Call initiated by Rubina Jamil, General Secretary of the All-Pakistan Trade Union Federation, and Christel Keyser, National Secretary of the Democratic Independent Workers' Party of France.
"Our Proposal is to hold an International Conference of Working Women"
All around the world, women are mobilising more and more in the fight for true equal rights between women and men.
Subjected
to double oppression and double exploitation in every domain, as
working women but also as mothers and as women, women are standing up
against all forms of oppression, discrimination and violence, and
against patriarchal domination.
We, engaged as we are in those
struggles and mobilisations in our respective countries, know that the
particular demands of women are part of the more general struggle of the
working class for its emancipation.
However, and this is not contradictory, women have specific demands:
equal pay, professional equality, legal equality, the setting up of
structures for childcare, the right of women to self-determination, the
right to choose regarding reproductive rights, and an end to the
harassment and acts of violence they are subjected to as women.
This
is why we propose that an international meeting be held before the
workers' conference called by the IWC*, involving working women engaged
in the struggle to defend their existing rights, to win new rights and
to win back the rights that have been lost.
In 1910, the Second
International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Copenhagen, decided
to organise the first annual International Women's Day on 19 March
1911, to commemorate the Revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune. And
on 8 March 1917, Russian women marked International Women's Day by
demonstrating in St. Petersburg to demand bread, peace and freedom. From
1920 onwards, International Women's Day has been celebrated on 8 March.
We
propose that on the occasion of the initiatives taken in each country
to celebrate on 8 March 2021 (public meetings, demonstrations, rallies,
etc.), the proposal to hold an international meeting of working women be
put to the participants and discussed, and that delegations of working
women begin to be formed and mandated to attend it.
Rubina Jamil, General Secretary of the All-Pakistan Trade Union Federation (APTUF), Pakistan
Christel Keiser, National Secretary of the Democratic Independent Workers Party (POID), France