We respond with organization and struggle for our modern needs to the attack of the Greek government and the EU
March 8, 1857 – March 8, 2017. PAME honors the heroic struggle of the New York women workers and addresses militant greeting to all current employees, unemployed, young women.
160 years ago, thousands of textile workers in New York came to the rally road, claiming a decent life with reduced working hours, wage increases and equation with those of their male colleagues, work with rights. They stood still bravely even when the police hit them and choked the demonstration in blood after industrialists’ command.
In this magnificent strike and uprising, which is one of the highlights of the labor movement, we can find the actual content of the International Women’s Day as established in 1910 decided in the Second International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen.
160 years later, the message of March 8 remains timely.
Today, workers and the unemployed, all women of popular strata understand and feel in their own skin that “equality before the law does not mean equality in life.” In the name of “gender equality” rights and achievements of women which had been won through struggles and sacrifices by workers’ movement are now violated. This barbaric attack by government – “institutions” – business groups, is the same as the attack against all workers, self-employed, poor farmers, unemployed, pensioners, men and women. The compromised trade union majorities in GSEE and ADEDY render women’s inequality a “quotas” issue, they cut it off from the general and overall class exploitation, leading to the manipulation and integration of women in the exploitative system.
In the suffocating framework of employers’ requirements for intensification of exploitation of workers, the shackles of double exploitation of working class women and the working classes will be strengthened. The chains are not invincible. We can break them, if we follow the path of organized struggle through the class unions, against big capital and every government in the EU and NATO, the employer and government syndicalism.
PAME calls upon the working class women to tread this path. To confront defeatism and fatalism, the difficulties and obstacles the system puts and together with their male colleagues to demand the recovery of losses and defend labor-popular rights on the basis of the needs that employees currently have.
PAME calls upon women o unite their voices with the victims of imperialist wars and interventions carried out for the profits of the business groups. To fight against our country’s participation in NATO and in every imperialist organization, against engaging in imperialist plans. To bring the perspective of a society which can meet the evolving needs of modern workers.
The experience and the legacy of the most brilliant pages in the history of the world labor movement, as written on March 8, 1857 from the New York weavers, “illuminate” the road.
