Fair-Trade Principle Seven: Ensuring Good Working Conditions

Fair Trade is becoming a popular concept, but unless explored and seen in practice, it’s a hard concept to understand in depth. Seven Women supports and applies the principles of Fair Trade in the grass roots development project we have created. The Seven Women organization provides a safe and healthy working environment for employees and / or members. It complies, at a minimum, with national and local laws and ILO conventions on health and safety. Working hours and conditions for employees and / or members (and any home workers) comply with conditions established by national and local laws and ILO conventions.

Fair Trade Organisations are aware of the health and safety conditions in the producer groups they buy from. They seek, on an ongoing basis, to raise awareness of health and safety issues and improve health and safety practices in producer groups.

Many of the women at the centre need regular health checks for their various disabilities. We have established a budget for this purpose to help them fund the required medical needs.

Our centre has been built with the funds raised in Australia. Our centre is sufficient and the women work in comfortable conditions. However, ideally we want to fundraise to build a better and more equipped facility, which pays closer attention to the physical disabilities of many of the women by providing improved access through ramps and rails, for example. Although there is room to improve our facility, there are no safety dangers to the women. Improving our existing facility is not of high priority at the moment

Principle Eight: Providing Capacity Building, will feature in our next post.

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Byron - Seven Women, Melbourne