politics | Labor and women and patriarchy

ISRAEL

Workers' Strikes and Protests in Israel

Israel – Social workers’ strike, confronting a privatized state

The social workers’ strike was declared after negotiations between the Finance Ministry and the SWU reached an impasse. Two main issues are at the heart of the strike: the almost absurdly low wages of public sector social workers, and the fact that almost a third of social workers are employed in private NGOs and organizations, following the wave of privatization that has swept the public sector during the last couple of decades. Unorganized, these employees have no guarantees for a basic decent salary or fringe benefits.

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In an article from March 10 Yediout Ahronot, journalist Gideon Eshet notes the significance of the social workers’ strike: “The SWU is the first trade union to understand this government privatization ruse and the significance it has on employment terms. Therefore the union is demanding that anything agreed for social workers in the public sector will be applicable to social workers in private organizations. If this is not done, the social workers’ leaders understand that in a few years there will no longer be social workers in public service. They will all be employees in private bodies under poor employment termsMORE

LIBERIA-COTE D' IVOIRE
LIBERIA-COTE D'IVOIRE Border Villages Sharing the Little They Have

BUTUO, Liberia, Mar 28, 2011 (IPS) - This Butuo man only knows one phrase in French: Viens manger. Come eat. That's what they said to him years ago, when he was one of hundreds of thousands who fled to Côte d'Ivoire to escape the brutal 14-year civil war in Liberia.

"That's how I know it," he says. "They gave us food."

The tables have turned now. This town a couple of kilometres from the border has been sheltering thousands of Ivorians since the disputed November 2010 election that is pushing the world's top cocoa producer ever closer to civil war. MORE

HONDURAS

CODEMUH: Women's Resistance in Honduras

The June 2009 coup in Honduras, which was orchestrated by military and business elites and saw the overthrow of President Manuel Zelaya, has proved a major setback for workers’ and progressive movements. One response to this threat to democracy has been the Popular National Resistance Front (Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular), a broad-based coalition in which the Honduran women’s group Codemuh has played an important role. Codemuh (the Honduran Women’s Collective) is a feminist and rights-based grass-roots organisation fighting for better living and working conditions for women in garment factories, or maquilas as they are known in Latin America.

Codemuh was formed by Honduran women activists in 1989. At the time Honduran women maquila workers, who would typically work between 12 and 24 hours per day, six to seven days a week, were not aware that labour laws existed, let alone that they had the right to organise and protest. They began meeting and organising to confront not only labour rights violations but gender discrimination. MORE

LIBYA

Something that I missed a couple of weeks ago

On March 10 : Libyan Women March In Support Of Rebellion

SYRIA

Syrian cabinet to resign next week: informed sources: Syria to announce constitutional reform: sources

Faced with unprecedented domestic pressure since he came to power in 2000, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and other senior leaderships are planning to announce an amendment to article 8 of the constitution that reserves the right to govern for the Baath Party only, Al Arabiya TV has learned from informed sources.

A proposition for the constitutional amendment is expected to be announced next week, the sources said.

Separately, the Syrian government is expected to step down in recognition of its failure to properly respond to people’s expectations before the unrest broke out on March 15 and has since led to several deaths, the informed sources added.

The ruling Baath Party leadership is also expected to announce a new media law that will forbid arbitrary imprisonment of journalists and guarantee for them the due process of law.

Burhan Ghalyoun, a Syrian sociologist at Paris Sorbonne University told Al Arabiya that promising to carry out reforms contradicts the regime's day-to-day practices against people in the street.

Asked if the opposition will give the regime a chance to carry out the pledged reforms, Ghalyoun said the regime does not recognize the opposition; therefore, it should not expect any positive reaction.MORE

BRITAIN <Do you remember Olive Morris? Red Chidgey reports on a collective of women using the internet to reactivate forgotten activist histories

In 2006, while researching the history of black British activism at Peckham library, Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre came across a photo from a Black Panther demonstration at Coldharbour Lane in Brixton. Within a crowd of men, the image captured a barefoot woman, fag in hand, holding a placard that commanded 'Black Sufferer Fight Police Pig Brutality'. That mesmerising figure was Olive Morris: the memorial name also given to the housing benefit office Lopez de la Torre had dealt with after moving to Brixton from Uruguay.

Intrigued by the convergence, Lopez de la Torre turned to Google. 'I went online and there was nothing about her. And then I went to libraries and archives and there was nothing about her there either.'

Lambeth Archives hadn't anything on file on Morris, but the staff there knew of her and put Lopez de la Torre in touch with Liz Obi, a close friend of Morris who had organised a Remembering Olive exhibition back in 2000. MORE

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War on Want: Poverty is political:On the occasion of War on Want’s 60th anniversary, Sue Branford looks at the turbulent history of this uniquely left-wing charity

Many people on the left are, like me, inherently suspicious of charities. Living in the global south, I became aware of the way hand-outs from charities can plaster over deep structural problems. By making it possible – just – for exploited people to survive in degrading poverty, charities can help to defuse social discontent and dissipate legitimate protest. Indeed, it’s clear that many charities that vehemently claim to be ‘non-political’ are, in fact, propping up the status quo. It’s for this reason, perhaps, that so many of us react scornfully to Cameron’s talk of the ‘non‑political Big Society’.

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Top of my list of alternative charities is War on Want, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. It is an organisation that never fails to impress with its unerring ability to link up with new movements and partners that will emerge as key players in a country’s struggle to build a more socially just society. War on Want is small compared with the economic might of Oxfam or Save the Children. Yet time and again it has provided financial and political support to a struggling new movement at a key moment, when such backing can mean the difference between survival and collapse.

