I am speaking on behalf of the Global Women’s Strike which jointly co-ordinated this event with the FBU National Women’s Committee. I’m very glad that this meeting is taking place and honoured to be speaking.

The GWS is an annual event on international women’s day, 8 March. Women and girls in villages and cities, in over 80 countries – from India to Uganda, from the US to Argentina – have gone on Strike to demand a change in priorities, to demand that society invest in caring, not killing. Women do 2/3 of the world’s work. Most of it is unwaged and the rest low-waged. Women work the hardest for the least, so each year we go on strike to build our international power to change that. The FBU knows well that a strike is the strongest weapon workers have, waged or unwaged.

Our Women’s Centre in Kentish Town is the base for a number of other women’s organisations. One of those, Women Against Rape, are here today. They have just lost their funding for being outspoken in defense of rape victims when others won’t be, against the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the government. They reminded us that they actively supported the last FBU Strike in 1977.

When we began organizing the first Global Women’s Strike in 2000, we asked trade unions for support. The FBU was the first and most consistent supporter. We knew this was a sign that the FBU wasn’t separatist; it recognized the importance of getting together with others, including with unwaged workers in the community who are mainly women.

I personally experienced fire fighters’ solidarity with the community. In the 80s I was part of a campaign to prevent the closure of the South London Women’s Hospital. The campaign, started by nurses, called for a women’s lie-in, and this grew into a nine-month occupation. When police came to evict us, some of us went up onto the roof with banners. The police called the Fire Brigade to help them. When the firefighters arrived they refused to turn their hoses on us to get us off the roof. That kind of independence and solidarity made a deep and lasting impression.

I later applied to be a firefighter because it offered better wages and conditions that all other jobs available to women. But after the initial tests and some training I was disqualified on medical grounds, grounds that I thought were unfair. I started a claim at an industrial tribunal, and then a job came up as an outreach worker to recruit more women and Black people into the fire service. But as soon as they employed me, they closed recruitment, which made a nonsense of my job and showed they weren’t serious about getting a "diverse" workforce.

As soon as news of this present Strike broke, we discussed with the Women’s Committee a public meeting to bring out the experience of women FBU members, both firefighters and control room staff, and also the women in fire service workers’ families. It’s not just the men or women in fire brigades who work for the fire service. For wives and partners, your first boss is often the main earner’s boss. Their job determines where you live and what you live on. It’s women who have to juggle to make ends meet. The hours that men work determines the whole family’s schedule. It’s not just the fire service workers who want to hang onto the current shift system. We understand that single parents say the current shift system enables them to do the two jobs of taking care of a family and of taking a full part in the fire service because they can regularly be with their children for four days running. And other families also support the current shift system because it can enable men to participate fully in the family, rather than becoming the parent the children see as he goes to work and as they go to bed. The flexible shifts the government wants to impose would mean the whole family having to be "flexible", constantly fitting themselves around changing work shifts. Despite over 100 New Labour women MPs, the government’s restructuring would at best discourage and at worst prevent men from sharing the caring work that usually falls to mothers, whatever other work they are doing.

Their partner’s job affects women in other ways. There is no way that anyone is going to be carrying the responsibility that fire workers do without taking that home. It’s the care and backup of wives, partners, mothers, sisters and daughters which puts men, and other women too, back together and enables them to go back on the job, whether they’re firefighters or control room staff. One union a century ago understood that wives were working for the same boss, and invited them in to vote on whether they went on strike.

We wanted women’s voices to be heard because otherwise we don’t only get half the story, we don’t get the real story. The issues and demands only women can raise show how many people are affected by all the injustices of the employers and the government, and how many people are involved in the struggle against them. What women have to put up with is no longer invisible – why should it be? – and not just personal to the family, but part of what the strike is about. That’s why hearing from wives, partners and other family members will strengthen the case for a pay rise and the other FBU demands.

Women also have to be heard because firefighting is still seen as a macho job. Control room workers who are mainly women, and also tend to be invisible, can lose out. This would start to change if the FBU demand of pay parity was won and we have been told by the women who know that it would bring about a more equitable relationship within the fire service team, which is better for doing the work in hand.

