Bilbao (EFE).- Institutions, students and unions have staged different events in the Basque capitals on the occasion of the celebration of Women’s Day, in which they have claimed equality to exercise power and leadership and the improvement of conditions labor in feminized jobs.
The Lehendakari, Iñigo Urkullu, has urged men to take Emakunde’s “Gizonduz” program into consideration, which calls for a critical review of dominant male models.
Urkullu has valued the commitment of “Gizonduz” to promote the understanding and awareness of gender theory, to facilitate the identification of alternatives to the dominant male models and to publicize the different organizational experiences that exist in the work of the men for equality
City councils, for female leadership
The councils of the three Basque capitals have promised to promote women’s leadership and that they can exercise power equally, some texts that have been unanimously adopted except in the case of Vitoria, where the PP has distanced itself.
The town councils have approved their respective declarations on the occasion of Women’s Day, which have been based on the model proposed this year to the Basque town halls by the association of Eudel municipalities.
The PP has supported the texts in Bilbao and San Sebastián but not in Vitoria, and the popular ones have organized their own act in the Biscayan capital considering that these texts elude the need to correct the law of “only yes is yes” which, according to complaint, has left women unprotected.
The rest of the groups -PNV, PSE-EE, EH Bildu, Elkarrekin Podemos-IU- have supported the respective declarations in their municipalities. Thus, the texts have been recited by paragraphs by the councilors of the different parties.
All three statements are similar. In them, the Basque city councils have committed to promoting women’s leadership and favoring the conditions for the exercise of power on an equal footing.
Also to strengthen policies that promote the empowerment and participation of women in all public and private sectors.
feminized works
The Basque Unions have taken advantage of the day of this March 8 to denounce in the street the precarious conditions in which many care tasks are provided.
They have defended that these services are public and have shown the weariness of women who are “chained” to this type of feminized work.
In an act and subsequent demonstration in Bilbao, nearly a thousand people called by the ELA union have claimed that “defending public care is feminist.”
As the union has indicated, the quality of public care services “affects society as a whole and, in a special way, migrant and racialized women, who are the ones who generally assume this responsibility.”
For this reason, it has demanded that these services must be “public, quality and free” and has indicated that “everyone in society is a worker and user of public services.”
The LAB union has also mobilized in the Basque capitals with a message in favor of public and community care on International Women’s Day.
In the demonstration that has been carried out in Bilbao, led by workers from feminized sectors -home care, residences, domestic workers…-, the general coordinator of the union, Garbiñe Aranburu, has demanded a change in the current “capitalist” care model and patriarchal.
“We women have had enough. We do not want to live chained to unrecognized or unpaid domestic and care tasks. We do not accept the precariousness that the gender division of labor generates”, she pointed out.
Faced with this, she has insisted on the need to radically change the current “outdated and exhausted” care model, as well as to “promote feminist alliances and prevent women who work in care from doing so in a precarious way.”
Among other demands, LAB has demanded that the privatization of social care services be prohibited, starting with nursing homes and home help.
Likewise, the Euskadi UGT has held rallies in the Basque capitals to show that there is still a long way to go to achieve effective and real equality between men and women.
In the one carried out in the center of Bilbao, the union’s secretary for Equality, Xuria Arza, has insisted on highlighting the existing gender gap in the labor market.
Among other data, he recalled that Basque women earn 5,914 euros less than their male colleagues, according to a report prepared by the union.
The consequence of this wage inequality is that 73.3% of the pensions received by Basque women are below 1,000 euros, as he has pointed out.
For its part, the Euskadi CCOO union held an internal assembly on March 8 and announced its participation this afternoon in the demonstrations called by the feminist movement.
student demonstration
Thousands of students have also demonstrated in Bilbao and have warned “the emboldened right wing of PP, VOX and PNV” that yesterday against the “only yes is yes” law was “a declaration of war” against the fight feminist and that “they will respond in the street”.
The march called by the Student Union has started from Plaza del Arriaga and along Gran Vía and ended in Plaza de Moyúa, where a statement was read in Basque and Spanish, and “PP, VOX” was warned and PNV that if they declare war on us, we will respond.
“What we have to say is that we are completely fed up with this sexist justice” because “there has not been any type of purge of fascist elements.”
That law against sexual violence had been “the result of the struggle and mobilizations of all these years” and “today we young people once again make it clear that we are going to continue mobilizing to claim our rights year after year.”
The demonstration has run between slogans such as “they kill us, they rape us and nothing happens here”, “if I don’t say yes, it’s also rape” and “I don’t want your compliment, I want your respect”.
The young students, accompanied by some of their classmates and also some mothers and grandmothers, carried signs that read “we deserve to live without fear” and “be thankful that women want equality and not revenge.”