User:GlobalWomensStrike/sandbox

History[edit]
Wages for housework was one of the six demands in Women, the Unions and Work or What Is Not to Be Done, which James presented as a paper to the third National Women's Liberation Conference. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, which James co-authored with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, which opened the “domestic labour debate” and became a women’s movement classic, was published soon after Women, the Unions and Work. The first edition of Power of Women did not come out for wages for housework; its third edition, in 1975, did.

After the Manchester conference, James with three or four other women formed the Power of Women Collective in London and Bristol to campaign for wages for housework. It was reconstituted as the Wages for Housework Campaign in 1975, based in London, Bristol, Cambridge and later Manchester.

In 1973, James and Mario Rosa Dalla Costa went on a speaking tour in Canada and the US where they put forward wages for housework, which is now regarded as a turning point for the development of the IWFHC. In the US, groups formed in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco (later in Philadelphia and Tulsa); and in Toronto, Canada. All were part of the International Wages for Housework Campaign which held its first conference in London in 1975.

In 1974, the Wages for Housework Campaign started in Italy. A number of groups calling themselves Salario al Lavoro Domestico (Wages for Housework) formed in various Italian cities. To celebrate, one of the founding members Mariarosa Dalla Costa gave a speech entitled "A General Strike" in Mestre, Italy. In this speech she talks about how no strike before has ever been a general strike before, but instead, only a strike for male workers. In Padua, Italy, a group called Lotta Feminista, formed by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici, adopted Wages for Housework as their organising strategy.

Between 1974 and 76, three autonomous organizations formed within the Wages for Housework Campaign in the UK, US and Canada: Wages Due Lesbians (now Queer Strike), the English Collective of Prostitutes and Black Women for Wages for Housework, co-founded by Margaret Prescod (now Women of Colour in the Global Women’s Strike). Black Women for Wages for Housework focused on specific issues of Black and third world women, including calling for reparations for "slavery, imperialism and neo-colonialism." Wages Due Lesbians called for wages for housework along with extra wages for lesbians for "the additional physical and emotional housework of surviving in a hostile and prejudiced society, recognized as work and paid for so all women have the economic power to afford sexual choices." Wages Due Lesbians also worked alongside The Lesbian Mothers' National Defense Fund, founded in 1974 and based in Seattle, which aimed to help lesbian mothers who had to fight custody cases after coming out. In 1984 WinVisible (women with visible and invisible disabilities) was founded in the UK as an autonomous organisation within the IWFHC.

In 1975 Silvia Federici started the New York group called the "Wages for Housework Committee" and opened an office in Brooklyn, New York at 288 B. 8th St. Flyers handed out in support of the New York Wages for Housework Committee called for all women to join regardless of marital status, nationality, sexual orientation, number of children, or employment. In 1975 Federici published Wages Against Housework.

== Men who agree with the WFH perspective formed their own organisation in the mid-70s. It is called Payday men's network and works closely with IWFHC and the Global Women's Strike in London and Philadelphia especially and is active with conscientious objectors and refuseniks in a number of countries. == In 1977, two years after Black Women for Wages for Housework was formed in New York there was a split. The WFH group in New York which Silvia Federici had formed and which had been all white, refused to work with the Black women's group and dissolved. The Italian Padua group led by Dalla Costa, who was close to Federici, left the IWFHC and dissolved not long after. Dalla Costa has blamed the political repression in Italy in the late 70s for the dissolution of the Italian WFH groups. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that the Italian WFH Campaign stopped being active towards the end of the 70s.

Black Women for Wages for Housework carried on in New York and in London (a group had also started in Bristol in 1976, and later brances formed in Los Angeles and San Francisco). It had a major success at the first congressionally mandated women's conference in Houston, Texas, in 1977. Working with Beulah Sanders and Johnnie Tillmon, the Black women who led the National Welfare Rights Organization, they got the conference to agree that "welfare payments" should be called a "wage". They believe that this helped to delay welfare cuts by 20 years.

IWFHC had an anti-war and anti-militarist perspective from the start and called for the funds to pay for unwaged caring work to come from military budgets. In England the organization was part of the women's movement against nuclear weapons at Greenham Common and against the building of a new nuclear power reactor at Hinkley (publication Refusing Nuclear Housework).

The U.S. PROStitutes Collective (US PROS) first started in New York in 1982 and later moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles. It campaigns for decriminalization of sex work and for resources so women, children and men are not forced into prostitution. Ruth Todasco, who started the Wages for Housework Campaign in Tulsa, later founded the No Bad Women, Just Bad Laws Coalition which focused on the decriminalization of sex work.

The IWFH Campaign including all its autonomous organisations in the US and UK, of which Selma James remains the point of reference, has never stopped being active. It started the Global Women's Strike in 1999 and expanded and continues to expand its international network (see chronology below).

IWFHC, and now the Global Women's Strike, present themselves as the collective endeavour of the autonomous organizations formed since 1974 and their campaigns. These campaigns include: ending poverty, welfare cuts, detention, deportation; a living wage/care income for mothers and other carers; domestic workers' rights'; pay equity; justice for survivors of rape and domestic violence; challenging racism, disability racism, queer discrimination, transphobia; decriminalizing sex work; stopping the state taking children from their mothers; opposing apartheid, war, genocide, military occupation, corporate land grabs; supporting human rights defenders and refuseniks; ending the death penalty and solitary confinement. . . . All are fighting for climate justice and survival. They describe anti-racism, anti-discrimination, and the justice work women do collectively for themselves and others as being at the heart of all their campaigning.