The ILO Staff Union and the Staff Action
Group for Equality (SAGE) would like to invite you
to come to celebrate International Women’s
Day on March 8th at 16:30 in the Gobelin (R2, the
space right outside the library)
The
rights won by women are the result of the battles
fought by their mothers and grandmothers. It was
the 8th of March 1857 that, for
the first time, women workers in New York sweatshops
organised a demonstration to demand improved working
conditions and to protest their low wages, long
working days and unsafe work environments. This
first demonstration was repressed, but two years
later, also during March, these same women workers
decided to form a union to try to improve their
working conditions.
More
than fifty years later, the recognition of a ‘Women’s
Day’ began with progressive labour groups
in the United States. An international Women’s
Day was first established in 1910
to honour the movement for women's rights and to
assist in achieving universal suffrage for women.
By 1911 celebrations in Europe and North America
were attended by over a million people, calling
for women’s right to vote and to hold public
office, the right to work, to vocational training
and to an end to discrimination on the job.
That
same year, on 25th March, the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist
Company fire in New York City took the lives of
more than 140 working girls, most of them immigrants.
A crowd of 100,000 persons participated in their
funeral. This event had a significant impact on
labour legislation in the United States, and the
working conditions leading up to the disaster were
remembered during subsequent observances of international
Women's Day.
It was not until December
1977 that the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution
naming the 8th of March as International Women’s
Day, recognizing the battles fought by women workers’
rights in the past.
(COMMUNICATION of ILO’s
Sub-regional Office in Santiago’s staff union.
This text is a contribution of María Elena
Valenzuela, published in the Staff
Union Bulletin, no.3)
