Women Working Worldwide was established in 1985 by a group of women activists concerned that the lack of a gender sensitive approach to labour rights work was leading to an inadequate response to the needs of the majority of disadvantaged workers in international supply chains. For the next 20 years WWW worked closely with an informal network of women workers' organisations and trade unions with close access to women workers to undertake a number of projects. The work focused on empowering women workers to change their working lives and to win the rights that they were entitled to under national law and voluntary codes of conduct.

Our focus has been primarily on garment workers in Asia and, more recently, horticultural workers in East Africa. WWW has also been an influential actor in the movement to pressure key stakeholders including buyers, governments and trade bodies to recognise their responsibility to ensure that workers receive justice in the supply chain and that the rights of women workers in particular are recognised and adhered to in international trading relationships.

Whilst WWW’s core mission has changed little during the course of its history, it has had to adapt to a changing contextual environment including: the dominance of codes of conduct on labour rights discourse that emerged in the late 1990s; formalised multi-stakeholder engagement such as through the Ethical Trading Initiative; increased public awareness concerning labour rights issues and increased sophistication of brands in reacting to public pressure; the mainstreaming of labour rights issues into the work of large NGOs; the increasing awareness of the importance of gender issues and yet the continued inadequacy of measures to incorporate gender and especially women-sensitive practices into labour rights discourse, regulation and policy/practice.

At the same time, international supply chains have become even more globalised, competitive and pressured. Many activists complain that the labour rights situation has in fact deteriorated over the past ten years as a fast-paced race to the bottom and consolidated European market puts pressure on suppliers outweighs the efforts of those representing workers. Informalisation, migrancy and exploitation of cheap labour continue to characterise international markets. Women have found employment but not necessarily just employment, international regulation remains almost gender blind, women continue to occupy the most underpaid and unskilled positions and the need for WWW’s work remains as urgent as at its inception.

This having been said, WWW has developed programme responses which have seen women rise as workplace, union and community leaders, enabled to do so by extensive training programmes, changes in policy and practice resulting from advocacy and campaigning activities supported by Action Research conducted with workers. Workers, local partners and WWW have implemented these activities often simultaneously across a number of countries. WWW has historically taken a sector-specific, supply-chain focused approach to its work with wide-reaching results. Informal networking activities linking women workers across sectors and geographical areas has led to the sharing of best practice including key publications and training materials, and the organisation of conferences and workshops. Grassroots work has been supplemented by European advocacy and campaigning activities designed to raise awareness of project work and women’s issues and to influence the policy and practice of a range of interested parties.

Recent developments include Small Projects Funding supported by Oxfam Novib which allows us to reach workers outside of our main projects and these have achieved impressive results. We are in the process of planning for a new project in the garment sector, linking women workers across two continents - Asia and Africa.