A WAVE of workers' struggles and strikes has broken out since the election of the People's Alliance government in Sri Lanka last year. One of the most dynamic strikes has been that of the 300 employees -almost all of them women - of the Ceylon Diamond Company. As part of their campaign for compensation or re-employment, six women from the locked-out workforce climbed onto the roof of the 10 storey Department of Labour on hunger strike, and occupied it for five days. Their demand: meet us for negotiations or we'll Fighting back: strikers from the Ceylon Diamond Company in the more peaceful surroundings of their union office Women working in Sri Lanka's free trade zones face a variety of oppression and maltreatment.
Although Sri Lankan women retain their dowry. they have to have a dowry to get married.
Many women in the zone work intensely hard in ordowry money. This means that they can be slow to resist appalling conditions -but they can also be very radical when threatened with loss of jobs.
It is common for divorce to be granted on grounds of women not seen to be virgins on consummation of marriage.
The women sleep in sails in cormories, racing a high incidence of rape. women" in their home villages, and women are fre. quently tricked out of dowry money by men who make a speciality out of relationships with women who work in free trade zone.
The largest source of foreign revenue in Sri Lanka is remittances from workers in the Middle East, many of them married women.
Care of children in Sri Lanka is by extended family structure, which allows women to be superexplolted as domestic servants in the Middle East.
Home working is alte widespread. Outside Kandy cigarettes - they're paid 75 hand rolting 1,000 cigapees each. In fact the ported from india. • United Federation of Women, Chandrani Jayasinghe, 143/3, Colombo, Sri Lanka, has campaigned against rape, for legalisation of abortion, decriminalisation of prostitution as well as in support of groups of womes workers.