Citizen Francisco Ameliach
President of the National Assembly
Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
8 March 2004

First of all, we congratulate you on the enormous advances that the 1999 Constitution represents for women and therefore communities, not only in Venezuela but all over the world. We are also aware that since the Laws to implement it were approved there have been ongoing attempts by the Venezuelan elite, with the backing of the US administration, to subvert the will of the people as enshrined in the constitution.

Therefore we feel it is urgent for all of us that the revolutionary principles of this remarkable Constitution be enshrined in legislation as speedily as possible.

With this in mind, we respectfully submit for your consideration our concerns and proposals regarding implementation of Article 88, shortly to be discussed by the National Assembly within the framework of the Social Security Law, in particular the subsystem regarding Pensions.

Article 88 says:

The State guarantees equality and equity between men and women in the exercise of their right to work. The State recognises work in the home as an economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth. Housewives are entitled to Social Security in accordance with the law.

This is the first constitution in the world to recognise that women are workers, unremunerated, in the home, who produce economic and social wealth, and who therefore deserve compensation. Women in many countries have been campaigning for this over decades.

For many years many of us have been saying that all women are housewives because we all do housework - caring work. Those of us who go out to a second or third job also have to breastfeed and raise our children, care for those who are sick, older or disabled (even when we are disabled ourselves); grow, prepare and cook the food that feeds families and continents (80% of food consumed in Africa and the Caribbean, and over 60% in Asia is grown by women, and in Latin America single mothers work 14 to 18 hour days to provide 100% of financial support and care for their families). On top of that we do volunteer and campaigning work to protect and advance the community's health care, education, and other human rights. We work in the so-called informal and underground economy as domestic workers, seamstresses, street vendors, sex workers. Our work in the formal economy is again often caring work: in hospitals and schools, as cleaners, childminders, personal assistants - jobs where we face wage discrimination (even lower pay and worse working conditions than the men who do the same or comparable low-paid jobs) as well as sexual and racial harassment. Even in non-traditional jobs employers give us caring tasks. We do all this often disregarding our need for rest and leisure, not even taking time off when we are ill.

As early as 1952 some of us were speaking out to make visible the unwaged contribution of women. Unremunerated work entered the international agenda in 1975, at the conference that opened the UN Decade for Women in Mexico City. The second conference in 1980 in Copenhagen, Denmark, gave it additional legitimacy with the figure (conservative in our view) that women do 2/3 of the world's work yet own only 5% of its assets. In 1985 at the final conference of the UN Decade for Women in Nairobi, we won Paragraph 120 which stated that the work women do in the home, on the land and in the community should be included in national statistics. Finally, in Beijing in 1995, the International Women Count Network (co-ordinated by the Wages for Housework Campaign) with the support of more than 2,000 organisations worldwide won the decision that national accounts should include how much of their lifetime women spend doing unwaged work and how much value this work creates.

Trinidad & Tobago and Spain have put this into law; other countries are carrying out time-use surveys; and increasingly unwaged work is considered in court decisions and government policies.

It has taken a revolution for this social and economic recognition that an international movement fought to be enshrined in a National Constitution. As Ms Castaneda has explained: "We were invited to submit proposals and we did. The women's movement and the Indigenous movement picketed, every day, for four months while the Constitutional Assembly was sitting and we got what we wanted. The members of the Assembly, women and men, recognised the historic importance of our struggle."

We know that many important laws and policies have been passed reinforcing anti-sexism, anti-racism and the movement against every kind of discrimination. For example:

1. Article 14 of the Land and Agricultural Development Law (aimed at achieving food security and sovereignty so that the population is well fed and is rid once and for all of its colonial dependence on imports for 65% of its food) prioritises women-headed households in the distribution of land, and entitles pregnant women to food subsidies before and after giving birth.
2. Banmujer, "the different bank", which (together with the Land Institute, the Sovereign People's Bank and the Micro-finance Development Fund) supports women who form co-operatives and other economic associations in order to overcome poverty with low interest rate micro-credit, training, on going support and follow up, technical assistance and healthcare workshops.

Article 88 - the linchpin of every economy

Article 88 is publicised on government subsidised milk cartons

It is clear to us that the grassroots women of Venezuela are giving unique leadership to all of us. We all know that women from the poorest areas were the main ones who mobilised the community against the April 2002 coup and won the reinstatement of their kidnapped president and their Constitution, and again in December-January 2003 to defeat the oil coup that threatened to starve the country. Women in Venezuela defend their Constitution to defend their loved ones. As a mother who risked her life demonstrating against the April coup, told her husband when he tried to stop her: "Don't you understand, it is for my children that I am going!"

In working to create a "caring economy, an economy at the service of human beings rather than human beings at the service of the economy", the Bolivarian process is putting into practice what we as an international movement have been demanding from governments everywhere. As Nora Castaneda, who is also an economist, has said: "If 65% of people in the world are living in poverty and women are 70% of the world's poor, dealing with women's poverty is the central issue for the economy." This is even more true in Venezuela where it is estimated that 60% of households living in poverty are headed by women.

