Danny Glover meets with Global Strike Organizers Grace Luomo, Margaret
Prescod, Selma James, Nina Lopez, Andaiye

“And we are the first to defend and protect those in our care.  It is usually women—mothers, wives, partners, sisters, daughters, grannies and aunties—who are the driving force of justice campaigns, whether or not we are prominent or even visible in them.”  Selma James

            The Global Women’s Strike (the Strike) was formed to win economic and social recognition for unwaged caring work and to demand the return of military budgets.

            Unwaged work entered the international agenda in 1975, at the UN Decade for Women conference in Mexico City.  In 1980, the International Labour Office estimated that women do 2/3 of the world’s work, yet receive only 5% of its income.  In 1985, the UN agreed to include the work women do in the home, on the land and in the community in national statistics.  In most of the world, caring work includes agricultural work and protecting the environment.  Women produce 80% of the food consumed in Africa and the Caribbean, in Asia up to 90% of workers in the rice fields are women, and in Latin America women provide 50% of the income in rural areas and are most active on farms that produce foods for home consumption.

            Finally in 1995 in Beijing, we won that national accounts would measure and value unwaged work.  It was a turning point globally.  Trinidad & Tobago put it into law in 1996.  Spain in 1998.  Catalunya in 2005.  But Venezuela set the new world standard in 1999.  Article 88 of its constitution says:

            “The State guarantees equality and equity between men and women in the exercise of their right to work.  The State recognizes work in the home as an economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth.  Housewives are entitled to social security.”

            Feminists have often prioritized the issue of abortion over workload, poverty and pay equity.  Yet to enshrine in law that caring work has social and economic value, would ensure that women, starting with mothers, are not penalized with the lowest pay when we go out to work or discriminated against in pensions, health care, childcare, and social welfare.  It would raise all women’s status and entitlements.

Most men are aware of the dependence on caring work, starting with their mothers’.  Many also agree that not counting it maintains the traditional division of labour between the sexes.  

            Raising the status of the carer would put women in a stronger position to demand that men take their full share of responsibility and become carers too!

India:  Dalit and Tribal Women together for Self-Help

Nawa Chhattisgarh Mahila Samiti (NCMS) is a self-help organization active in 400 villages.  It has brought together Dalit and Tribal (Indigenous) women for the first time, overcoming years of divisions.

            Every March since 2000, NCMS co-ordinates Global Women’s Strike actions all over Chhattisgarh.  Thousands of women, mainly agricultural workers, hold rallies and marches.  Men support by cooking and in other ways; some landlords lend their trucks.

            NCMS campaigns for:

• Food Security:

Grain banks have been established in m any villages.  Every woman contributes 5kg of rice twice during the harvest.  Each bank grows to about 300kg a year, from which can borrow.  Rice loans are repaid with a little extra rice as interest.

Seed banks preserve native seeds of rice, dhall and vegetables (which are being destroyed by cash crops), and to resist GM seeds.  Native seeds are organic, cheaper, hardier, use less water and grow more quickly.

Farming co-operatives sell half the grain and save the rest.  Some of the money goes toward helping women in other villages start co-ops.

A signature campaign won a subsidized monthly ration of 40kg of rice from the State for single women—unmarried, divorced, widowed—who have no income after the harvest.  Two saris from each village were used as petitions and sent to the government.  100 villages took part.  Many organizations joined the campaign to win a national food law in 2000.

• Land Rights

NCMS helps women get their names on land titles so they cannot be evicted from their homes when their husbands die or want to separate.

• “Revolving Fund”

A few women are given an animal to breed or money to buy seeds.  They will then give some money from selling surplus produce or the off-spring of the animal such as kids’ goats, to other women.

• Pay equity and higher wages for Social Security and pensions

Women agricultural workers went on strike during harvest time—men get higher pay even though women plant and harvest more grain.

• Justice for survivors of  rape and domestic violence

NCMS campaigns to stop rape by husbands and those with power and authority—going to the High Court to win justice for rape survivors, as well as taking direct action.  Women from different villages have broken up rapists’ wedding ceremonies, and demonstrated outside the homes of husbands who beat their wives.

