We, feminist organisations and allies from around the world, call for a Women’s Global Strike on 8 March 2020. We ask that feminists and their allies withdraw their labour on this day, recognising the roots of International Women’s Day in women’s solidarity strike actions throughout history, and showing to the world, that when women stop, the world stops.
Why do we need to do this?
Because the promises made by our governments to advance equality, development and peace for all women 25 years ago were not kept. While wealth has grown during this period, multiple, interconnected inequalities have obscenely deepened [1]. Because that wealth has been in large parts created by women who do not get to share that wealth. We live within an economic order which is exploiting women and benefiting from the free or lowly paid care work that we do, from the low wages and precarious conditions of work.
Because the greed of fossil fuel companies has destroyed the environment, and the effects of climate change are also more deeply felt by women. We are more likely to be displaced [2], we have to travel further to collect water, we are forced to migrate, and we suffer from health implications of increased salinity caused by rising sea levels, changing temperature and more frequent natural disasters [3].
Because worldwide, women and girls continue to perform more than three-quarters of the total amount of unpaid care work. This work is still unrecognised, undervalued and not included in the calculation of national GDPs, even though the economy would not function without it. Women spend more time in unpaid care work than men in every region, ranging from 1.7 times more in the Americas to 3.4 times in Africa, 4 times in Asia and 4.7 times in the Arab States [4]. Besides, domestic work is commonly underpaid and performed under precarious working conditions.
Because in many countries gender pay gap is stagnant, and for some it is actually increasing. The global pay gap between men and women will take 202 years to close [5].
In 2020, when we mark 25 years since the commitments made for women’s rights at the 1995 Fourth World Conference for Women, known as the Beijing Platform for Action [6]. it is time for us to come together, across generations, across different movements, to stand in solidarity with each other and bring the world to a standstill.
We believe that our demands are common demands across the world:
- Decent Work and Living Wages for all
- End gender-based violence
- Just access to resources, power, and opportunity
- Food sovereignty for all
Throughout history, strikes have been an effective tactic for of harnessing the power of movements to affect change. International Women’s Day is not a marketing campaign to make women feel beautiful: it is a day when women have risen up and protested, putting their lives at risk to defend their human rights and fundamental freedoms. Let us honour that history, reclaim the day and revive women’s collective power to demand our human rights.
[1] “The top 1% captured twice as much global income growth as the bottom 50% since 1980”. World Inequality Report 2018. Retrieved from https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir-presentation.pdf
[2] “80% of people displaced by climate change are women.” Halton, Mark. BBC (2018) Climate change ‘impacts women more than men’. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43294221
[3] “A lot of money is being thrown at climate change interventions, […] but almost none of it goes into research – not for the public health impact anyway. Everyone is thinking about environmental disasters. No one is thinking about public health”. BBC (2018) How climate change could be causing miscarriages in Bangladesh.
Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-45715550
[4] International Labour Organization, ILO (2018). Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work. Ginebra: OIT
[5] World Economic Forum. The Global Gender Gap Report 2018. Retrieved from http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf
[6] Fourth World Conference on Women. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/