Dear Sisters & Brothers,

Every International Women’s Day since 2000, women in over 60 countries have taken all kinds of grassroots actions to demand that society Invest in Caring Not Killing, and that the money squandered on war is spent instead on what our communities need, beginning with the needs of women the first carers on whom everyone else depends.

We invite you again to take action together in the 7th Global Women’s Strike on or around 8 March.

In January and February, co-ordinating groups of the Strike in England, Guyana, India, Ireland, Peru, Spain, Uganda and the USA attended the World Social Forum in Caracas – an opportunity to meet grassroots organisers from around the world and to meet as a network in the heart of a revolution spearheaded by women – the Venezuelan revolution. We held workshops in English and Spanish which gave visibility to different countries of the Strike but also different sectors of the grassroots: women and men of different races, different sexual choices and different disabilities – each found her/his counterpart in the Venezuelan movement. We have been strengthened and encouraged by the tremendous energy and determination of grassroots women who have protected a government which invests in caring, starting with the poorest communities, and which in turn backs women.

The world is beginning to recognise and value women’s hidden contribution to society but Venezuela goes further. On 3 February President Hugo Chávez announced that, in recognition for their work in the home the poorest housewives would receive a monthly income equivalent that is 80% of the minimum wage – 372,000 bls or about $180. He also announced a 15% increase in the minimum wage (which with the ticket employees get for meals and other essentials would bring its value to 835,350 bls or about $400 a month), along with increases in pensions and other low wages. The first hundred thousand housewives will benefit from June, and another 100,000 from July. Chávez said that he aims for up to 500,000 women eventually to get this money.

This is not the implementation of the revolutionary Article 88 of the constitution which recognises the economic and social contribution of women’s unwaged work in the home and on that basis grants housewives a pension. Article 88 still needs legislation to put it into practice.

Rather than wait for this, Chávez has put together the recognition Article 88 gives to housewives’ work, with the recent legislation aimed at lifting the poorest out of poverty, and redirected some of the oil revenue to women –Chávez has repeatedly said, women are the poorest, work hardest and are most committed to the revolution.

This is finally a wage for housework, something we have demanded since 1972! It is bound to raise women’s wages in Venezuela. We heard about it first from people phoning to congratulate us on this victory which they assumed was directly associated with our work.

The Grassroots Network of Los Altos in Miranda State (Venezuela), which is part of the Strike and hosted us in Los Teques, issued a public statement welcoming the money, urging that revolutionary community work also be recognised as productive work and paid for, and proposing ways for the government to prevent corruption in how beneficiaries are selected and the wages distributed. We are circulating their statement and invite you to do the same.

Another high point of the trip was meeting a woman from the Indigenous organisation Organización Nación P’Urhépecha in Mexico who has been organising Strike actions for the past three years, publicising what she read on email that women in other countries were doing and hoping it was all true! She has since raised the Strike at a national women’s network and they have agreed to take part!

We’re sure women in other countries have also made plans for the Strike – please tell us about them so we can tell others!

In London the key event will be on 17 March: Report back from Venezuela – Women Spearhead the Revolution, and discussion on the Strike’s relationship with the women and men organising there. We will also launch the new book Creating a Caring Economy - Nora Castañeda and the Women’s Development Bank of Venezuela published by Crossroads Books in English and Spanish, which we launched in Venezuela to great acclaim. It is a dynamite collection of recent interviews and speeches by Nora Castañeda, the President of the Bank, which provides micro-credit to low-income women, and is helping to build a movement which is “creating an economy at the service of human beings”.

We will also be showing a film on the resistance to the coup in Haiti, a resistance also led by women but much distorted and denigrated.

On 11 March in the great tradition of New Orleans funerals, the Strike in Los Angeles along with the Katrina Evacuees Councils will hold a "Second Line" March, a Survivors’ and Supporters’ Speak-Out, followed by a “Taste of New Orleans” Cuisine (see www.globalwomenstrike.net).
Men’s support and participation internationally is co-ordinated by Payday, a multiracial network of men. They are also organising with women and men refusing the military and its lethal and repressive work, from the US and the UK to Israel and Eritrea. The “poverty draft” – economic necessity and the promise of residency or citizenship which drives many, especially people of colour and immigrants, to join the military – would enable the US to make “endless war”. Refusing the military is a vital part of the movement to end not only war but poverty. Payday’s film Refusing to Kill about women and men refusing to be torturers, rapists and murderers for the military was shown on Venezuela’s national TV (with Spanish subtitles). So was the Strike’s fourth film Talking of Power – sex, race and class in revolutionary Venezuela. Get them shown where you are. (E-mail:  payday@paydaynet.org www.refusingtokill.net)
We have just issued a new Strike journal with news from the network over the past year (enclosed for people who don’t yet have access to the Strike Website). As you’ll see, much of our organising, in both countries of the South and increasingly the North, has gone on fighting environmental devastation: floods and/or droughts in Guyana, India, Uganda, the US…

Do please send us your news and photos, so we can publicise them as always on the website and in future Journals and other reports. If you have an email address, please send it to us, to reduce the cost of mailings.

Power to the sisters to stop the world and change it!

Selma James


Previous year’s Strike materials are available in the following languages:
Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Aymara, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu, Bengali, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Deutsch, Dutch, Espanol, Euskera, Farsi, Francais, Gallego, Greek, Gujerati, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Lingala, Luo, Luganda, Oriya, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Shona, Sinhala, Slovene, Somali, Swedish, Swahili, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Tigrinia, Turkish, Twi, Urdu.

We need people to help translate this year’s materials, if you can help, please contact us right away!



Demands of the Strike:

·Payment for all caring work - in wages, pensions, land & other resources. What is more valuable than raising children & caring for others? Invest in life & welfare, not military budgets or prisons
·Pay equity for all, women & men, in the global market.
·Food security for breastfeeding mothers, paid maternity leave and maternity breaks. Stop penalizing us for being women.
·Don't pay 'Third World debt'. We owe nothing, they owe us.
·Accessible clean water, healthcare, housing, transport, literacy.
·Non-polluting energy & technology which shortens the hours we work. We all need cookers, fridges, washing machines, computers, & time off!
·Protection & asylum from all violence & persecution, including by family members & people in positions of authority.
·Freedom of movement. Capital travels freely, why not people?


National coordination in: Guyana, India, Ireland, Peru, Spain, Uganda, USA
Participating groups in 65 countries so far.