Trinidad & Tobago
A Call to All WOMEN
JOIN THE 4^TH GLOBAL WOMEN’S STRIKE

WOMEN SAY NO WAR – INVEST IN CARING NOT KILLING
8 March International Women’s Day

We invite all Women and men to join this year’s Global Women’s Strike on 8 March 2003, with women in over 70 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, India, Indigenous lands, South and North America, Australia and Europe.  Together we voice our total opposition to war and the trade in arms that destroy our people and our planet.  This year’s Strike call, echoed by millions of women, and increasingly men, is INVEST IN CARING NOT KILLING – money for promoting life, not for death and destruction.

Women across the globe pay the highest price for war.  Even before bombs drop, the military soaks up our resources, leaving us to work endlessly to make up for what we and our loved ones are denied by the priorities of war.  We grow most of the world’s food – yet we and our children are the first to die of starvation, including on US ‘reservations’ for Native Americans.   We work the hardest for the least pay.  The military props up corrupt governments so multinationals can exploit us, killing us with overwork, starvation and pollution.  Women and children are 80% of the casualties of war.  And we have suffered endless wars, from Angola to Congo, from Palestine to Korea, fomented and directed from the US and Europe.  A million and a half of our children die every year from attacks on breastfeeding by the global market, particularly the milk formula and AIDS industries.  Cuts in welfare and other social programmes North and South make us the invisible adjusters in “economic restructuring” and privatisation.

In Trinidad and Tobago workers face low wages and long working hours, with little time for family responsibilities, in most cases working for less than the wage stipulated by law, because there is insufficient monitoring and enforcement of the Minimum Wages Law. In the case of Domestics, although CEDAW has recommended that Trinidad and Tobago government recognize Domestics as workers, they continue to be unrecognized as workers in law and practice. They are deprived of severance benefits, health and safety, the right to bring claims before the Court in cases of wrongful dismissal, it is also not mandatory for employers to register them so they are unable to enjoy their right to social security  benefits such as sickness, pensions, maternity, and injury benefits that are provided by the NIS Board and are enjoyed by other workers. The exclusion of Domestics as workers in law and practice fosters poverty and is a form of violence against women. We would be using the Global Strike  to make women workers` demands to the Minister of Labour on International Day.

Our sisters from the villages of Uganda, where 75% of the annual budget goes to the military, have to dig for water that is unfit to drink.   Like women everywhere, they struggle daily to survive and to change the world.  They tell us: “We have suffered all types of Wars. Innocent hungry women and children killed . . . We do work endlessly caring for families, bearing children yet on empty stomachs.  Drought has caused a lot of suffering especially to breastfeeding mothers, the aged, the disabled and infants, and instead money which would have made our life easier is put on military budget. Our survival is not an economic priority, so our survival work is not seen.”  Kaabong Women’s Group Strike Call, 2003.

Indigenous women from the Centro Cultural Aymará ‘Pacha Aru’, in the Andes of Peru say:  “As workers, we call for wage incentives for mothers -- native rural women -- to whom part of the military budget must be allocated.”

Afro-, Indo- and Indigenous women in Guyana are calling a three-hour Strike from housework with the slogan EVERY PIECE OF WHAT THEY CALL “COLLATERAL DAMAGE” IS SOME MOTHER’S DAUGHTER, SOME MOTHER’S SON.

We take our lead from women in Nigeria who, uniting across tribal affiliation, occupied the installations of Shell Oil, which has exploited, corrupted, polluted, killed and maimed for profit.  They demanded some of these lavish profits for caring – for food, schools, healthcare.

80% of refugee women and girls have suffered rape, often by police, soldiers, agents of charities and others meant to protect us.  While the US spends $1 billion a day on the military (before Iraq) and the UK earmarks £3.5 billion to slaughter people in Iraq, women seeking asylum from rape, other torture and devastation, are left destitute, detained and even deported.

Military conflicts and Western-backed dictators force us to flee our homes, which is in itself an unbearable trauma.  Most people seek refuge in neighbouring Third World countries, where people are already living on the edge of starvation . . . Many of us spend our lives in camps as a result of war, with women carrying the burden of poverty, ill-health and violence perpetrated by soldiers, “peace keepers” and others paid to ‘protect’ us.  Our communities are devastated not only by bombs, but by polluted land, air and water, by climate change that deprives us of water, crops and healing plants, or that floods us out of homes and lands, or that kills in other ways. 

Divisions have been promoted between those of us of African, Asian and Latina descent, those of us who are immigrant and those of us already settled, and between different religions/no religions among us.  We are invited to join government-inspired attacks on asylum seekers and other immigrants which label whole peoples as “terrorists” or “undeserving scroungers” – and therefore dispensable.  We refuse to be used to give credibility to the witch-hunting of asylum seekers and other immigrants, and to cover up for the western backed dictatorships that cause many of us to seek asylum.  Many immigrants also leave our homelands as economic refugees.  Resources from the Global South have been drained to build the empires of the Global North. 

Women of Colour are the first to stand against Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell, who give a multi-racial face to Bush’s plan for world domination.  We didn’t build civil rights movements anywhere to integrate armies that bomb people of colour in other countries.  40% of US military are people of colour – our loved ones who we’ve invested our lives in caring for are now called up to slaughter and be slaughtered.  Women of colour from military families are joining the millions refusing war.

With every cut in money to single mothers, every child deprived of quality non-discriminatory schooling, every elder refused quality healthcare, every woman spending a third of her life carrying water, we are paying for military budgets.  WE REFUSE the military AS the priority for which ANY OF US must ALL do without?

The Strike demands: Payment for all caring work, in wages, pensions, food security, land, and other resources; Food security for breastfeeding mothers, paid maternity leave; Don’t pay “Third World Debt”; Accessible clean water, healthcare, housing, literacy; non-polluting technology; Protection and asylum from all violence; and Freedom of movement.

If any of us are to survive, we must come together across divisions of skin colour, nation, tribe, religion, language . . . and with women and communities everywhere.  The Global Women’s Strike is our weapon against war and for life.  Join us in demanding that the £900+ billion annually squandered on military budgets be repatriated to all grassroots communities.