            NCMS provides self-help legal training on how to report rape to the police and fight a legal case.

• Right to basic education

• Accessible healthcare

Using herbal medicine and alternative health camps, Tribal women prepare remedies from forest plants and travel to different villages to provide treatments.  NCMS also presses for a free women’s hospital.

• Resources for women and children with disabilities

Wheelchairs, hearing aids and disability pension cards have been won.  They campaign for all children to go to school together, not segregated.  NCMS trains women to be elected to the Panchayat (local council) and remain accountable.  Women are the majority in many councils.

Uganda: Invest in water not War

Karamoja is a remote rural area in north-eastern Uganda.  It has been devastated by war and other armed conflicts, poverty and desertification due to global warming.  The Kaabong Women’s Groups Organization (KGWO) fights droughts and famine, and co-ordinates Strike activities. 

            The women have built a Centre brick by brick with the help of men supporters.  It brings together thousands of women each year.  Some walk three days without food to take part in the Strike.  KGWO has involved local women’s groups, which had not worked together before.  These joint actions have won the abolition of “cost sharing” health care charges, and have increased men’s respect for women’s work both at home and outside.

            Accessible clean water is the priority as women and girls have to walk miles to dig for dirty water in dry river beds, and many die, are raped or get ill from it.  KGWO has introduced bio-sand filters to the local community—a straightforward local appropriate technology which uses local sand to make unsafe water clean and bacteria-free.

            Grace Loumo, founder of KGWO in 1989, said, “We have been demanding water for years.  Our greatest success is that on 8 March officials announced the local government will construct 16 boreholes in our District.  One of our demands has been met!”

Ireland:  A Proposal for the Constitution

Article 41.2.1:  The State recognizes caring work done within the home, often extending to the community, as a social and economic activity that produces social welfare and economic wealth, and entitles carers, starting with mothers, to economic and other support.

            The State also recognizes that in rural areas caring work has included work on the land which has kept families and communities alive and strong poverty emigration.

            41.2.2: The State shall therefore ensure that carers, starting with mothers, are not obliged by economic necessity to engage in waged work which would increase their workload, and shall provide workers in the home with independent remuneration and pensions.

            41.2.3: The State shall also ensure that women, particularly mothers who do most of the vital work of caring for children and/or other dependants, or men who do this caring work, do not suffer discrimination in wages, pensions, health care and social welfare they go out to work, and that pay equity, that is, equal pay for work of equal value, is fully implemented.

Peru: Domestic Workers Organize for Implementation of New Rights Law

In Peru there are 700,000 domestic workers; 90% are indigenous and rural young women who have migrated from the countryside to the cities to escape from poverty.  Considering their working day, payment and access to healthcare and pensions, many work in slave conditions—no fixed timetable, no rest days and even no payment or no minimum pay.  Many are underage and/or illiterate and are denied the right to go to school.  They suffer physical abuse and rape.  When they reach sixty they are thrown out with no pension or severance pay, after investing their life in the care of the family.

            In 2003 with the passing of the Domestic Workers Act 27986, we won:

And eight hour working day—many have been working 12, 14 and 16 hours.

• Extra payment of 50% of monthly pay on national holidays and Christmas, and entitlement to all national holidays.

• The right to education regardless of age—in order to overcome illiteracy and enable domestic workers access to other employment.

• The Regulation of the Domestic Workers Act defines CCTH as administrator of the law jointly with the government.

CCTH Works with the Aymara Centre in Puno.  Pacha Aru Demands:

• Fair prices for our agricultural produce.

• That the work of rural women be recognized and valued.

• Free schooling, health, water and electricity.  No to privatization.

• Maternity security.

• The right to exist as Indigenous people and be legally recognized by the state and by the international community.

• The right to our culture, to speak and be educated in our own language.

• State protection, especially for those in vulnerable situations.

• Lower salaries for congress, ministers and local and national state functionaries to address the struggle against poverty.