 Hello and welcome to Around the World in 8 Minutes with People Dispatch, where we bring you news from working class struggles and popular movements across the world. Today, we are reporting from New Delhi, India, where women from various progressive organizations such as All India Democratic Women's Association, All India Progressive Women's Association and other organizations have gathered here to celebrate International Women's Day. This day is steeped in the history of landmark struggles led by women across the world to secure equal political and social rights. In 1910, when it was decided to start celebrating International Women's Day, the day first centered around the struggle of securing women's suffrage with the slogan, the vote for women will unite our struggle for securing socialism, as well as furthering the battle of securing the full and complete liberation of women. We remember the origins of Women's Day, which was really based in the struggle of working class women for a strong resistance to the kind of exploitation that they faced. And I think today, in 2019, when Indian women are facing such a huge conservative backlash because of the environment created by the BJP RSS's dominant ideology, which sees women in a very stereotypical way and particularly working women, they look down on working women because they feel that working women are not fulfilling their real role as mothers, as sisters, as subordinate to men, and they are breaking tradition by going out to work and ruining the ideal Hindu family. So I think it is very essential that we assert the reality of women's autonomy, of women's freedom, of women's struggles, of women's sacrifices, which have brought so many women out of the darkness of the kind of Manuwadi societies that the BJP wants us to live in. So today we pledge, resist these right-wing forces, fight back the assault on our very being by the Hindutva forces and make sure in the coming elections that they voted out of power. This is best signified by the struggle in Russia in the year 1917, when on the 8th of March that year, a woman, tired by the food shortages and the endless war, took to the streets to protest the Czarist regime with the slogans, bread for our children, and return of her husbands from the trenches. This sparked the February revolution, which ignited the fire for the October revolution leading to the eventual formation of the Soviet Union. Thank you Surangya. Vibrant and defined mobilizations were also held across the globe, marking International Women's Day. Here are a few glimpses from these mobilizations from various regions. In our second story, we look at the strike action by aviation sector employees on March 6th at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in the capital city of Nairobi. This march was met with brutal police repression. The police charged the picket with batons and chased striking workers out to the airport. As many as six union leaders and four members are reported to have been arrested. At least four flights were cancelled and 26 more delayed or diverted as a result of the strike. The strike was called for by the Kenya Aviation Workers Union against the government's decision to hand over the airport to private interests. The airport, built with taxpayers' money, is presently owned by the government and run by the Kenya Airports Authority. To talk more about this strike, we are joined by Benedict Wachira, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kenya. They have several concerns and the main concern is the rejection of the privatization or attempted privatization of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, which is the biggest airport in Kenya and all of the biggest airports in the region and also on the continent of Africa. The government of Kenya and of the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta are trying to privatize this national airport by merging it with Kenya Airways. An airline which is to be the national airline but is now under private hands because the government owns and controls 48% of that airline. So they imagine the airline and the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport so that the airline can now manage and run Jomo Kenyatta Airport. Essentially what we are saying is that now the private entities in Kenya Airways will be running the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, basically privatizing the airport. So the workers have been up in arms, they have rejected that and they have very many reasons. First they are saying that the airport was built by the taxpayers of Kenya. Therefore it cannot now be used to benefit a few individuals, most of whom are big businessmen in collaboration with top politicians for their own benefit. They also have other consents. For example the CEO of Kenya Airways earns 8 million shillings which is equivalent to 80,000 US dollars every month. Yet the average worker at Kenya Airways earns 300 dollars every month. So they're also questioning this difference in the amount of earnings that people are getting because remember these CEOs and the top management do list of the work yet get the highest pay. So basically they are questioning the whole concept of capitalism and the neoliberal attempts of even trying to privatize that national asset that is the airport. And they are planning to start Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and slowly expand to other national airports, Mombasa, Kisumu, Endorette and other places in Kenya. We as a party we are fully behind the workers in the rejection of this attempted privatization of our national assets or our public assets. But that being the workers are also raising issues on casualization of the Kenyan workforce especially at the airport. Airways they are not employing people directly. They have set up these external brokers who do the interviews for these workers, employ them for three years and a very stringent environment which are illegal in Kenya. For instance they are told they cannot join unions. If they join unions they'll be sucked. Some of the women we have been told that they cannot get pregnant within the first year of employment. If they do they will get sucked and all these things are against both the Kenyan laws and the international labor laws. Thank you Benedict. That's all for this episode of Around the World in 8 Minutes. For more stories and videos please check out our website peoplesdispatch.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.