National women's strike in Germany

May 11, 1994
Issue 

Thousands of women took part in Germany's first national women's strike on International Women's day. From Bochum, MARY MERKENICH reports on the activities of the German women's movement.

On May 28, 1993, the Constitutional Court, the highest court in Germany, overturned a parliamentary reform liberalising somewhat the abortion laws.

This decision caused widespread outrage. Feminists, Greens and others called for a national women's strike on March 8, International Women's Day. This call was soon supported by women from church, immigrant, green feminist and left-wing groups.

Three political parties officially supported it: the Greens, the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) and the VSP (the United Socialist Party). Strike committees sprang up in large and small cities throughout the country.

In Bochum in the heart of Germany's Ruhr (industrial) valley, I spoke with Eva Prausner of the Women's Strike Committee. Eva comes from the autonomous women's movement, recently joined the VSP, is 31 years old, a baker and a Wen Do (feminist self-defence) teacher.

The Bochum Strike Committee is fairly representative of the national situation. It was a coalition of various women's groups, primarily coming from the autonomous women's movement, with a couple of individual trade unionists and Turkish women.

This group organised several activities leading up to March 8. Last year they had a female union lawyer as guest to speak about the legal implications of the strike. At the beginning of the year they held a protest with banners and leaflets at the Bochum train station against sexual harassment and violence against women. Later they picketed a major clothing chain for its sexist advertising.

More recently, they distributed leaflets about the problems of women refugees and organised a discussion about the situation of migrant and foreign women. They also arranged a talk by a Swiss feminist about the very successful Swiss national women's strike in 1991.

As part of the federal preparations, a national organising conference on November 13, in Kassel, north Germany, attracted women from 80 cities. Consulting guests were women from Iceland (who held successful national women's strikes in 1975 and 1985) and from Switzerland.

Women's wages on average are still 30% lower than men's. Women's unemployment is much higher than men's. Massive cutbacks in social services mean not only job losses, (predominantly women's), but also lower unemployment benefits, worse working conditions with a higher stress factor, lower social service payments (eg to single mothers), the closing of creches, and forcing women to carry out these tasks instead, like taking care of the sick, the old or the disabled.

Especially hard hit are "Ossie Frauen", the East German women, who constitute 64% of the unemployed in east Germany (over one-third of those able to work in the old East Germany are today without work).

Then there are the migrant women. They face even higher unemployment than German women, receive lower wages, suffer worse working conditions, face the danger of being deported, gain residence at the cost of being made totally dependent on their husbands, have no right to vote and face racist laws and attacks.

Eva told me that organisers of Women's Strike Day chose a strike for several reasons. They wanted to give the feminist struggle a new quality. She sees it as a kind of civil disobedience, aimed at showing that women no longer agree to "function" in this system. The multitude of complementing activities are intended to make it uncontrollable.

There was a real need to think up alternatives to the classical strike form, because there was no official endorsement from the union movement. Instead the DGB (the umbrella organisation of the unions) called for a "protest" day, in an effort to downplay the strike aspect. The unions defended their position by claiming that political strikes are illegal. However, in the past, German unions have organised political strikes.

The union officialdom and the SPD (the major social democratic party) and, sadly, many of their female members played down the strike action. The SPD went so far as to try to split the activities by organising a demonstration on March 5 in Bonn.

Despite this, March 8 was successful. In many cities, women used drums, rattles and whistles during marches to gain as much attention as possible for their demands for equality in politics, employment and the family.

In Berlin at several points, street blockades brought lunchtime traffic to a standstill. In Bonn at a large rally, DGB president Ursula Engeln-Kiefern demanded quotas to promote and support equality in employment. The demonstrators wrapped a huge purple ribbon around the town hall.

In Dortmund, 1500 female city council workers struck. In Bremen about 1000 women demonstrated. In Hannover 40 women on bicycles circled important traffic points and then joined 200 of their sisters in a rally. A car and bicycle convoy through Dresden demanded solutions to high female unemployment and the abolition of all anti-abortion laws.

In most cities, the protesters renamed streets after famous women, such as Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Janis Joplin and Gianna Nannini.

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