https://socialistaction.org/2018/02/11/brooklyn-meeting-builds-march-8-womens-strike/
Brooklyn meeting builds March 8 women’s strike
/ 2 days ago
Feb. 2018 Women Mar. 8 forumBy CHRISTINE MARIE
On Jan. 30, around 100 people gathered at Verso Books in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
to participate in the launch of a campaign of action in solidarity with
the International Women’s Strike (IWS) that will be held around the
globe on March 8—a date celebrated as International Women’s Day by the
working-class movement.
This will be the second year of some kind of international coordination
of women’s mobilizations around the globe. It will build on the wave of
massive demonstrations and work stoppages that began even earlier in
2016 in Poland, Argentina, and many other locations. This year, U.S.
organizers are building a coalition to prepare a one-hour strike of
low-wage, immigrant, and working-class women that will be followed by a
march and rally in New York’s Washington Square.
An impressive panel of organizers laid out the theoretical and practical
thinking behind this year’s action in New York. Ximena Bustamante, a
leader of the IWS NYC collective explained clearly the thinking behind
this year’s call. Our goal, she said, is distinct from that of liberal
feminism. Our project is not electoral but instead “a refusal to confine
the horizons of social change to the terms defined by the Democratic Party.”
The IWS project, Bustamante said, is to attack the “structural origins
of multiple fronts of oppression, exploitation, and dispossession that
we experience.” This means “articulating already existing struggles as
both working class and feminist” and taking part in “the radical
transformation of current social relationships.”
In order to develop such a women’s and working-class movement and March
8 action, the IWS NYC is developing a coalition of groups already in
agreement with many related goals. The coalition in formation is made up
of radical caucuses in some unions, workers’ centers, cooperatives,
socialist groups, immigrant rights groups, grassroots feminist groups,
and community-based groups around social justice.
The NYC collective has been working toward the consolidation of such a
formation all year, in part, by carrying out interviews with women
organizers from such organizations. These include the Street Vendors
Project, Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), Retail Action Project
(RAP), Brandworkers, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), Laundry Workers
Center, Workers Justice Project, New Immigrant Community Empowerment
(NICE), Worker Center Federation, Eco-Cleaning Coop, Beyond Care Coop,
Golden Steps Coop, Is Si Se Puede Cleaning Coop, and Pa’lante Coop.
These interviews are available at
http://www.publicseminar.org/author/iwsnyc/.
This work documented the lived experience of organizing women in New
York City, demonstrating the weakness of the arguments of those who
opposed last year’s women’s strike on the basis that it was too
dangerous for women to take such steps. Natalie Matos of the NYC
collective addressed this question directly. “Many say that a ‘women’s
strike’ is impossible due to non-strike clauses, precarious labor
conditions, and the vulnerability that the majority of women face in
their workplace.” We believe that in spite of all this, “a strike of
women is both possible and fundamental in this political conjuncture.”
IWS NYC is confident that a one-hour strike in New York City “will make
women’s absence unavoidably felt in our homes, neighborhoods, and
communal spaces, in our paid workplaces and on the streets.” Organizers
are clear about the limitations imposed on the event by the complacency
of most union leaderships but optimistic about the political impact of
the walkouts and protests that will occur.
One of the fundamental arguments for the one-hour strike is that such an
activity is hardly a stretch for thousands and thousands of working
women in the city who already are active in daily struggles for union
organization, against deportation, wage theft, police brutality, and
loss of social services.
The first panelist to speak, Jeanette Vizguerra, was the embodiment of
the organizing determination of immigrant women. Born in Mexico City,
Vizguerra came to the U.S. without papers and within seven months was
organizing janitors with the SEIU. Now she is a leader against
deportation and for sanctuary. All this organizing has taken place for
the last eight years as she fights her own deportation.
A second speaker, Maria Ines Orjuela, a housekeeper at the newly
organized Hilton Hotel in Stamford, Conn., voiced the support of her
union local, UNITE-HERE 217, for the March 8 strike.
Another theme addressed by the panelists was the movement’s growing
understanding of the relationship between women’s problems on the job
and at home and in the community. To illustrate the way that a women’s
strike can link women’s oppression and exploitation by the boss, Sarah
Jaffee recounted the story of the Brooklyn-based Mujeres Guerreras, or
Warrior Women. These activists first came together to organize grocery
store and food service workers with Fight for Fifteen but soon
discovered that they also shared a need for collaboration against sexual
violence in the workplace, in the community, and at home.
Workers’ problems based on class and gender do not end when they leave
the worksite, and fighting oppressions in the community is the only way
to free women to lead workplace struggles.
Chaumtoli Huq and Suzanne Adely each praised the IWS for its commitment
to genuine internationalism. Huq observed the ways that solidarity
between female garment workers in Bangladesh and South Asian women in
Brooklyn strengthened each other’s struggles. Adely, who has long
experience in Arab-American community organizing, pointed out that while
at the Jan. 20-21 Women’s Marches it was often difficult to protest on
behalf of the female Palestinian teen Ahed Tamimi—who was jailed in
December for resisting Israeli troops on her family’s land—the IWS
recognized that a global movement for women must be anti-imperialist and
anti-Zionist. Learn more at https://www.womenstrikeus.org/.
Photo by Socialist Action
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February 11, 2018 in Labor, Women's Liberation.
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