A reading sample from Contested Social and Ecological Reproduction. Impacts of States, Social Movements, and Civil Society in Times of Crisis edited by Antonia Kupfer and Constanze Stutz. Read a snippet from the text “Women* in Movement: Female (Care) Strikes Between Unions and Feminism” by Ingrid Artus.
Women* in Movement: Female (Care) Strikes Between Unions and Feminism
by Ingrid Artus
In the heart of a global capitalist economy based on social inequality and a rigid exploitation of nature, we are currently witnessing a worldwide wave of feminist movement. Or to use the metaphor of Karen Offen (2000), there is a new “volcanic eruption” of feminist struggles directed against patriarchal violence and gender-specific inequality. These topics are old. What is new, however, is the propagated means of struggle: the women*’s strike, grève feministe or sciopero delle donne, which has proved to be capable of mass mobilization, as was impressively demonstrated, for example, in Argentina in 2016, in the US in 2017, in Spain in March 2018, in Switzerland in June 2019 and 2023, and in Iceland in October 2023 – as well as in a lot of union-led feminized strike activities focused mainly on the care sectors. The following text is about these new female (care) strikes, which, I propose, can be seen as hubs of utopia. They evoke visions of a better and fairer society based on solidarity and liberated from sexual oppression. These visions are, furthermore, not only an abstract and distant goal, but are (at least partially) also actualized and ‘lived’ in the course of concrete strike practices.
In this text, I do not only explore the potentials of women*’s strikes, but also the difficulties in cooperation between unions and the international feminist movement. The article is structured in five parts. To begin, I will briefly describe lines of tradition concerning the relationship between women*, unions and the labour movement. Following this, I offer some remarks on the fundamental concept and topic of ‘strike’, before addressing the specificity of women*’s strikes, or more generally, the relationship between strike and gender. This is followed by a fourth section outlining the difficulties and potentials of collaboration between unions and the feminist movement. The conclusion emphasizes again that women*’s strikes can be seen as hubs of utopia for a better world. Overall, my aim for this text is to offer a contribution to bringing research on utopia out of its academic niche existence. I posit that the classic concept of utopia as an unreal ‘non-place’ can be contrasted or even replaced by a concept that understands utopias as an integral part of critical-progressive social movements (cf. Daniel & Klapeer, 2019; Daniel, 2023).
1 Women*, Unions and the Labour Movement: Lines of Tradition and Current Facts
The labour movement and the women’s movement can be seen as the two most influential social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, the relations between these social movements are complicated (Günther, 2019; Artus et al., 2020; Streichhahn & Jacob, 2020). In the early days of unionization in the nineteenth century, the male-dominated unions often fought against female waged work, which was seen as ‘dirty competition’ to men*’s work and posing a danger of ‘wage depression’. Women* were not even accepted as union members and were also legally forbidden to organize politically (Lossef-Tillmans, 1978). It would be decades before the socialist workers’ movement, and especially the proletarian women’s movement, changed these kinds of arguments. This was due to figures such as August Bebel and Clara Zetkin, the founder of International Women’s Day on 8 March.
Gradually, the socialist labour movement and the trade unions committed themselves to the goal of gender equality. Since that time, unions have fought for many emancipatory achievements, not only but also for women*. But at the same time, they remain institutions of hegemonic masculinity (Podann, 2012) – or ‘androcentric institutions’ – which means that the ordinary or normal union member is still thought of as a man*. Although women* are increasingly part of the waged labour force, they continue to be underrepresented in trade unions – in terms of their organizational presence, union leadership positions, and the degree to which trade union policies reflect the interests of women* (Elomäki et al., 2022).[1] Gender-specific unionization varies greatly depending on which industry is unionized (Artus & Holland, 2022).
German trade unions have gone through difficult times in the past 30 years. Their membership has almost halved from its peak at over 11 million after the integration of East German members in 1991 to 5.64 million in 2022 (DGB, 2023). Against this background, and in view of the increasing number of women* in employment, German trade unions are nowadays increasingly targeting female workers with the aim of increasing their membership. Hence the proportion of women* in the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) has risen slightly from 32% in 2005 to 34% in 2022 (DGB, 2023). Women* have become more visible within the labour movement. There is also a certain trend to consider gender-political issues in collective bargaining in a more decisive way and to promote women* in union leadership positions. Recently, the two biggest German trade union organizations, the DGB and the branch union of the metal and electrical industry (IG Metall) are headed by women*.
In parallel, a significant rise in feminized (and often migrant) labour disputes and female strike activities can be observed. The centres of female worker unrest are the service and care work branches. Before analysing these feminized strike activities in more detail, however, I will first ask a question, banal at first glance, but ultimately not so simple: What is a strike?
2 On the Subject of Strike
If you ask someone what a strike actually is, you will get very different answers depending on whom you ask. A German trade unionist will answer that a strike is a legal and important power resource to enforce a collective agreement. This ‘narrow’ concept of strike is mainly due to the quite restricted legal right to strike in Germany (Dribbusch, 2007, 2023). Strikes are legal only as temporary collective cessations of work in order to enforce collective contracts between unions and employers. Hence, only trade unions can legally call for a strike. Individuals or other groups of activists cannot – at least not in the context of waged employment and without the risk of negative sanctions.