Women's survival work is invisible in the first place because the survival of the grassroots has never been a priority for capitalism - they could always get some other people elsewhere to replace those they had destroyed. That is what the genocide of Indigenous people and the onslaught of slavery teach us. But survival and therefore the elimination of poverty are our priority.

Citizen President of the National Assembly, President Chavez has said on many occasions that: "The market cannot be in charge of the world because it threatens to end the world." For the market not to be in charge, our survival must be truly prioritised, not the capitalists' profits, and therefore the caring work we do, without which there is no survival, must be truly valued.

Article 88, one of 350 articles, is as Ms Castaneda has said, "the most revolutionary article" because it values women's work of survival. And this work is the linchpin of every economy, a truth which capitalism has succeeded in hiding. Further, in recognising the unwaged caring work women do, the constitution begins to value most of the world's work - of women as well as of men - which, because it is outside of the market, has been unvalued and often invisible.

Once women are entitled to social security as workers in the home, we bargain from a position of strength for better wages and working conditions when we go out to work. We are also empowered to refuse domestic violence and insist that partners respect the caring work we do and take more responsibility for doing it.

Concerns and proposals for Article 88

It is important that the laws which will implement Article 88 recognise housewives as workers who are entitled to social security because of their work and not for some other reason.

It is crucial that housewives should not be classified, as they are in other countries, as people "in vulnerable situations" who need protection, which categorises housewives in a politically conservative way to justify their social security. Workers yes, destitute no.

To entitle any woman to social security for any reason other than women's overwhelming contribution would undermine the long-term interests of women worldwide who have fought so hard to win Article 88. It would be contrary to the Constitution's aim to recognise society's debt to women and create an economy which prioritises human survival over profits.

It would be tragic if women who have worked hardest to carry forward and defend the Bolivarian process and its Constitution from coups and conspiracies, and who represent the majority of those taking part in community organisations and cooperatives, literacy, healthcare and land programmes, on top of their daily caring work, had the indignity of being considered "destitute" rather than workers! Venezuelan women have told us that they are strong and can overcome any obstacle because they have had to be "mother and father" to their children. They will not accept, after all that exhausting and heartbreaking work, to be relegated to invisibility once again. None of us can allow it.

Events of the past three years have demonstrated that the revolutionary process depends on the prompt and determined action of grassroots women. Nothing will strengthen women's resolve to defend this process more than the recognition of their caring work. Nothing will demonstrate to the world how uniquely advanced this Constitution and therefore this process are than the National Assembly passing new laws implementing Article 88 fully and honestly.

We are of course aware that the Venezuelan economy may not have the means - for now - to compensate all women, but there is no reason why the law can't spell out that all women who are housewives are workers making a valuable and vital contribution to society and the economy, and at the same time compensate those whose financial need is greatest. You may also want to consider a payment, even if small, for every woman when she first becomes a mother as the most unequivocal recognition that EVERY MOTHER IS A WORKING MOTHER.


Thank you for your attention and consideration.

Power to the sisters and therefore to the Bolivarian revolution,

Global Women's Strike

For the full and honest implementation of Article 88 of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

Women all over the world who have been campaigning for decades for the recognition of the work done by women in the home, on the land and in the community, congratulate our sisters in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela or winning Article 88 in their Constitution.

As President Hugo Chavez has said on many occasions: "The Market cannot be in charge of the world because it threatens to end the world." The work we do for our survival, and not to profit the capitalists, is outside of the market. If we as human beings are truly prioritised, then the work that ensures all our survival must be truly valued. It is our view that, by recognising housewives as workers who "create added value and produce social welfare and wealth", Article 88 is key to creating "a caring economy, an economy at the service of human beings rather than human beings at the service of the economy". It is also key to ending women's poverty, since most of the work women do is unremunerated. And since worldwide 70% of people living in poverty are women, ending women's poverty must be central to today's economy.

Women and men who recognise the value of caring work to the survival of the human race and the planet look towards Venezuela and the implementation of Article 88 in the hope that it will achieve a fundamental change of direction towards an economy which prioritises survival over profits.

For these reasons, in discussing the implementation of Article 88, we respectfully urge the National Assembly to consider recognising explicitly that:

1. All women are housewives since all women do housework before, during and after our other waged or unwaged jobs, and all housewives are workers.

2. All housewives are entitled to social security in their own right as workers who contribute to society and the economy, regardless of whether they have an income or are destitute. Based on this principle, the very basis of Article 88, it may be necessary - for now - to prioritise those women who have no access to social security through their own or their husband's employment. But the entitlement must be universal.

3. We urge you also to consider giving all first-time mothers (or, in the case of the mother's death or inability to raise her children, the replacement carer) a remuneration, even if small, as explicit recognition that "every mother is a working mother" and that no work is more important than the work of raising children.

4. Such recognition would undermine domestic violence as well as discrimination in pay and working conditions outside the home, thus strengthening all families and all workers.

5. Men must be encouraged to share this caring work through paid leave and other appropriate measures.

6. Such full and honest implementation of Article 88 would strengthen women everywhere who have been campaigning for this for decades, as well as strengthening our resolve to publicise and defend the Bolivarian revolution of which it is the fruit.

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