .