Women at the foot of the machine Metallurgical workers at the forefront!

2023-09-01 13:41:03

Jujuy women have shown that we are willing to go all out when they touch our rights, our natural resources, our lives. Along the same lines, we want to refer to the metalworkers who came out to fight like lionesses for their rights.

On 07/18, the first day of the metallurgical strike called by the Metallurgical Workers’ Union (UOM), mobilizations were called throughout the country. In Buenos Aires, 20,000 workers and workers marched to the Techint headquarters. It has been years since there has been such a strong and numerous strike and mobilization of the UOM.

They were there, the workers who organized to guarantee them, making visible the miserable salaries they earn as metalworkers and as women, since for the same tasks they earn much less than men. They uploaded their receipts to social networks and took their claims to the march.

The union bureaucracy did everything possible to keep a large part of the metal base from participating. However, they organized to get there anyway: the workers went down in groups of trains or buses. Most of them may have been participating in a march for the first time, but they were not overcome by fear, nor by the machismo of their partners or co-workers, nor by the uncertainty of how to get to Retiro, from factories far away from the city. Capital.

25 % of the guild and in the worst conditions.

The metallurgical industries are incorporating more and more women. Today they are a quarter1. Almost all of them are in the lowest paid branches, the lowest, most precarious categories, and excluded from all types of training.

The metallurgical agreement does not take them into account, not even in factories where they are the majority. It completely ignores the problems they have because they are women and also those of other oppressions.

At the Obra Social, the attention is terrible, it does not even guarantee the rights achieved in recent years for all the compañeras.

To make matters worse, the Labor Reform demanded by the employers threatens to take away the few gains made, aggravating the precariousness of the metallurgical companies.

Practically, the option is to be a housewife or do similar tasks in the factory, for little money.

Perhaps because of all this, there is a great female grassroots activism that uses the networks a lot to organize itself. Many times the bureaucracy tempts them with “some place in the union”, even if it is only made of cardboard. Even so, the women delegates in the factories are very valuable when it comes to going out to fight and the “disobedient” suffer greater persecution from the bosses and the bureaucracy. It is not the first time that they stand up and go to the front, as happened in previous years in Banghó, Eitar and other factories.

Struggle, worker unity and independent organization are the key

They want us to believe that we are weak, that men can do more. They are almost always the leaders of the struggles. However, in this strike, the metalworkers took to the streets together with the men and demonstrated that the unity of the working class is necessary to succeed.

The employers risked that the plan of struggle would fail, and that the national UOM would surrender and accept their conditions. They sought to impose a meager increase, but mainly to bankrupt the metallurgical workers so that the Labor Reform that they are promoting would pass without resistance, hand in hand with the Governments. For its part, the leadership of the UOM did not want to go all the way: it launched the strike to defuse the rank and file anger and put pressure on its share of “the cake”.

They could not! Achieved 20%, already, cumulative increases for August and September and other benefits.

But there are many needs of the working people. The colleagues will not solve them with individual “empowerment” or a female CEO. We need salaries and pensions at least equal to the family basket, automatically adjusted for inflation, equal pay for equal work, categories, nurseries and daycare centers in all factories and working-class neighborhoods, defeat the feared Labor Reform.

What has been done is a great start to build the organization by factory, fighting machismo to add to the compañeras, unite workers and workers in the fight for our demands, including women’s, act against gender violence or if we are repressed in a protest. We have to strengthen ourselves until we overcome the inaction or lukewarmness of the union leadership and face the adjustments that will come with a National Jujeñazo, regardless of who wins the elections.

Metallurgical workers and all women workers are a fundamental part of these challenges.