In 2013 over 1,000 women died and many others were injured as a result of the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh, Asia. These women worked in inhumane conditions in exchange for starvation wages. The news shocked the world. We, women of the World March, join our voices with those of other social movements in demanding an end to the impunity of Multinational Corporations. We declare April 24 as a Day of Solidarity and Worldwide Action to remember these martyrs of everyday life and to condemn the exploitation and expropriation of women's work within the dynamics of the worldwide economy.
“Rana Plaza” is not only in Asia, it is everywhere.
This call for the solidarity action Rana Plaza is everywhere! comes while we are still trying to recover from the shock and tragedy caused by cyclone Idai, affecting sub-Sa- haran African countries Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe, destroying whole cities and communities and causing the loss of hundreds of lives. Recently, we also experi- enced another tragedy caused by the collapse of a dam belonging to mining company Vale, in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil, destroying lives and destroying nature.
We are aware that these tragedies have the same origin: violence against nature by the unfettered action of multinational corporations seeking unlimited profit for their share- holders. This violence is carried out by exploiting women’s bodies and work to support a patriarchal, capitalist-imperialist, colonialist, lesbophobic and transbobic economic model. This system, which is primarily responsible for disasters, is the same one that controls and manipulates collective efforts to recover from the damage caused by these same criminal disasters.
In this 24th April Solidarity Action,
- We denounce the alliance of governments and and the far right with Transnational Corporations. These continually impose austerity policies that are sustained by women's work, mitigating the effects of lower wages and lack of public investment in rights and services. These policies lead to more poverty and precarity for working-class people, more violence against women, and the increase of racism and xenophobia.
- We denounce the fact that working-class women, rural and peasant women, black women and women of color, women living on the periphery, Lesbian and Trans women, and women with special needs and their communities around the world are deprived of dignity in their life and work. They are forced to live in a constant state of alert, a state of war, a state of terror, often forced to leave their land and their lives in search of refuge and work, in search of survival, in a world where everything is resolved by building walls and reinforcing borders.
- We condemn all forms of violence against women and against nature. We denounce the sexual division of labor and the system that trivializes the work of women, diving us, stig- matizing us, undermining and mutilating us. We denounce austerity politics, reformist policies that expropriate land, the means of production, and annihilate the rights of the working class.
We, women of the World March, on this day of Action and Feminist Solidarity, call on all women and women's organizations as well as all of our allies around the world to take to the streets, to expose the dynamics of exploitation of women's work and to take public action to highlight the need for change.
- We reassert that women's work counts, and is an integral and fundamental part of the system that generates and sustains life, in harmony with nature.
- We advocate that the global economy be built and developed from the grassroots, based on principles of equality, justice, peace, freedom and solidarity between women in their broadest diversity and in their relationship with men in harmony with nature.
- NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US! Our work counts. Our Lives count!
