Yahoo – AFP,
Agnès PEDRERO, June 4, 2019
 |
The
organisers are calling on women to stop work whether they have paid
employment
or do housework at home (AFP Photo/Fabrice COFFRINI)
|
Geneva
(AFP) - Nearly 30 years after staging a first nationwide strike for equal pay,
women across Switzerland say they are preparing fresh action to push for wage
parity next week.
On June 14,
1991 -- 10 years after equality between the sexes was enshrined in the Swiss
constitution -- half a million women walked out of their workplaces or homes to
protest persistent inequalities.
Three
decades on, however, unions and rights groups say things have barely improved.
They are
calling on Swiss women to join a fresh strike, again on June 14, to demand
"more time, more money, more respect".
Women in
Switzerland on average still make 20 percent less than men.
And for men
and women with equal qualifications, the wage gap remains nearly eight percent,
according to the national statistics office.
"Even
if you take into account all of the regular excuses and you only compare women
and men in the exact same position with the same professional experience, the
fact remains that a woman in Switzerland is cheated out of 300,000 Swiss francs
($313,000, 266,000 euros) over the course of her career, just because she is a
woman," Switzerland's largest union UNIA said in a statement last year.
Strikers
will also be demanding zero tolerance for violence against women and more
respect and better pay for women's work, including through the introduction of
a minimum national salary.
The idea of
another nationwide women's strike was born out of frustration at a bid to
change the law to impose more oversight over salary distribution, which passed
through the Swiss parliament last year
The final
text only applied to companies with more than 100 employees -- affecting fewer
than one percent of employers -- and failed to include sanctions for those that
allow persistent gender pay gaps.
 |
Swiss women
are angry that, decades after the constitutional recognition of the
equality of
women, they are still not getting paid as much as men (AFP Photo/
Fabrice
COFFRINI)
|
'Women
work for free'
Organisers
have called upon women to snub their jobs, and also housework, for the entire
day to help raise awareness about the vital contribution women make across
society.
"Really,
the objective is to block the country with a feminist strike, a women's
strike," activist Marie Metrailler told AFP.
For those
women unable to take a full day, the organisers urge them to at least pack
their things and go by 3:24 pm -- in recognition of the male-female pay
disparity.
"After
that, women work for free," said Anne Fritz, the main organiser of the
strike and a representative of USS, an umbrella organisation that groups 16
Swiss unions.
Gaining
recognition of women's rights has been a drawn-out process in Switzerland.
It was one
of the last countries in Europe to grant women the right to vote, in 1971 --
and in the conservative Appenzell region women only won that right in 1991.
And while
Switzerland did enshrine gender equality into its constitution in 1981, it took
another 15 years before the law took effect.
"In
1991, we determined that... nothing was moving. So we went on strike,"
Geneva author Huguette Junod told AFP.
Around
500,000 women -- a high number in a country that at the time counted fewer than
3.5 million female inhabitants -- marched and organised giant picnics in the
streets. Some women hung brooms from their balconies.
The large
turnout was all the more remarkable given that work stoppages have been
extremely rare in Switzerland since employers and unions signed the "Peace
at Work" convention in 1937. It states that differences should be worked
out through negotiation rather than strikes.
Junod, 76,
recalls that many women were blocked from participating in 1991.
But, she
said, "those who were not permitted to strike wore a fuchsia-coloured
armband ... and took a longer break".
 |
Women demonstrated on May 14 in Lausanne, a month ahead of the nationwide
action to press for equal pay (AFP Photo/Fabrice COFFRINI) |
'Illegal'
Organisers
are bracing for a repeat of that situation, for while the strike has some
support, the employers' organisation flatly opposes it.
"This
strike is illegal," Marco Taddei, one of the organisation's
representatives, told AFP.
He stressed
that the demands put forward "do not solely target working
conditions", and that the constitution "stipulates that a strike can
only be used as a last resort."
The unions
disagree.
"What
is illegal is wage discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace,"
Fritz said.
Recognising
that many women will not be able to get away from work, organisers have
declared purple the colour to wear this time to show support for the strikers.
Over the
past three decades, womens' rights advocates in Switzerland have made some
gains. Abortion was legalised in 2002, and 2005 saw the introduction of 14
weeks of paid maternity leave.
But
Switzerland still offers no paternity leave, and limited access to over-priced
daycare is seen as a major hindrance to women's full participation in the world
of work.
Switzerland
"is very conservative on the question of women's rights," Eleonore
Lepinard, a sociologist and associate professor of gender studies at Lausanne
University, told AFP.
The
authorities have yet to commit to collective policies on day-care and elderly
care, which would make it easier for women to enter, remain and thrive in the
workforce.
Women's
forced absence from the workforce for years at a time "benefits men on the
employment market and in terms of salaries", Lepinard said.
She hailed
women's growing ability to speak up and make their grievances known.
The
question, she said, is: "Do the politicians know how to listen?"
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