BHAM Women's Strike Rally/March

BIRMINGHAM Women's Strike rally and march from Victoria Square for International Women's Day!

On 8 March 2018 women will strike and refuse to work. We will walk out of our kitchens, universities, brothels, schools, bedrooms, factories, hospitals and offices. We will strike from all the work we do, whether it is paid or unpaid. If you can strike on 8 March, do. If you need to book the day off work, do it now. Or call in sick on the day. Withdraw all the housework and domestic work you do everyday for free. If you have a male partner, get them to care for the kids or make breakfast.

The Women’s Strike will occur on International Women’s Day. We join a new international women’s movement, which has only grown in strength and determination since exploding onto the streets in recent years from Argentina to Poland, from Ireland to Mexico.

The Women’s Strike defies the idea that all women need to do is tell our stories and speak out. We are exhausted from telling the same story, over and over again. We need action.

The Women's Strike is a strike for solidarity between women - women of colour, indigenous, working class, disabled, migrant, Muslim, lesbian, queer and trans women. On 8 March, in cities and towns across the UK we will meet each other on the streets and strike against a system of power that keep us isolated and divided from one another.

The Women’s Strike is about realising the power we already hold - activating and nourishing resistance. It bursts into the centre of politics. It produces collective solutions to our individual experiences. It breaks the age-old story of female weakness.

The Women’s Strike fractures our confinement in the domestic home and challenges the traditional trade union strategy of reducing industrial struggle to the employment contract.

The Women’s Strike is a challenge to the assumption that women’s work should be performed for free and always with a smile. We demand that all women to have the right to choose, when and if they want to have children and, at the same time, not be trapped waiting to be chosen.

The Women's Strike shines a light of solidarity on to the language of gender identity and recommits us to countering transphobia in the women's movement and beyond

If you want to get involved in organising for the women’s strike or want to start your own strike assembly at your workplace or in your community, get in touch or come along to one of our events.

#westrike
On 8 March women across the world are going on strike. This is a call to action for women in the UK to join the strike. We will refuse to work. We will be on the streets. We will shut things down and disrupt business as usual.

Women’s Strike Assembly will meet at 12 at Victoria Square.

#westrike
For every woman who is sick to death of being sexually harassed and bullied at work.
For every woman who is hungry and unable to heat her house.
For every woman suffering because of benefit cuts or poverty wages.
For every woman who is expected to earn less than her male colleagues and then come home and start a second shift of cooking, cleaning and caring.
For every woman who is kept powerless by whore stigma.
For every woman of transgender experience who is subject to violence and whose womanhood is denied by the state, her doctor, her employers, and those around her.
For every woman who is told she is just going through a phase, that she's too pretty to be a lesbian or too ugly to be straight and has endured homophobia, biophobia or queerphobia at home, at work and in the street.
For every woman who has worked herself to the bone to keep the national health and education systems functioning and yet has not received a pay rise in years.
For every woman who has suffered violence at the hands of partners, friends, colleagues or bosses and is not believed.
For every woman who faces violence at the hands of the state through immigration raids, mass incarceration and racist policing.

#westrike
Women’s work makes life possible. And for that work, we are rewarded with violence and exploitation in the streets, at work and at home. The recent #metoo campaign has exposed the daily reality of sexual harassment and violence that is at the centre of our labour exploitation. To add insult to injury, we’re told that our suffering is inevitable - even natural. We strike to reject that lie. We strike for a world where women can live free from violence and exploitation. Nothing is external to the women’s movement. We will strike and we will win. #westrike to invent a time of our own where our desires and needs are the basis of a new form of life on earth.

Join us - we have a world to win.

#womenstrike
#westrike
#8M
#8march
info@womenstrike.org.uk
Instagram: womenstrike.uk
Twitter: @Women_Strike
Facebook: Women’s Strike Assembly UK

Endorsed by (send your endorsement to info@womenstrike.org.uk)

Organisations:
Women’s Strike Assembly (London), Women’s Strike Assembly (Birmingham), Feminist Fightback, Precarious Workers Brigade, Plan C London, Plan C Birmingham, AntiUniversity, National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, United Voices of the World (UVW), Pluto Press, Cleaners, Allied Independent Worker Union (CAIWU), East London Sisters Uncut, the x:talk project, Verso Press, Housmans Bookstore.