Blog post

We're Going On Strike!

On the March 8th Verso staff will be joining women across the world on strike.

Verso Books14 February 2018

We're Going On Strike!

Across the globe women are disproportionately the figures who take on the extra burden of care when the welfare state subtracts.

In the UK cuts to the NHS, cuts to mental health, cuts to domestic violence services, and the inhumanity of universal credit is putting a greater strain on women’s lives. Irish women are still denied acceptable access to safe abortions in Northern Ireland.

In the US we see our efforts as part of a new international feminist movement that organizes resistance not just against Trump and his misogynist policies, but also against the conditions that produced Trump, namely the decades long economic inequality, criminalization and policing, racial and sexual violence, and imperial wars abroad.  

On March 8, International Women’s Day, we are joining many women across the world on strike in solidarity with the myriad of oppressions and discrimination faced by women and non-binary people.

We will also be donating 10% of the sales from our sales in February to the strike fund. See all the feminist books included in our Red Sale here. Read more about the strike in the UK here and the US here

The Women’s Strike is about refusing all the work that women do – whether paid work in offices and factories, or unpaid domestic work in homes, communities and bedrooms.

The Women’s Strike will occur on International Women’s Day. We join a new international women’s movement, which has only grown in strength and determination since exploding onto the streets in recent years. From Argentina to Poland, from Ireland to Mexico, women are making connections, building alliances and taking action against our current conditions of womanhood.

The Women’s Strike rejects the decades of economic inequality, criminalization and policing, racial and sexual violence, and endless global war and terrorism.

The Women’s Strike is a strike for solidarity between women – women of colour, indigenous, working class, disabled, migrant, Muslim, lesbian, queer and trans women. On 8 March, in cities and towns across the UK we will meet each other on the streets and strike against a system of power that keep us isolated and divided from one another.

The Women’s Strike is about realising the power we already hold – activating and nourishing resistance. It bursts into the centre of politics. It produces collective solutions to our individual experiences. It breaks the age-old story of female weakness.

The Women’s Strike fractures our confinement in the domestic home and challenges the traditional trade union strategy of reducing industrial struggle to the employment contract.

The Women’s Strike is a challenge to the assumption that women’s work should be performed for free and always with a smile. We demand that all women to have the right to choose, when and if they want to have children and, at the same time, not be trapped waiting to be chosen.

The Women’s Strike shines a light of solidarity on to the language of gender identity and recommits us to countering transphobia in the women’s movement and beyond

The Women’s Strike defies the idea that all women need to do is tell our stories and speak out. We are exhausted from telling the same story, over and over again. We need action.

To donate to the strike fund visit https://www.youcaring.com/womenonstrikeonmarch8th-1062062