Inside Spain's Radical, Union-Led Women's Strike

By Kim Kelly, Splinter News

11 March 19

xactly one year ago today, 5 million women in Spain went on strike.

For two hours on March 8, 2018, they flooded the streets—students and politicians, domestic workers and business leaders, women of all stripes and identities—to call for an end to Spain’s machista culture, and the toxic societal blights that come along with it: structural inequality, sexual harassment, domestic violence, and a pervasive wage gap. Organized by a coalition group called the 8 March Commission and spearheaded by the National Confederation of Labour (CNT), Spain’s largest confederation of radical labor unions, the general strike was extremely popular amongst the general public, with a full 82% of Spaniards saying that they “believe that there are sufficient reasons to call a protest against discrimination against women.”

Today, they’re doing it again. At the time of this writing, the strike is already in full swing in over 1,200 locations around Spain, as are other International Women’s Day actions around the globe. There will be no general strike today—in the U.S. at least—but there is much we can learn from our Spanish sisters and siblings in the struggle.

It’s not surprising that feminist labor activists in Spain—a country with a long history of mass labor actions, robust leftist political tradition, and strong anarcho-syndicalist unions—managed to successfully engineer a general strike of such magnitude, but those watching from this side of the ocean surely can’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. It was the threat of a general strike (delivered in no uncertain terms by Sara Nelson, the formidable and charismatic president of the Association of Flight Attendants) that helped to end Donald Trump’s cruel government shutdown, yet right now at least, the mere idea of American workers undertaking that kind of large-scale work stoppage still seems closer to a figment of our collectively oppressed imaginations than a real possibility.

We haven’t seen a general strike on these shores in decades, thanks in part to the the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act (which renders solidarity strikes across disparate industries illegal) as well as a systematic dismantling of organized American labor power that began in earnest when Ronald Reagan busted the PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981, and that is now enthusiastically upheld by Trump’s anti-worker regime. Recent years have seen an upswing in mass rallies and demonstrations (generally in protest of the white supremacist in the White House), and on International Women’s Day in 2017, Women’s March affiliates attempted “A Day Without a Woman.” The day saw thousands across the country participating in what was billed as a one-day “strike,” though organizers acknowledged it was meant to function more as a traditional rally, and to “introduce women to different tactics of activism,” as co-organizer Linda Sarsour told the New York Times.

The idea of a women’s strike has appeared in a number of different countries. Iceland’s 1975 Women’s Day Off (Kvennafrídagurinn) strike saw 90% of the female populace refuse to go to their paid jobs or perform domestic work in protest of wage disparities and social inequality; one participant called it “a quiet revolution.” The following year, Iceland’s parliament passed a law guaranteeing equal rights to women and men. In 2016, tens of thousands of Argentinian women filled the streets for Ni Una Menos, a mass protest against sexual violence. Female factory workers across China have been staging strikes for years over low wages and gender discrimination at work. On January 1, 2019, between 3.5 and 5 million women in the southern Indian state of Kerala joined hands to form a gargantuan human chain to protest gender inequality and religious discrimination against women. It stretched for 385 miles. A few weeks later, 50,000 women garment workers in Bangladesh staged a militant work stoppage for higher wages that lasted for nearly two weeks, and was met by a violent police crackdown.

The 8 March Commission already made its mark on feminist—and labor—history last year, but in 2019, they’re hoping to go even bigger. Once again, they’re joining forces with Italy’s Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI), with whom they work closely, and share both an overarching politic and a desire to take their fight against gender discrimination—and capitalist oppression—international.

“Our objective is to project and coordinate internationally the union sections to spread the struggle across the world; if we want to abolish capitalism, we need to spread our fights worldwide,” a spokesperson for the CNT told me over email (they requested to be identified simply as “CNT International group of work”).

They’re calling for a 24-hour strike, instead of the two-hour version that, under Spanish law, all workers are entitled to participate in per shift in the event of a strike (unlike the U.S., the right to strike is enshrined in the Spanish Constitution, and trade unions are empowered to legally call strikes that impact entire sectors) and that traditional labor unions are continuing to encourage. (The CNT, being anarcho-syndicalists, don’t mind ruffling their stodgier counterparts’ feathers). Unlike some other country’s feminist organizations, they are also encouraging men to get involved. In contrast to historical efforts in other places, these activists have no interest in showing what a world without women might look like. They want to build solidarity across gender lines and show what a world with a truly unified working class could look like.

