CREATE A STORY
OF POSSIBILITY
“Don’t wait for something big to occur. Start where you are, with what you have, and that will always lead you into something greater.”
Mary Manin Morrissey
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR, UN Human Rights), founded on December 20, 1993, is the leading UN entity on human rights. While doing my research, I came across a page on their website that shares life stories that were delivered during the “Voices” event organized by the OHCHR and held daily during the Durban Review Conference at the United Nations Office in Geneva, Switzerland, from April 20, to April 24, 2009. The Durban Review Conference is the official name of the 2009 United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), also known as Durban II.
The “Voices” event provides a platform for individuals from diverse geographical and cultural backgrounds to share their experiences and gives a human face to issues addressed by the Review Conference. Delegates from 141 countries participated in the conference. Over the course of the week, at scheduled sessions each day, 15 individuals offered their personal experiences of racism.
Creuza Oliveira tells the story of more than nine million Brazilian domestic workers, mostly women, mostly black, for whom slavery is not relegated to the dust piles of history. It is also the story of the revolutionary impact unions and social movements can have on entrenched and systemic injustices.
Born in a family of poor rural workers with no schooling, Oliveira began life as a domestic worker in Bahia when she was only 10 years old. Unable to balance work and school, she had to pick work and dropped out of school numerous times.
At work, Oliveira would be beaten and taunted whenever she broke something; she was often called lazy, monkey, and even the N word. The physical and psychological abuses were compounded by sexual abuse from the young men in the household where she worked. To top it all off, Oliveira was not paid.
She buzzed, looking at the audience and said, “I only started to receive a salary as a domestic worker when I was 21; until that age, my payment was in used clothes and food. I did not have a right to vacations or any basic workers’ rights.”
At age 14, her employers took her to Sao Paulo to work, without any authorization from her relatives in Bahia. From the video of her speech, I could see her shudder, probably from recalling the memory.
The Turning Point
Such was Oliveira’s life until she heard on the radio about meetings of domestic workers fighting for their rights. She attended one meeting and thus began her evolution from a suffering young woman with low confidence into a leader in the fight for the rights of blacks, women, and domestic workers. She hated weaknesses. She felt her face flush again.
“Almost half a million domestic workers in Brazil are children and teenagers between 5 and 17 years of age [and] working without compensation, as slaves,” she said.
“Domestic work in my country still carries the legacy of slavery: lack of application of relevant laws, physical and moral violence, lack of recognized rights vis-à-vis other professions, lack of union rights, and so on.”
Oliveira is now President of the National Federation of Domestic Workers in Brazil and active in the Unified Black Movement and Women’s Movement. She shared the numerous changes in her country’s policies since she attended the 2001 World Conference against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance, also known as Durban I, which was held in South Africa. Federal departments have been established to promote racial and gender equality, and the organization of domestic workers has gained visibility. There have been important victories in the recognition of property rights and on issues including domestic violence.
Domestic workers are now guaranteed, by law, rest and vacation days, as well as job security for pregnant women. Employers are prohibited from deducting housing and food expenses from their salaries, and there is ongoing construction of public housing for domestic workers. Legislation prohibiting domestic work for children and teenagers under 18 years of age has also been recently signed into law by the President of Brazil.
Oliveira says the situation for domestic workers has certainly improved with such laws and more access to redress, but the problem lies in implementing these laws, as domestic work is carried out in private households. Article 7 of the Constitution also still explicitly excludes domestic workers from various labor standards.
She is well aware of the fact that racism is about power relations and that domestic workers for the most part have low self-esteem. Independent expert for minority issues, Gay McDougall, who moderated the discussion, noted the difficulty in securing the labor rights of domestic workers and that this was not a problem unique to Brazil.
Oliveira also referred to broader issues causing the perpetuation of racism in her country, including the media, songs that diminish women and encourage violence, and TV shows that depict black women as ignorant.