Over the last four years, I’ve been working with the Canadian Women’s Chamber of Commerce (CanWCC), an organization committed to feminist values of co-operation and mutual support.  When CEO Nancy Wilson was invited to government consultations on financial aid during the COVID-19 pandemic, she realized that none of the discussion related to the needs of her members, 80 per cent of whom were self-employed—entrepreneurs and solo workers providing a service or creating a product.

More than one million women in Canada are self-employed, yet no one considers them part of the economy—not the government, nor other workers, nor economists. Nancy approached me to work with her in building a coalition on self-employment. I was a little skeptical about working with a chamber of commerce, even if it called itself feminist, but I was broke and needed the work. We conducted focus groups of self-employed people across the country, including a diversity of gender, race, age, disability, and location. The biggest problem they identified was isolation. As well, self-employed individuals didn’t have a union or member-based organization to provide them with support or to form a collective base for organizing. CanWCC is now involved in a large fundraising campaign to make the self-employed a visible force in the economy and politically.

The coalition was both a success and failure. It was success in uncovering a significant absence in the economic and........

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