“CNT advocates the strike of men and women as a tool to paralyze the system, not as a symbol to make visible the lack of women on the 8th of March,” they explain. “We believe that a revolution is happening, that feminism goes beyond the women’s struggle—it is a class struggle that wants to support racialized women and transgender [people], women around the world, and to put an end to patriarchy and the precariousness of all class workers.”

The CNT’s feminist roots can be traced back to the Spanish Civil War and the founding of the union’s women-only Mujeres Libres branch in 1936, during the anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anarchist-led workers’ revolution. Now, the daughters and granddaughters of those original revolutionaries are running the show in the union’s current incarnation, wherein women hold the majority of powerful union secretary and representative roles.

“They [fought] in the Spanish Civil War on the same way as men, when the rest of political alternatives prompted women to work in the rear,” the spokesperson explained. “Nowadays, Mujeres Libres still works actively, and its activity and the work of the rest of women has strongly influenced the CNT in itself. We are a big part of the militancy and it is growing year by year building a new anti-patriarchy root inside. We seek militancy in feminized sectors, [and] this is having a positive consequence.”

The 8 March Commission’s demands for this year’s strike have not changed from 2018;if anything, given the recent rise of the far-right, anti-feminist Vox political party in Spain, they are even more pressing now. Vox seeks to scrap a landmark 2004 law on gender violence, arguing that it discriminates against men, and its supporters have been attacking the 2019 strike on social media. The organizers are undeterred, and have been planning for this day since the last strike ended. They’ve got their own hashtags, too:

“We want to fight against gender violence, the figures are horrible. 1,003 women have died since 2010 in Spain, and not only those killed, that violence is palpable in all spheres of our lives,” the collective said in its email. “In the workplace we demand the end of the wage gap, which reaches more than 20%: we know solutions and mechanisms to finish with it that are not being put into practice.”

“We demand access to employment and professional promotion by establishing objective measures for this way of collective bargaining, prohibiting companies that demand availability outside the working day and obligating them to provide the training carried out within working hours. We demand that identical maternity and paternity [leave]. With regard to pensions, we demand the elimination of the gender gap; this gap derives from the social organization of work, which devalues ??care, and gender discrimination in the labor market.”

The CNT left me with some advice for American feminists and labor activists who want to build something bigger.

“We believe that the feminist message must be given from a rooted class perspective,” the CNT spokesperson says. “We do not believe in the division between feminism and politics. We believe in feminism as a struggle to support the racialized, against emigration, in favor of equal employment opportunities, against the capitalism that underpins the patriarchal system.”

“Seek affiliation in impoverished and feminized sectors, giving a trade union tool to people who do not believe in the association of workers, such as the cases we have had among hotel cleaners, which never believed in their profession as strong and empowered to fight,” they continued. “Seek support and propagation among migrant or class women, who are against the patriarchal capitalist system, and let them see that the General Strike has a huge impact in our society. The majority of the population has changed their way of thinking. We need a change.”

My American comrades, take note. Viva la huelga!

The Pros and Cons of Impeaching Trump

By Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

10 March 19

Real and reasonable arguments among congressional Democrats—and, indeed, among the public—range from the practical to the procedural.

he announcement last week that Representative Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was demanding documents from eighty-one agencies, companies, and individuals with knowledge of the Trump Administration’s behavior, or misbehavior, was, in its way, momentous. Though properly classed as the kind of oversight that the see-no-evil-even-when-you’re-staring-at-it Republicans in Congress avoided for the past two years, it seems clear that Nadler is planning what amounts to pre-impeachment impeachment hearings.

Nadler himself cautioned that, regarding the potential eviction of the Trump family from Pennsylvania Avenue, “we don’t have the facts yet,” but the committee’s demand appears designed to assemble as much of what can be known about any potential Trump family depredations as possible, and see where it all leads. Trump called the demand nothing but “a big fat fishing expedition,” provoking the reflection that you are rarely scared of big fat fishing expeditions unless you know that there are big fat fish lurking somewhere in your pond.

