WFTU International WORKING Women’s Day – WEB CELEBRATION MARCH 8,2021 AT 16.00PM GREEK TIME – OPEN INVITATION

Intervention in today’s event of WFTU, on the occasion of 8^th March 2021

The spread of the covid throughout the planet and the unfolding of the new capitalist economic crisis, added to women additional injustices and exploitation. The rapid development of science and technology is not accompanied by the reduction of working time and the general improvement of living and working conditions.

Instead, it is used by monopoly groups at the expense of workers, men and women, increasing exploitation. The generalization of teleworking, which in all countries, tends to be permanent in some sectors, the “flexibility” of labor relations, the promotion of individual and business contracts, high levels of female unemployment and wage inequality, the irregular and “rolling” working hours, especially for the workers in Health, supermarkets, services, aggravate the living and working conditions of women. Even in the most developed countries, any distinction between working hours and leisure time is lost.

The current tragic situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic around the world, even in the “metropolis” of capitalism in the US, but also in the EU, is the timeless result of the policy that considers health protection, prevention, medical care and coverage of popular needs as a “cost” to the state and not as a social good. At the same time, capitalist governments generously reinforce, directly or indirectly, business groups in the areas of Health – Welfare – Medicine.

We reject the logics of the Imperialists, the bourgeois governments on “gender equality”, which intensify the attack on the rights of women and men, leveling them down.

The declarations of “equality” of men and women in law do not mean equality in real life, nor stability at work, nor liberation from class exploitation, on which new forms of additional oppression of women appear.

We are raising our voices so that the real causes of the multifaceted violence at the expense women to be heard. Unemployment is violence, economic exploitation is violence, the war, the enforcement immigrants and refugees to emigrate is violence. Deprivation of free time is violence. Exclusion from the achievements of the science, of culture, of technology, the physical or verbal abuse are all forms of violence. Violence that was born and reproduced by the barbaric imperialist system, with US-NATO-EU interventions and wars, but also with the dangerous peace of all other governments that agree on the same policy

We express our solidarity with the women of Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan (….) We participate in the campaign of the WFTU for the release of children from Israeli prisons.

The women’s section of the WFTU will take initiatives so that women will turn their indignation, anger and insecurity for the next day, into a militant demand. The feeling of isolation, the frustration, which burden the thinking and attitude of women, can and must be broken, strengthening the “voice” of the mass struggles, strengthening the labor trade unions, the class-oriented trade union movement, strengthening the WFTU.

The historic anniversary of March 8, dedicated to the hard strike struggles of working women in the 19th century for equal wages for men and women, for humane working conditions, for fewer hours of work reminds us all that

progressive in the History of societies, of the class struggle is not to submit to negative correlations, but to fight in order to change them.

We continue to fight for a society that can free women and men from all forms of economic exploitation and social oppression; for a society that will want and will can eliminate all forms of violence and inequality.

Long Live FISE

Long Live WFTU

Chrisoula Lampoudi