TRINIDAD & TOBAGO PRESS RELEASE

The Local Chapter of the International Wages For Housework Campaign and the National Union of Domestic Employees (NUDE) will be celebrating International Women`s Day March 8<sup>th</sup> 2003 with a speak out to mark the fourth Anniversary of the Global Women`s Strike at NUDE`s Headquarters, Wattley Circular, Mt. Pleasant Road, Arima from 3.30 p.m.

The Global Women's Strike began with a call from women in Ireland for a National Strike on IWD 2000, with the demands for a paid holiday for women and recognition of women's unwaged work. Working with the Irish women, the International Wages for Housework with groups in over sixty countries including Trinidad and Guyana agreed to make the Strike global; and have come together to work for the Strike and to put forward the global demands.

Women all over the world are taking up the call for a strike. Women in Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, Ghana, Guyana, Ireland, India, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand/Aotearoa, Peru, Spain, Switzerland, Tanzania, Uganda, Uruguay and the US, who are organizing Strike activities for the day. We have also heard from women in Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Congo, France, Nigeria, Poland and Scotland. As before women are using the global power of the strike to strengthen their local demands. Last year women in Uganda won some free health care services for everyone nationally. We in Trinidad are demanding recognition for Domestic as workers.

Women's organisations, women`s groups, and other work places must stop work for twenty minutes. Put your brooms, and mops outside the front door. Women in the trade unions, who often carry the load of unwaged on top of low waged work, are invited to use the global women's strike to advance their cause as workers outside the home and inside. Not supporting the women`s Action is tantamount to agreeing to the status quo.

The Global Women's Strike, is a grassroots women's movement against the globalisation of, mass murder and exploitation of labour and the acts of violence perpetrated against women and children. We believe poverty is violence and lies at the roots of all other violence against women.

The Global Women's Strike focuses on women`s enormous contribution to every society and every economy. Women make the world go round and raises and look after its entire population, but most of the work women do is unwaged, unrecognised, or undervalued.

The Strike demands in brief are payment for all caring work, pay equity, benefits, food security for nursing mothers, abolition of the debt, accessible clean water and fuel, protection from violence, and freedom of movement.  The global demands are a concrete way of building power for and with women wherever we are, from the villages of Uganda where women daily struggle for clean water to the women in rural India who are struggling against bonded labor, to women on welfare in the US who are facing destitution with "welfare reform" to women in the Caribbean who face low wage and in most cases no wage.

However our local demands briefly are: Amend Industrial Relations Act - to include Domestics as Workers, and the removal of membership in good standing to qualify for representation in rights dispute; Equal pay for work of equal value; Ratification of ILO Convention no. 156:Workers with Family Responsibilities, 1981; ILO Convention no.158:Termination of Employment, 1982;

The more we as women come together to break the divisions of race, ethnicity, nations, religion, language – which divide us to deprive us; the more grassroots women`s needs are made visible and our demands heard against the wars and the trade in arms that soak up our resources.

It is vital that those of us with more power, although we know as women we don't
collectively have much, stand with those of us with even less.  We must demonstrate that we know that our struggle for survival, beginning with those of us who are grassroots, is the struggle for change, is an anti-war struggle.

The Strike is therefore a response not only to women's needs and struggles globally, but also to the way grassroots women have been let down, in fact dumped by those publicly claiming to speak for women.  The Strike is trying to reverse the priorities of feminists, away from the self-advancement of individuals and back to the advancement of women from the bottom up. This focus on women's advancement and tearing down the barriers to it, is one with the self preservation of the human race, as is indicated in our Call to Action.

WOMEN EVERYWHERE SAY NO WARS INVEST IN CARING NOT KILLING

A Call from Trinidad and Tobago

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