There is, however, a real and reasonable argument among congressional Democrats—and, indeed, among the public—about whether pursuing Trump’s impeachment, even assuming that we get the facts, is a wise idea. The arguments against it range from the hyper-practical point that a President Mike Pence would be worse, to the procedural-minded one that, since impeaching Trump would mean that two of the four most recent Presidents would have been impeached, and since articles of impeachment can be passed by a simple majority in the House, every President from now on would risk facing it the moment the opposition has a majority. This would create perpetual governmental paralysis, and, while Trump might not care about safeguarding democratic institutions, the country should.

A point common to all the anti-impeachment arguments, though, comes right out of an old Western; as the lawmen used to say about the cattle-rustling varmint after he was caught, “Hanging’s too good for him.” In this case, impeachment is seen as too rarefied, too technical a proceeding to end Trumpism. Trump should be defeated at the polls; ejecting him in any other way provides too many opportunities for after-the-fact stab-in-the-back recriminations, and will only further convince his base that the “deep state” conspired against him. Indeed, given the congressional Republican Party’s cultlike adherence to Trump, beginning a process in the House that can end only with acquittal in the Senate wouldn’t be good for the Democrats, or for the country.

These arguments have weight. A President Pence would certainly continue to appoint right-wing judges and limit L.G.B.T.Q. rights and ignore climate change and all the rest, and might do so more efficiently, being better able to concentrate on the task without getting distracted by Fox News or the allure of military parades. But what if he did? These may all be policies worth opposing; they’re not crimes that can’t be tolerated. It’s the core premise of any liberal democracy that people have to accept the program of the party in power no matter how little they like it, or even how morally repugnant they find it. The argument for Trump’s eviction rests not on the kinds of laws that he would like to pass but on his unique contempt for the whole concept of the rule of law.

Even before the House investigations get going, or the Mueller report is delivered, or the prosecutors finish their work, there is already too much evidence of this contempt to let it alone. Indeed, it is the excess of evidence that now acts as Trump’s sturdiest armor. Back in 1980, Trump destroyed the façade of the old Bonwit Teller building, which he razed to make way for Trump Tower, after being told that he shouldn’t and when no one expected that he would. He has learned that, if you just do things, ordinary people with normal expectations about human behavior will have a hard time believing that you’re doing them.

Any one of a dozen things that Trump has done overtly would have resulted, if done clandestinely by another President, in near-universal cries for impeachment, if not for immediate resignation. Just for a start, his firing of the director of the F.B.I. and then confessing to both a journalist and the Russian foreign minister that he did it to end an investigation into his own campaign’s contacts with Russians follows the exact form of one of the impeachable offenses—obstruction of justice—that was applied against Richard Nixon. The “smoking gun” tape smoked because it showed that Nixon had tried to stop the F.B.I. from investigating the Watergate break-in on phony “national security” grounds.

The best argument for impeachment is, ironically, the case for national unity. Americans ought to be able to agree that, while all opinions are open to debate, some behavior really is out of bounds. An impeachment trial can’t be won? Well, the Republican Party may be obedient now, but there is just enough Never Trumping among those who were once the staunchest of conservatives to make it clear that the difference between constitutional conservatism and thuggishness is real and can be argued for, and maybe even partly won.

The House may soon find itself moving toward impeachment in any case. On top of the House investigations, New York State regulators last week subpoenaed Trump’s insurance broker, following allegations of irregularities raised during the recent testimony of Michael Cohen. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors continue to explore various activities related to Trump’s campaign and his family businesses.

The long-term consequences of impeachment are unknowable; long-term consequences always are. The foreclosed impeachment of Nixon was more or less a political wash: the Democrats held the House for another twenty years, while the Republicans regained the White House just six years later. The impeachment of Bill Clinton, however high his approval ratings were when the resolution passed in the House, may have hurt Al Gore in the 2000 election. But, within eight years, the Democrats had regained control of both Congress and the White House.

Pragmatism is not a way of negating principle but, rather, the realist’s way of pursuing principle. The arguments against impeachment today are primarily pragmatic, the arguments for it primarily principled, but the principled course could, before long, turn into the only practical course. Impeachment may be too good for Trump. It may yet prove just the thing for the country.