Brooklyn meeting builds March 8 women’s strike

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4 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 2018 On Jan. 30, around 100 people gathered at Verso Books in Brooklyn, N.Y., to par­ ticipate in the launch of a campaign of ac­ tion in solidarity with the International Women’s Strike (IWS) that will be held around the globe on March 8—a date cel­ ebrated as International Women’s Day by the working-class movement.

This will be the second year of some kind of international coordination of women’s mobilizations around the globe. It will build on the wave of massive dem­ onstrations and work stoppages that be­ gan even earlier in 2016 in Poland, Argen­ tina, and many other locations. This year, U.S. organizers are building a coalition to prepare a one-hour strike of low-wage, immigrant, and working-class women that will be followed by a march and rally in New York’s Washington Square.

An impressive panel of organizers laid out the theoretical and practical think­ ing behind this year’s action in New York. Ximena Bustamante, a leader of the IWS NYC collective explained clearly the thinking behind this year’s call. Our goal, she said, is distinct from that of liberal feminism. Our project is not electoral but instead “a refusal to confine the horizons of social change to the terms defined by the Democratic Party.”

The IWS project, Bustamante said, is to attack the “structural origins of mul­ tiple fronts of oppression, exploitation, and dispossession that we experience.” This means “articulating already exist­ ing struggles as both working class and feminist” and taking part in “the radical transformation of current social relation­ ships.”

In order to develop such a women’s and working-class movement and March 8 action, IWS NYC is developing a coali­ tion of groups in agreement with related goals. The coalition in formation is made up of radical caucuses in some unions, workers’ centers, cooperatives, socialist groups, immigrant rights groups, grass­ roots feminist groups, and community-based groups around social justice.

The NYC collective has been working toward the consolidation of such a for­ mation all year, in part, by carrying out interviews with women organizers from such organizations. These include the Street Vendors Project, Restaurant Op­ portunities Center (ROC), Retail Action Project (RAP), Brandworkers, Desis Ris­ ing Up and Moving (DRUM), Laundry Workers Center, Workers Justice Project, New Immigrant Community Empower­ ment (NICE), Worker Center Federation, Eco-Cleaning Coop, Beyond Care Coop, Golden Steps Coop, Is Si Se Puede Clean­ ing Coop, and Palante Coop. These inter­ views are available at http://www.pub­ licseminar.org/author/iwsnyc/.

This work documented the lived expe­ rience of organizing women in New York City, demonstrating the weakness of the arguments of those who op­ posed last year’s women’s strike on the basis that it was too dangerous for women to take such steps. Natalie Matos of the NYC collective addressed this question directly. “Many say that a ‘women’s strike’ is impossible due to non-strike clauses, precarious labor con­ ditions, and the vulnerabil­ ity that the majority of women face in their workplace.” We believe that in spite of all this, “a strike of women is both possible and fundamental in this political conjuncture.”

IWS NYC is confident that a one-hour strike in New York City will make wom­ en’s absence unavoidably felt in homes, neighborhoods, communal spaces, paid workplaces, and on the streets. Organiz­ ers are clear about the limitations im­ posed on the event by the complacency of most union leaderships but optimistic about the political impact of the walkouts and protests that will occur.

One of the fundamental arguments for the one-hour strike is that such an activ­ ity is hardly a stretch for thousands of working women in the city who already are active in struggles for union organiza­ tion, against deportation, wage theft, po­ lice brutality, and loss of social services.

The first panelist to speak, Jeanette Vizguerra, was the embodiment of the organizing determination of immigrant women. Born in Mexico City, Vizguerra came to the U.S. without papers and with­ in seven months was organizing janitors with the SEIU. Now she is a leader against deportation and for sanctuary. This orga­ nizing has taken place for the last eight years as she fights her own deportation.

A second speaker, Maria Ines Orjuela, a housekeeper at the newly organized Hil­ ton Hotel in Stamford, Conn., voiced the support of her union local, UNITE-HERE 217, for the March 8 strike.

Another theme addressed by the pan­ elists was the movement’s growing un­ derstanding of the relationship between women’s problems on the job and at home and in the community. To illustrate the way that a women’s strike can link women’s oppression and exploitation by the boss, Sarah Jaffee recounted the story of the Brooklyn-based Mujeres Guerre­ ras, or Warrior Women. The activists first came together to organize grocery store and food service workers with Fight for Fifteen but soon discovered that they also shared a need for collaboration against sexual violence in the workplace, in the community, and at home.

Workers problems based on class and gender do not end when they leave the worksite, and fighting oppressions in the community is the only way to free women to lead workplace struggles.

Chaumtoli Huq and Suzanne Adely praised the IWS for its commitment to genuine internationalism. Huq observed the ways that solidarity between fe­ male garment workers in Bangladesh and South Asian women in Brooklyn strengthened each other’s struggles.

Adely, who has long experience in Arab-American community organiz­ ing, pointed out that while at the Jan. 20-21 Women’s Marches it was often dif­ ficult to protest on behalf of the female Palestinian teen Ahed Tamimi—jailed in December for resisting Israeli troops on her family’s land—the IWS recognized that a global movement for women must be anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist. See: https://www.womenstrikeus.org. n

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Damon Higgins / The Palm Beach Post