The Global Women's s Strike was born when women in Ireland asked the International Wages for Housework Campaign (WfH) to support their call for a women's strike on 8 March 2000, and WfH made the Irish Strike global.

In fact the Strike began in 1952 with Selma James's little pamphlet called A Woman's Place and continued with her Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972), and Sex, Race and Class (1973). It was previously assumed that only waged workers, mainly men in industrial countries, were ‘real’ workers, and that only they could change the world. The Campaign broke with this sexism and racism, establishing autonomy as a new basis for organising. It made the case that the work women do for wages is a second job, on top of unwaged work in the home and in the community, producing all the workers of the world.

Since then, we have been campaigning for recognition and wages for all unwaged work, as well as for pay equity – joint levers against women's poverty, exploitation and discrimination of every kind. In Beijing in 1995, the International Women Count Network which WfH coordinates, supported by more than 2000 organisations and with CARICOM taking the lead in negotiations between governments, won the UN decision that national accounts should include how much unwaged work women do and its economic value. Trinidad & Tobago and Spain have put this into law, while other countries are doing time-use surveys, and increasingly consider unwaged work in court decisions and government policies.

The Strike has brought together women in over 60 countries, including grassroots organisations with impressive track records. From taking action together every 8 March, it has grown to a global network that strengthens the ongoing daily struggles of grassroots women (and men).

In Venezuela, we work with the women who are building a caring economy and who won Article 88 of the revolutionary Constitution, which recognises housework as an economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth, entitling housewives to social security.

The Strike is part of the movement against war and occupation. With the theme INVEST IN CARING NOT KILLING, we demand that the $l trillion now spent on military budgets annually goes instead for basic survival needs, and therefore for women the first carers and fighters for the survival of loved ones: clean accessible water, food security, healthcare, housing, education, safety from rape and other violence, protection of our planet. We claim for a start the US military budget – over half of all military spending – with which ‘Corporate America’ imposes its economic and political interests on the whole world (including on people in the US).

The struggle women make for ourselves and our communities is often as ignored as the unwaged survival work we do, including growing most of the world’s basic food. The Strike gives visibility to women of colour – including women of Indigenous, African and Asian descent – single mothers, women with disabilities, immigrant women, sex workers, lesbian women, to spell out their contribution to every economy, society and struggle.

We work with payday – men who actively support our struggle because they agree that INVEST IN CARING NOT KILLING is the priority of all workers and all humanity. Men owe women their daily survival – from breastfeeding to cooked meals, clean clothes and emotional support; they also depend on women opposing the values of the Market that now threaten everyone's survival.

The Strike is neither party political, nor separatist. It is ambitious for the movement for change but it stands against personal ambition that undermines mutual accountability. The Strike is a framework for unity – among sectors of women, between women and men within and among countries – because it is based on each sector’s independent struggle – the basis for a truly diverse movement from the bottom up.

Andaiye, Guyana, June 2004