Every year we ponder on women’s rights on and around 8 March. How far have we come? What progress have we made in terms of equality between women and men this year? Having become one of the most mediatized of international days, International Women’s Day is loudly acclaimed on social media and protests take place in over a 100 countries worldwide, more often than not sporting pink-clad women, girls and men from all walks of life.
But its original intent seems to have got lost somewhere down the line. National Women’s Day was established by Theresa Malkiel, a Ukrainian-born American labour activist in New York in 1909 and was the precursor to the International Women’s Day which began to develop globally in 1911.[1]
National Women’s Day was inspired by Malkiel’s vision of women’s workers’ rights, a vision bringing forward women’s working conditions and the need for women to come together through formal unions. Unions have fought for and achieved most of what is good at work, including the 8 hour work day and paid sick leave. The power of the collective when it comes to obtaining decent work conditions is invaluable and women stand to benefit from it greatly. It is by leveraging the rights to peaceful assembly and of association that women can best advocate for rights at work. “Exclusions from labour legislation, barriers to forming and joining trade unions and reprisals for labour organizing leave women with “little leverage to change the conditions that entrench poverty, fuel inequality and limit democracy”.[2]
Yet, for many women joining a labour union is downright impossible. This is particularly concerning at a time when the global pandemic has negatively impacted women’s rights and drastically impaired their right to peacefully assemble and associate and they would benefit greatly from its collective power.
The Covid19 pandemic has exacerbated women’s lives in a multitude of ways and they have seen increased harassment for exercising their rights to peaceful assembly and association, many times in the guise of Covid19 emergency measures enforcing stay-at-home orders and limiting public gatherings.[3] Around the world, the pandemic has put increasing demands on women and girls to take care for families and the sick, and working women now represent 70% of Covid19 response workers. Many of these essential workers are unable to mobilize to demand equipment for themselves and their families as a result of restricted access to their rights to peaceful association.
This is the case partially because around the world, many women are active in sectors which are explicitly excluded from labour laws, such as for instance domestic workers or agricultural workers, denying them the right to freedom of assembly and association, and consequently their all-important rights to strike or join trade unions. The discriminatory nature of these exclusions from labour laws has truly manifested itself as a result of Covid19. It is time for the growing informal economy which mainly employs women, to be formalized and to eliminate explicit exclusions in labour laws that deny groups of primarily women the rights to freedom of assembly and association.[4]
This International Women’s day, let’s remember the invaluable and much needed contributions of women and women-led associations towards a more sustainable world. They constitute important drivers of change around the world and are at the forefront of today’s most pressing global struggles ranging from responding to the covid pandemic, to organizing fair work and climate justice. But for women to continue to organize themselves and to enable their indispensable contributions towards a more sustainable future, their exercise of the rights of freedom to peaceful assembly and of association, including their right to join labour unions, must be fully respected and protected.
My hands-on guidelines on the right of women and girls to peaceful assembly and association gives detailed concrete examples of what can be done to support women in gaining fair and equal work conditions, but mostly in how to support them in continuing to come together to work towards a more sustainable future as countless women-led organizations around the world do.
Read them here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Woman%27s_Day
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