And the invisibility of women has affected the fire service in another way. Despite a majority of male workers, fire service workers are service workers. And so they have suffered from the tradition of low pay established against women service workers.

We’re grateful for the leadership we’re getting from the NWC. We glimpsed the fantastic work they do, including trying to get more women into the fire service and to improve the situation for women workers already there. We wonder if the men know what leadership these women are providing, which has forced others to acknowledge that it is the union, not the employers, that stands for women’s equality. We also need to hear from Black firefighters and control staff, women and men, because their experience is all of our business. Here again, widening the pool of experience to include all who are involved, strengthens and empowers us all.

We not only support but are part of the fire service strike because we know that your fight to improve pay and working conditions benefits us all. The FBU has refused to make its case at the expense of other public service workers and instead has demanded more money for all. That would raise women’s wages first of all. We know that it is a fight to defend the fire service from going the way of other public services and is therefore a life-saving action. And we as women have a particular interest in ensuring that the public services are not destroyed because we are the ones who are expected to make up in extra work for every cut. It is women who put people’s lives together when they are devastated by tragedy.

The Strike has opened the way for a lot of truths to be told. It was shocking to find out that the present formula for deciding how many fire officers are available in any area is based not on lives at risk, but on the value of property at risk. Channel 4 News said on Tuesday:

"The effect [of this formula] is that deprived areas may get lower levels of fire cover than rich areas – even though the government’s own submission to the Bain Inquiry points out that the most excluded children are 16 times more likely to be killed in a domestic fire than [children] in social class one."

This has to change. We want to pursue this and we are asking for the union’s support in that.

Another revelation is on the issue of amalgamating control rooms with other public services. We saw that the FBU opposes this because, among other reasons, joint control rooms would be police-led. The FBU stressed the importance of the fire service being independent of the police and said that if it was not, it would impact on the ability to recruit Black and ethnic minority staff. I would add that it would put off all kinds of people joining. We want the fire service to continue to refuse to hose women defending public services. The independence of the fire service is what enables fire workers to do their job in the way it should and must be done, free of political manipulation.

Above all, we agree with you that people’s lives must be the first priority. Many people are coming together on this. Whether it’s workers on strike against low pay, mothers demanding housing or education for their kids, pensioners deprived of a dignified income, students deprived of grants, asylum seekers driven out of their homes by poverty and war promoted in London, Washington, etc., who are deprived of benefits to survive on, commuters protesting the destruction of the railways, or the many, many people demanding proper health care, people are pointing to the annual $900+ billions in military spending and demanding to know: Why is this the priority for which we all must do without?

That is what we go on Strike for every 8 March. We are demanding that the health, education, care and safety of people is the priority for government spending, instead of the military. The slogan of the Global Women’s Strike is Invest in Caring, Not Killing. Many men have embraced this perspective, and Payday is an organization of men organizing men’s support for the Strike.

We have been heartened to see that so many others are making their demands on the military budget. Our Kentish Town Fire Station has a placard which states "£200m loan to stop the strike. Blair says no. £4b wasted on Apache helicopters."

We are demanding payment for caring work from the military budget. Women are the life-givers, the first caregivers and if the money comes to women it will go firstly to the care of people and the planet. That’s not because we’re soft. If we were, men wouldn’t have been able to depend on our support for every struggle to get what they’re owed. We expect the same support from men. We are not part of a support group, we are part of a struggle.

And none of us can do it alone. Our Strike is global because we know that what happens on the other side of the world is happening to our people. If people are starving, they are not strangers, they are members of our class. We had better organize against it because otherwise millions will die and we will be strengthening the forces that want to impose the same things on us. Women in Uganda walked three days without food to be part of the strike. What an example of determination! They need us and we desperately need them. We are doing it together because by bringing people and issues together, each one of us can draw on the power of everyone, and that’s the way for all of us to win.

Global Women’s Strike Crossroads Women’s Centre,
230a Kentish Town Rd,
London NW5 2AB Tel: 020 7482 2496 Fax: 020 7209 4761
website: http://womenstrike8m.server101.com Email: womenstrike8m@server101.com

FAMILIES & FRIENDS ON THE FIRESIDE