Organizing Women for International Women's Day

How to Prevent Rape:
Go to this website now for a step by step guide.
Smart stuff!

There seems to be a new and much needed upsurge in discussion about rape. While the link above is from 2009, it is still getting passed around the interwebs, and there is a reason for this. It is directed toward men, as many of the other new campaigns are. Women are more media savvy then ever before, and more of us have tools we did not have in the past in order to agitate on our own terms. Women's groups are also savvy, and are using the lessons learned on the ground in organizing alongside cutting edge marketing and advertising techniques to get the message out. These messages aimed squarely at men make me grin ear to ear and hope for a new wave of even more and better agitation from the next women anti-rape activists around the world. Watch out Julian Assange, the women are onto you and your cronies, and we are not going to let you get away with it!

Still, I was struck by something about women's organizing on Saturday.

It is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day on March 8 and there was a march in Vancouver, one of many around the world, to commemorate. I could not go because of my health; but I did end up out and about for some part of the afternoon. What struck me was not only how little impact the march had on the city, but also how big the city is, and how much work we women have to do to make a mark that with change things. For surely things cannot go on, business as usual, and yet they do. As I moved through 3 different neighbourhoods I realised that no one knew what was happening a few blocks away, that this city's organizers' small vision for this day would leave little trace, and all of our hard, hard work of the last 100 years and more has no place in the day to day life of the place.

My workplace is hosting a pancake breakfast for women staff tomorrow, a small women only event which is again questioned by women and men alike for it's appropriateness. There are a handful of identifiable feminists in the organization, who are activists away from work, but we have not been asked to speak. Instead, we are playing Jeopardy, eating pancakes (I am having Lenten body memories from this! ha!) and listening to three good hearted women, all supervisors and managers, talk about women's leadership.

It just makes me sad; this agency de-certified from a union several years ago, a move which I think was a good one at the time, as they moved from being public sector to non profit employees. The history of the agency is an activist one, so the general inclination around the place has kept our wages, benefits, and working conditions decent. But change is coming in the form of government funding formulas and sources; hirings to management have already taken place which signal a move away from a social change agenda. So we are disconnected from the reasons to host an International Women's Day event, which was afterall International Women Workers Day - the day women socialists organized for themselves in Russia, and then the rest of Eastern Europe, which carried so much momentum it is one of the driving forces behind the Revolution of 1917.

I am of conflicted because I hold dear to the idea that unions are of and for the working class, and my job is not a working class one; still, it would be nice to talk about our work and what it means to be a woman doing our work in some sort of context. We work with poor and unemployed people, from 18-65, across race, class and gender, and we are not to encourage insurrection amongst them, although in all good conscience we should be. I personally do not know how to 'teach' the 'lifeskill' called 'Empowerment' without some sort of discussion about how to access power in a patriarchal society. I do not find eating pancakes while listening to management discuss women's leadership empowering to me as a woman, nor as a woman who works outside my home, not one bit. Instead, it makes me want to be a bit rebellious. Well, it all makes me want to be a lot rebellious.

Back to International Women's Day and organizing working women in a city now. I stand beside all unions, public sector unions of the professional middle class as well, and of course. But as the unions are more upwardly classed, something is lost - the rank an file is not the rank and file it used to be, fighting for a wage to keep food on the table is inherently different from doing the same for a salary which pays a mortgage payment (mine won't,) and the heart, soul, street, fight, and context or union organizing is completely lost in the current state of affairs. Case in point: the garment workers were not organized away from their machines for the march. Neither were the women working in the poultry processing and rendering plants. Neither were the women working in retail and restaurants.

We have won much. Yet worker's rights, women's rights are under attack.

Since I mentioned garment, factory and service industry workers, let's look at minimum wage. We know minimum wage is not enough to survive on anywhere, especially here, one of the more expensive cities to live in in the world. On that basis alone, we should be gathering women to us, to each other, into the working class movement, into the women's movement. We need a Living Wage and then we need a Guaranteed Living Income. As a start, every single union should be signed up to the Living Wage campaign and insisting on this wage ($16+ in Vancouver) for their members. Every single feminist organizer needs to insist they do.

Organizing working class women to these goals could be a step toward change which makes everyone look up, take notice, pay attention. For more then an afternoon.