https://socialistaction.org/2019/03/10/international-womens-strike-if-we-stop-the-world-stops/
International Women’s Strike: ‘If we stop, the world stops’
/ 13 hours ago
March 2019 IWS headshot 2
Lucía Cavallero of Ni Una Menos, a feminist collective in Argentina.
By KYLE HARRINGTON and RYAN BALBONI
On Feb. 7 and 8, two leading feminists toured Connecticut. Audiences
heard Lucía Cavallero, a member of Ni Una Menos, an Argentine feminist
collective that has repeatedly put hundreds of thousands of women on the
streets in protests against femicide, and Julia Cámara, a member of the
coordinating body of the Spanish feminist movement M8, which initiated a
feminist strike in Spain that included 5 million people. Together, they
provided a gendered socialist perspective on organizing mass
mobilizations of working women across the globe.
The two feminist leaders spoke to hotel workers in Stamford, students at
Trinity College in Hartford, and student and community activists at the
University of Connecticut. The tour was initiated by International
Women’s Strike CT and co-sponsored by the Women and Gender Resource
Action Center at Trinity, the University of Connecticut Women’s Center,
and the Stamford Hospitality Workers of UNITE-HERE Local 217.
Overall, nearly 200 students and workers heard the stories behind the
recent international mobilizations in defense of women’s rights and
against austerity and the vicious attacks on the social wage.
At the University of Connecticut, Cavallero began her speech by talking
about the origin of her IWS organizing in Argentina in 2015. Cavallero
radicalized when working in a call center and soon began organizing with
other women forced into precarious work. The primary strategy, she said,
was the development and strengthening of the relationship between
feminists, workers, and the labor unions.
Cavallaro asked audiences to consider three major points that organizers
had asked themselves. First, what criteria is used to determine whether
a task is a “job?” Answering this question, she said, puts all
reproductive and care work, typically unpaid labor, under the same
umbrella as waged jobs that have historically mobilized through
striking. Second, who is authorized to call for a strike? Uniting the
labor struggle with the feminist struggle provided an avenue for
horizontally organizing the paid and unpaid labor that women carry out
in their communities and homes. Finally, what are the reasons to call
for a feminist strike?
Cavallero argued that when one understands women’s reproductive work and
care work as unpaid labor—and often unrecognized labor—the reasons to
call for a strike to solve women’s problems become obvious. The
organizers in Argentina decided that struggle against unfair wages and
working conditions must include women whose primary labor is in
reproductive work and care work.
In addition, organizers argue that there is a precise link between labor
exploitation and gendered violence. This concept became central to their
conception of organizing a feminism for the 99%. When people understood
the relationship between the economy and the huge numbers of femicides
in Argentina, Cavallero said, it was a short step to motivating a strike
against femicide. The movement realized, she said, that “the life of one
women is enough to call a strike!”
Finally, Cavallero encouraged the audience to consider how this
illustrates the importance of international feminism and all that it can
teach about how to build the International Women’s Strike movement in
their own communities.
Cámara drew from a similar perspective and understanding when explaining
the mass mobilization she helped to organize in Spain. The background to
the idea of the strike, she said, was the Indignados Movement that
emerged in Spain in May of 2011.
March 2019 IWS headshot 1
Julia Cámara, from M8 in Spain.
That movement, she explained, was organized through unifying social
networks such as Real Democracy Now and Youth without a Future around
their common concerns regarding high rates of unemployment, cuts in
social support programs, and frustration with the two-party system, the
banks, and corruption.
The organizing nodes first developed during the Indignados Movement
joined with the fight for abortion rights in 2014 and 2015. This
struggle actually deposed the minister who had proposed criminal
punishment for abortion.
Then came the 2017 Women’s Strike in Argentina, which had a profound
impact on the thinking of Spanish feminists and ultimately led to the
strike mobilization of five million women in 2018. Cámara explained that
the feminist strike in 2018 was the expression of the anger that was
first articulated at the start of the Indignados Movement back in 2011.
She asked audiences to keep in mind that when she speaks of a “strike,”
she is referring to the entire movement, and not solely the individual
day that the strike occurred. This idea of a strike as a movement is a
useful reconceptualization to keep in mind when considering the network
of International Women’s Strikes as being something larger than what is
building to take place annually on International Women’s Day on March 8.
How was the mobilization of five million organized? Cámara explained
that when assemblies of women in various states across Spain met to
discuss the strike to occur on March 8 2018, they had only two months to
mobilize. The organizers began by asking what defines a “feminist
strike” in theory and practice, and decided to build a movement based on
four sectors of labor: a workers strike, a strike for domestic or care
workers, a student strike, and a consumer strike. On this basis, they
began connecting networks of immigrants, refugees, precarious workers,
traditional unions, with the new anti-corporate feminist nodes
stimulated by Argentina.
Connecting these often-separated areas of work began to politicize
women, and the relationships built served as the foundation for an
entirely new level of mobilization. Cámara explained that the support of
a significant labor union was necessary in order for an officially
recognized general strike to be called, and that the ability of the
feminists to win such a call from two major national labor unions in
Spain was a huge advance for the feminist movement as a whole.
Between the organizing against femicide in Argentina, and the organizing
of unpaid and paid laboring women in Spain, an international dialogue
and network has been created, and this communication is a cornerstone of
the IWS movement.
As Cámara asserted, “the material conditions that sustain life rest on
the backs of women,” thus highlighting the significant potential that
International Women’s Strike organizing holds.
Through expanding understandings of the working-class movement to
incorporate the unwaged reproductive and care work of women, the IWS
slogan, “If we stop, the world stops”, can become central in the
continuous fight for our rights as people of the working class.
International Women’s Strike Connecticut will follow up the tour with a
March 9 forum, “In Solidarity with the Global Women’s Strike,” at the
Elmwood Community Center in West Hartford.
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March 10, 2019 in Women's Liberation.
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