Panel discussion: A Woman’s Work

Harini teaches sociology and social anthropology at the Open University of Sri Lanka. Her research interests include political activism and state/society relations. She is a board member of Nest, the Centre for Women's Research and the Law and Society Trust.

Sepali is an academic and a women’s rights activist. She has an M.Phil and a D.Phil in Development Studies from the IDS, University of Sussex, UK. She is a Visiting Lecturer in Gender/Women’s Studies at the Faculty of Graduate Studies,  University of Colombo Sri Lanka.  Her research includes women in the informal sector, women’s unpaid care work, women migrant workers, SRHR, gender in disasters, women in the media and in politics. She is the Technical Advisor at the Women and Media Collective.

Violet Perera  currently is a Program Coordinator at WMC since 1988 and the Coordinator of the Action Network for Migrant Workers (ACTFORM) since 1999. She engages in community mobilization, advocacy and policy makings on rights of women migrant workers at national and international level.  She also works on increasing women’s political representation in Sri Lanka. She is also a member of the National Advisory Committee on Labor Migration of the Ministry of Foreign Employment.

Menaha Kandasamy, the daughter of a plantation worker, has been changing the structure of traditionally male dominant plantation labor unions in Sri Lanka into a more representative and egalitarian setup by ensuring a 50 percent representation of women within the estate committees. Menaha is President of the Ceylon Plantation Workers Union (CPWU), one of the most powerful plantation unions in the country. Menaha also founded the Red Flag Women's Movement.

Chamila Thushari has dedicated her time to give a voice to these voiceless women in the FTZ who are deprived of their rights in an oppressive work environment. She now works as the Programme Coordinator of the Dabindu Collective, an organisation formed in 1984 to speak on behalf of the oppressed women who provide labour in the FTZs.