March: women's movement, labour rights, mobility

Hello readers of FES Connect!

Every year in March, the month of International Women’s Day, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung holds a Women’s Day event. This time around, in the light of a very vocal and anti-feminist right-wing populist movement, coupled with persisting issues surrounding women’s rights, FES organised a string of events on “care work.”

The interest about care work by FES comes to no surprise when we consider the results of the first report on gender care gap in Germany, with women doing 52 per cent more unpaid care work compared men. In families with kids, this number exceeds 80 per cent.

Worldwide, the status of care work screams gender inequality. Women provide the bulk of mostly unpaid care work, left with less income and less social security, a social standing that is a reality also for domestic workers, predominantly women, whose low-paid and undervalued jobs are usually unprotected by labour laws, and lack social protection.

Unpaid care work and the status of domestic workers reminds us more than ever of a historic fact, that the political goal of the international women’s movement for equality goes hand in hand with the workers’ movement for rights. In reminder of this message and on the occasion of International Women’s Day, in this March issue we look at the progress on gender equality and labour rights for women through the lens of care work.  

Among the stories and videos, we proudly present also a special series in our Popular Posts section that we dedicate to the progress in labour rights for domestic workers in Latin America, Asia and parts of Africa. In this way, we pay tribute to a historic commitment by social democrats pledged in the Erfurt Program of 1891 to demand legal equality for agricultural and domestic work with industrial.

Read on, organize and engage!

Your FES Connect Editorial Team