Last week at the Congress of the European Trade Union Confederation, the ETUC, together with the representatives of the European Industrialists, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the head of the EU’s Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, they together declared the new anti-workers’ attack of the Employers-EU-Governments.

The “cherry on the cake” to “decorate” their anti-worker meeting was the proclamations of “equal pay for equal work for men and women” made by the head of the EU’s Commission, which will be promoted by a corresponding EU directive, applauded by the “trade unionists” of the ETUC. With these slogans, they were all photographed together as a loving family!

“In its majestic equality, the law equally forbids both rich and poor to sleep under bridges…” Anatole France used to say.

The bright smiles on the photographs of Mrs von der Leyen and the ETUC staff conceal the fact that the ‘equality’ they claim is not equality through wage increases but equality through a reduction in the earned income of men and women, which the EU and the governments have imposed through their policies in support of the capital.

That is why both the ETUC and the Commission hide the fact that their “equality” is not about the life and working conditions for the armies of women and men working under outsourcing, part time or on fixed-term contracts under the EU’s anti-labour legislative framework. Their ‘equality’ is not about all those whom business treats as the ‘children of a lesser god’ – ‘fuel’ for capitalist profitability and competitiveness. They hide the fact that their ‘equality’ is not about the energy poverty they have imposed on the workers of Europe, as well as austerity, massive food inflation, the attack on labour rights, the freezing of wages.

But women workers can respond with their experience to such mockery!

Because they have experienced in their own skin the brutality of capitalist exploitation, where inequality is the rule and the source of profit for the exploiters of labour power, slogans such as “equal pay”, “equality in the labour market”, “equality in participation in trade union bodies and decision-making centres”, cut off from any class content.

The way they “wash away” capitalist exploitation, they lead to the illusion of class reconciliation, supposedly that the woman-worker and the woman-industrialist who exploits her have common interests on the basis of gender and, ultimately, to compromise with the loss of rightss, the labour jungle.

Women workers must respond to the filth of all the ETUC-type mechanisms, the applauders of the anti-workers’ attack, with their greatest, decisive and militant participation in the real working class trade unions and the promising workers’ struggles organised all over Europe!

Unions that for months have been organising struggles and strikes for wage increases, for a life with rights. Trade unions in line of demand and confrontation with the business groups, the EU and the governments that serve them.

With this line we count victories, we overturn the negative correlation, we put obstacles to anti-workers’ policies, we create the conditions for our emancipation from capitalist exploitation, which will also free us from all inequality!

Women workers together with men workers, we applaud this path and not the cliff of integration that our butchers and their servants, such as the ETUC, want to direct us to!

We strengthen the common struggle of women and men workers against the common class enemy all over Europe! With organization, with struggles, with internationalist solidarity, we can overthrow them!

Women’s Secretariat of PAME