International Working Women’s Day

This International Working Women’s Day the Trade Union Left Forum stands in solidarity with working women in Ireland and all women across the world suffering super exploitation and gender based violence.

We salute the many tens of thousands of working women who are active in their trade union, community groups, social campaigns as well as bearing an unequal responsibility for rearing children and sustaining families.

In particular we salute the women of occupied Palestine suffering the most horrendous and barbaric violence and genocide in Gaza and the West Bank at the hands of the zionist occupation army of the apartheid settler colonial state of Israel and supported and armed by the USA and EU.

The ruling classes across the world and here in Ireland are attempting to co-opt this important day in the lives of working women in order to neutralised the radical class based anti- imperialist politics that have underpinned organised events across the world on the 8th March for over a century.

Instead of an individualistic feminism that aims for upper-class women achieving equality with their male peers we need a workers’ feminism based on true solidarity between workers of all genders.

Women should join trade unions to demand better work-place conditions through collective bargaining, instead of hoping that their female boss will ask the CEO nicely.

Ultimately we should realise that women’s issues are a political and not an individualist struggle.

Everyone should has access to high-quality health services and reproductive health, not just the few executive women who “leaned in.”

Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, healthcare, climate change, border policing; are some of the issues that impact women globally.

Feminism shouldn’t start—or stop—with seeing women represented at the top of society.

Feminism must start with those at the bottom, and fight for the world they deserve. And that means targeting capitalism.

Feminism must be anti-capitalist, eco-socialist and anti-racist.

This is a manifesto for the 99%.

In Ireland the gender pay gap is currently 14%. If you took every woman TD elected in history and placed them in the Dáil chamber, there would still be 28 vacant seats left.

50% of workers in Ireland got paid less than €28,500 a year. For 50% of women workers it’s less than €22,000 a year

Three out of five women say their caring responsibilities for children and other vulnerable or elderly relatives are preventing them from applying for a new job or promotion.

“The worker is the slave of the capitalist Society the female worker is the slave of that slave” James Connolly