The Peoples’ Coordinating Committee of the World Federation of Trade Unions, which organize together national and class-oriented trade unions from the Basque Country, Galicia, the Canary Islands and Catalonia, states the following on the occasion of the International Day for the elimination of violence against women.
In our opinion male violence is structural and therefore occurs in all areas of life. It is not something that belongs to the personal or private domain, or that occurs between two people. It is one of the ways in which the hetero-patriarchal capitalist system keeps women and people who disagree with the gender norm in the place of subordination to which they want to relegate us. This hetero-patriarchal capitalist system is sustained, to a large extent, by the invisible contribution that women make in productive and reproductive work, cushioning the failure and damage of the imposed neo-liberal model.
Therefore, the labour field is not unaware of this structural violence. The sexual division of labour supports and makes possible situations of violence against women, which affect, with special severity, those who suffer from a precarious situation.
The current situation of exception that we are experiencing due to the context of the pandemic, which is making evident the lack of freedom that we have as citizens, reaffirms the failure of an economic system and a social model, already in crisis, which has direct consequences for women, including the increase in male violence throughout the world.
To combat this situation, it is necessary to transform all the structural elements of this system and build a new model based on equal rights and opportunities where male violence has no place. It is therefore necessary that, from the class oriented trade union movement, as agents of transformation that we are, we also work in this direction in all the spaces in which we participate, both in the workplaces and in the street together with the feminist movement. It is necessary for unions to take steps towards a feminist trade union practice, capable of combining women’s rights as such with their rights as workers and citizens of free nations.
From the People’s Coordination of the World Federation of Trade Unions, we call on you to stop looking the other way, to assume the necessary commitments and to advance in the construction of this new model. To this end, we reiterate our commitment and call for participation in all the mobilisations that will take place today in different parts of the world called by the feminist movement.
