CA

The most obvious and defensive response could be that we did not invent the name of the day of action. This was again already called as a women’s strike internationally. But this would be a defensive response.

We actually have a more political response, in the sense that appropriating the term “strike” for a day of action for the feminist movement had various meanings and played various roles. First of all, we wanted to make visible the labor that women perform not only in the workplace, but also outside of the workplace, in the sphere of social reproduction.

This work isn’t paid in most cases, but it is nonetheless work, and should be recognized as such. This is why the women’s strike was very different as a concept from a general strike because it was a strike not only from work in the workplace, but also from unpaid work outside of the workplace.

Secondly, I think the meaningfulness of using the term “strike” had also to do with emphasizing the fact that women are also workers, and allowing women to identify themselves not only as women but also as workers.

Thirdly, I think that it is very important to relegitimize the term “strike” in United States. This is not a very popular notion, politically speaking. As a matter of fact, the women’s march had quite an amount of pushback from their constituency that was challenging the notion of a strike. But not from, say, the perspective of labor organizers being worried that we are misusing the term “strike.” Criticism came from people who do not have any sympathy for strike as a form of struggle. From this viewpoint, I think it was very important to reintroduce the notion of striking within the political language in the United States and to relegitimize it.

Finally, we were also hoping to have some strikes in workplaces. We were particularly aware that given the labor laws in the United States, these strikes would not be formal strikes because labor laws prevent workers from organizing political strikes.

From this viewpoint, the day of action was very successful because three entire school districts closed on March 8. For example, in Prince George County School District, apparently 1,700 teachers asked for a day off, and 30 percent of the transportation staff. These are big numbers.

The next step would then be to understand who organized this. I am skeptical that 1,700 teachers decided to take a day off without having any kind of even informal network, but I think the fact that three districts shut down showed that there is willingness and readiness to take some more radical actions in the workplace. This is a very important signal for working on organizing in the workplace.