Santra Denis returned from the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow in November with a clear reminder of how women worldwide are more similar than they are different.

Denis attended COP26 as executive director of the Miami Workers Center (MWC), a Miami-Dade County-based organization that supports low-income communities and low-wage workers, particularly Black and Latinx women, in south Florida. Reflecting with Global Citizen over the phone on the conference, which aimed to keep global temperature rise under 1.5 degrees Celsius as outlined by  the 2015 Paris agreement and promote climate change mitigation, adaptation, and financing — one phrase came to Denis’ mind: “Poto Mitan.”

“It's Creole for what they consider women to be for society — we are the pillars of society,” she said. “All over the world, you will see women who are hustling and bustling."

“There were communities — Indigenous communities, Black communities — and the majority of those communities were represented by women who take care of the elderly but also work the land. They know the land. They know what it means to plant and to harvest. And they understand how to be one and in sync with the environment.”

The goal of COP26 was to get countries to greatly reduce carbon emissions and achieve net-zero by 2050, and Denis said there’s an opportunity to promote women’s economic justice within that agenda by shifting more extractive industries to care work.

Care work, which includes child care, elder care, cleaning and cooking, and more domestic labor and can be paid or unpaid, is considered low-carbon work that has little to no negative impact on the environment, she explained.

“There's a huge opportunity for us to grow this industry to provide living wages, to provide an on-ramp for folks to grow within their careers and their specific roles.”

Everyone relies on care workers at each stage of life, from infancy to old age, Denis explained. Her daily fight is to create an economy that sees and values care work, which is often invisible because it’s predominantly performed by women, especially women of color.

“Without this work, this nation comes to a halt,” Denis said. “These are people that we need to prop up. That's what economic justice means to me, that the people who we know allow for this country to run, our communities to run, that we support them and provide opportunities for them to thrive.”

Read the full article about domestic workers and economic empowerment by Leah Rodriguez at Global Citizen.