We work in a friendly, bustling cafe in Islington, where most days if you pop in for a flat white or avocado toast you’ll find a bubbly barista happy to chat about Brexit, the oat milk shortage, or the latest Ariana Grande record over a jug of steaming milk. Today, however, you’ll find the door locked and a sign that reads: ‘Closed Friday 28th March: On Strike.’
Today, we’re proud to be joining women and non-binary people across the world in withdrawing our labour - paid and unpaid - as part of the global Women’s Strike. This isn’t a strike about the pay and conditions at our particular workplace. Instead, we are striking in solidarity with women and non-binary workers everywhere, and to highlight the systemically underpaid and undervalued work that we do.
As hospitality workers, this strike is particularly important to us. Despite being a sector rife with low-pay, exploitation and harassment, it is notoriously difficult to organise as a workforce because of the precarious nature of the job. It’s also an incredibly unequal industry. 54% of hospitality industry workers are women, but the top jobs such as chef are dominated by men, while seven in 10 of the UK’s waiting staff are women. Research by Unite the Union last year found that 9 out of 10 hospitality industry workers had experienced sexual harassment at least once in their careers. 64% of hospitality industry workers are low-paid, and there is a 7.3% gender pay gap across the hospitality sector - meaning men are paid on average £2,000 more than women.
Working in hospitality, as well as being physically tiring, requires a great deal of emotional labour - especially for women and non-binary people, who are expected to regulate our emotions during interactions with customers, co-workers and superiors. Where we work, our customers are almost uniformly delightful - but only last week we got told off by an older male customer for laughing!
Outside of the workplace, women take on an average of 26 hours’ unpaid work (such as cooking, cleaning and childcare) every week - more than double the amount that men perform. Perversely, people on the lowest incomes take on the most unpaid labour. The burden of emotional labour, too, falls more heavily on women and non-binary people in our relationships with spouses, partners, families and friends.
So why take action today?
International Women’s Day has always been strongly linked with the labour and socialist movements. The earliest Women’s Day, organised by the Socialist Party of America, was held in New York in 1909. The Russian Revolution began after women in Saint Petersburg went on strike for “Bread and Peace”. But women have too often been written out of the history of the Labour movement, at the same time as Trade Unions and socialist movements in general have been characterised as “macho” - erasing the central role women have always played in these struggles. By striking today we want to make it clear that women’s rights are workers’ rights; there is no workplace justice without gender justice, and vice versa.
So if we’re not striking for changes to our pay and conditions, what do we want?
First and foremost, we’re striking to to demonstrate that it’s feminised labour that keeps the world turning - often labour that’s unnoticed or undervalued.
We’re striking to show solidarity with women and non-binary people who face discrimination, harassment and unfair conditions at work.
And we’re striking to to invite reflection and solidarity from our customers. The women’s strike is a chance for us all to think afresh about the labour we perform for others, the labour that others perform for us, and the gendered inflections of that labour - and to think about what we can all do to liberate ourselves and the people around us from the shackles of gendered oppression.
Georgia Elander, Joanne Soltani, Annie Wilkes, Samantha Potter, Kit Miles, Jess Bryant and Ruby Risdon are striking today as part of the Women’s Strike