I’ve seen this happen in Brazil, where War on Want was one of the first agencies to enter into partnership with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST), the landless workers’ movement that was later to play a key role in defending the rights of peasant farmers and in pressing the government to carry out radical agrarian reform. Similarly in Palestine, War on Want has been unique among British charities in supporting the grass‑roots resistance to the Israeli occupation – just as it supported the liberation movements in Algeria, Vietnam and Eritrea in the past. And in South Africa, where it once played its part in the anti‑apartheid struggle, War on Want now works in partnership with radical social movements challenging the ANC government to deliver social justice to everyone. MORE

BANGLADESH

Laia Blanch spoke to Amirul Haque Amin, president of the National Garment Workers Federation in Bangladesh

Britain is familiar with headlines decrying the sweatshop conditions in which high street clothes are made. Sweatshop workers are often presented simply as victims. Yet last year in Bangladesh, workers organised through the National Garment Workers Federation (NGWF) won an 80 per cent increase in the minimum wage in the garment industry. In a country where women are often expected not to take part in political life, more than half of the union’s 27,000 members are female, a proportion that is reflected in its executive committee.

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The NGWF was founded in 1984. How has the union gone about improving the lives of garment workers?

Since 1984, the NGWF has been campaigning to ensure fair wages, equal rights, dignity and the empowerment of women garment workers. As well as organising workers in the factories into trade unions and factory committees, we have provided training and education, undertaken campaigning and lobbying in Bangladesh, and put pressure on garment factory owners, the government and multinationals. We have also won legal aid for victimised workers, as well as taking dispute resolutions through the established legal mechanisms. Mobilising solidarity between garment workers, retail workers and consumers in the North, and with trade unions in the South, has also been a priority. MORE

UNITED NATIONS

Patriarchy and Fundamentalism Two Sides of the Same Coin

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 24, 2011 (IPS) - While "fundamentalism" has become something of a buzzword in the past few years, particularly in the West in connection with Islam, it in fact exists in every region and religion, and has a set of common characteristics, say activists who have studied the question for years.

To bring attention to the issue and how it affects women's lives around the world, the international Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) launched a new report Wednesday on the sidelines of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women meeting in New York entitled Towards a Future without Fundamentalisms. MORE

PAKISTAN

Divided Between the Mullah and the Model

KARACHI, Feb 9, 2011 (IPS) - A spat between a Pakistani actress and an Islamic leader has emerged as a vivid revelation of a deep split across the nation between different sets of values.

Veena Malik, 27, a model turned actor, was recently ‘evicted’ from season four of Big Boss, an Indian reality television show.
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Malik says "it is a hell of a lot of money," without disclosing the amount. She hinted, though, that "TV is bigger than Bollywood."

Since her return to Pakistan, Veena Malik has received flak both from the media and the clergy for working in a show in archrival India and, for her supposed indiscretions during the show including giving massages, and cuddling and hugging her male housemates. She was also reprimanded for exposing herself in the way she dressed.

"I was who I am, I never pretended to be any different," says Malik, undeterred. "I am an actress and an entertainer. I was not representing any Islamic group." Those who found her offensive had the option, she says, to switch off the television channel. MORE

Pakistani Actress Defies Mullah Accusing Her of Immoral Behavior on an Indian Reality TV Show

CHINA

Death Sentence Looms for Filipino Drug Mules in China

MANILA, Mar 28, 2011 (IPS) - Time is running short for three Filipino workers in China. Ramon Credo, Elizabeth Batain and Sally Villanueva - who were convicted of smuggling heroin in 2008 - are set to be executed by lethal injection Mar. 30.

The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) announced that the Fujian People’s Court and Guangdong High People’s Court have informed the Philippine Consulates General in Xiamen and Guangzhou of the date of execution. Foreign Affairs Department Spokesman Eduardo Malaya told reporters that Credo and Villanueva would be executed in Xiamen while Batain’s sentence would be carried out in Shenzhen.

As the date nears, the global alliance of overseas workers and their families - Migrante International - said it would continue to appeal to the Chinese government to commute the death sentences on humanitarian grounds and stop the execution of the three Filipinos.

According to Amnesty International (AI) a significant proportion of the executions or death sentences recorded in 2010 were for drug-related offences - at times in direct contradiction of international human rights law. AI stressed that a total of 31 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice during the last 10 years but China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and Yemen remain amongst the most frequent executioners. MORE

BRAZIL

Women Workers Determined to Ride the Wave of Mechanisation

GUARIBA, Brazil, Mar 28, 2011 (IPS) - "She's crazy" said most of the husbands and other family members of the 34 women who decided to become operators of sugarcane harvesters in the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo, attracted by the opportunity of better pay and encouraged by the growing mechanisation of the industry.

But when IPS spoke to them, they made it clear that nothing will stop their fight to break down the stereotype that driving huge machines, alone and sometimes in the dark, through the region's endless sugarcane fields is a man's job.

Being seven months pregnant did not stop 33-year-old Rosana do Carmo, who already has three children, from taking the course offered by the Secretariat of Employment and Labour Relations (SERT) of Guariba, a town of 35,000 people in Brazil's main sugarcane producing region, some 300 km from the city of São Paulo, the country's largest city.

She hopes to complete the classroom time, four hours every weeknight, before the birth. She plans to leave the practical part of the training, in the harvester, for when the baby is a little older.MORE