Political strikes – meaning strikes that are basically addressed to the state and involve political demands – are prohibited in Germany, at least according to current legal opinions. And even unions can only legally call for a strike if there have been intensive negotiations beforehand. It has to be assured that a strike is the last resort in a collective bargaining dispute. If, finally, a union calls for a strike in a collective bargaining dispute, then it pays its union members strike benefits, which are around 60% of their wages. Strikes are thus expensive for unions, and this is an important reason why German unionists are rather cautious about calling strikes. Nevertheless, the trade union-affiliated Economic and Social Research Institute (WSI) registered 225 union-led strikes in 2022, involving several thousand work stoppages and around 930,000 employees. In international comparison, the degree of industrial action in Germany is in the lower midfield. Around seventeen per cent of all employees in Germany have taken part in a strike in the ‘narrow sense’ at some point during their working life (Dribbusch, Luth & Schulten, 2022).
Looking at what is called a strike in history, or in other countries or political contexts, there are many more kinds of actions that can be called strikes. In France, for example, there is an individual right to strike, which means in principle three wage earners in the workplace can simply decide together to go on strike for some demand, without any union at all. In Italy, Greece, Spain and France, general strikes for political demands are also part of the normal repertoire of political action (Hamann, Johnston & Kelly, 2013), even if there are always social disputes about the legitimacy and even legality of political strikes (this is currently the case in the UK, in view of the extensive strikes in the national healthcare sector). In Germany, too, there are many actions called strikes that have little or nothing to do with unions. There are climate strikes or education strikes at universities and schools. Feminists have called for sex strikes or childbirth strikes. And currently there is an international women*’s strike movement, which takes place mainly in the form of mass mobilizations on feminist struggle days such as 8 March. So there are many forms of strike, which would fall under the concept of strike in the broader sense. And while these are hardly common among the (German) trade unions, they are becoming increasingly common in German as well as international social movements.
According to this broad definition, a strike thus means that as many people as possible join together to break their cooperation with the existing rules. The striking people normally have one thing in common: they are in a relatively powerless position vis-à-vis someone or some institution that is more powerful than they are. A strike is therefore when these relatively weak people get together, organize themselves and decide that at a certain point or even over a longer period of time they will no longer cooperate within the existing power relations and routines. In other words, it is the – often demonstrative – withdrawal of cooperation by the weaker in relation to the stronger through the means of collective organizing, with the aim of changing asymmetrical power relations.
This is strike action in a broad sense. And strikes, precisely because they pit the weaker against the stronger, are usually dangerous. They are moments of crisis. They are crisis-like because they break with routines that have hitherto been taken for granted. They are crisis-like because the activists do not know exactly what will happen if they question what has been taken for granted up to now, if they stop cooperating. Nor do they know exactly how the more powerful will react if they withdraw their willingness to cooperate. Hence strikes are potentially dangerous moments in which people must rely on one another.
A successful strike requires trust in the reliability to collectively organize. It also requires the belief that together the world can be changed. Strikes are moments of danger, moments of crisis; but they are also moments in which a utopia appears. They are moments in which it becomes clear that together we are strong, we can change the world. Together with others, I can take my fate into my own hands. Strikes are moments of self-empowerment in which people experience that they can move things. People who participate in strikes often never forget this experience for the rest of their lives.
Strikes are constructive moments in the formation of political awareness, and they are moments in which collective identities are formed. A ‘we’ is constituted in collective action. This we – the collective identity that strives together for a more or less utopian goal – is both a prerequisite for joint action, and at the same time a consequence of it. Therefore, strikes as a means of struggle are, on the one hand, exigent and presuppositional; they need preparation and/or a long tradition of collective action. On the other hand, they often have considerable effects for the future, in terms of fostering feelings of solidarity and collective identity. This is true for both successful and failed strike movements. Even when strikes ultimately fail to achieve the goals set, they are often viewed positively or even glorified in retrospect as powerful attempts to fight back. As the motto goes: those who fight can lose; those who don’t fight have already lost.
If we now take a closer look at women*’s strikes or feminized strikes, these are special in the sense that the ‘we’ that fights and wants to realize a utopia is (more or less) defined by a (however constructed) gender identity. As strikes that are carried out by a majority of women* and that pursue primarily female
interests, they always have – explicitly or not – consequences not only for capitalism but also for patriarchy. Something similar can be said for migrant or Black strike movements. It does not matter whether these strikes are ‘only’ or primarily for more wages or shorter working hours, and at first glance seem to have little to do with patriarchal or racist conditions of exploitation. The meaning, the dynamics, the media perception and also the strike results in these cases are always shaped by the conditions of sexist or racist oppression. These facts are explained in more detail below.
[1] A comparison of ten countries in Western Europe by Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick and Richard Hyman (2013: 54) showed that Germany occupied the inglorious top position in terms of difference in the degree of unionization among men* and women*. While in Sweden, Denmark, the UK and Ireland women* were even more union-organized than men*, the degree of female organization in Germany was only about half as high as that of men*.
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Contested Social and Ecological Reproduction.
Impacts of States, Social Movements, and Civil Society in Times of Crisis
edited by Antonia Kupfer and Constanze Stutz
About “Contested Social and Ecological Reproduction”
Humanity has not succeeded in securing the basis of life for all people. A major reason is the dominant global capitalist economy, which is based on the exploitation and use of nature—but this state of affairs is not accepted by everyone. This book provides a close socio-analytical look at how states, social movements, and civil society actors deal with this polycrisis.
