 Lleiddo i mi gael wneud ar ddweud y tîm ymddangos gwaith yn y gallai, yma ychydig ar y mewn dda i'n swyddfa a'r llif ac mae'n bod nhw'n gweithio Cymru. Felly, mae'r gweithio gweithio gweithio gwaith yma ar y tydd, The next one is the univable form and it also means going on strike from our offices, our factories, our schools, hospitals and strip clubs etc. So joining me today to talk about what the political significance of a women's strike is in 2018. We have Camille Barbagallo who is an organizer at the Women's Strike Assembly and the Mum of Two. We have Sam Siva who is an organizer at the Women's Strike Assembly and Plan C London. The Dean Houghton, who is a union organiser, labour organiser, and also a Mum of Two. So, to start us off, obviously the idea of a women's strike isn't new. It's been a really integral tactic of the women's movement for a really long time. Could you tell me a little bit about the history— women's strikes as a tactic of feminist organisers. Why it's still important in 2018 for us to be taking this kind of action? It is certainly the history of the strikes that took place and are the history of the women's strike in Manhattan in 1908, the historic strike on the Irish Revolution, in 1908 and the 1908 which inaugurated International Women's Day to the women who started the Russian Revolution demanding bread and roses and peace. Our own history here in the UK with the Dagenham strike, a which saw the Equal Pay Act getting brought in in 1970 Ono, mae'r fawr er mwynhau a'r hollau nid yn y drydd yng nghymru. Ond ydy'r fawr yn y gwaith o'r gweithio ar y cyfleu ymlaen. Mae'r bwysig yn brin yw, yn 2016, mae'r fawr yn mythig, mae'r fawr yn fawr yn mythig, ac mae'n gweithio ar gyflogau. Mae'r bwysig yn ymddi wedi'r cyffredinol ac mae'n gweithio ar y gweithio ar y gyd. Last year, in 2017, we saw the first international women's strike being coordinated in over 54 countries. Wow. I think what's really important about the tactic of the strike and the significance of a women's strike is the idea that a strike is at all and it's something that we can use to bring about radical change. Like Camille said, it's nothing new, but maybe in some way we've kind of lost touch with it and it's sort of like, you know, you can hear like a lot of trade union leaders sometimes almost apologising for strikes, you know, they'll kind of say like, you know, it was the only sort of thing that we had left, it was, you know, we were forced into it and like I often think about strike as like, actually it's the most powerful thing that a group of working people can do is to withdraw their labour. That's the most powerful tool that they have, whether that's against the bosses or against the patriarchy or whatever it might be. And women have been showing us how to do that and have been doing that effectively throughout history. And like we forget that the trade union movement in this country was born out of women striking, young working class women in the east end of London, Irish and possibly Jewish migrants don't quote me on that, working in a factory in the east end of London, going on strike against their working conditions, pay and everything else. And it was that strike, the match women strike, that led to the dockers taking mass strike action that led to the birth of the trade union movement as we know it today in this country. And Camille's referred to the birth of the Equal Pay Act coming about as a result of the Grunwick strike, sorry, as the Ford-Dagonham strike. These women were kind of written off as insignificant. Even the trade union leaders didn't want to know about their struggles and their disputes. And it wasn't until they took matters into their own hands and withdrew their labours. They bought that factory to a standstill. So it's kind of, and we saw it with Jai Ben Desai and the Grunwick strike. And we're seeing a kind of resurgence of that now with the struggles against outsourcing, teaching assistance. The issue of Equal Pay is kind of on the agenda now. And so I think what's really significant about the women's strike and about looking at the history of strikes that have been led by women is that they've changed the world for women and we want to get back to that place and we want to reclaim that and we want to start using the strike as a tool to bring about that change. I think also that the women's strike is a devastatingly simple concept. Like people go on strike when their conditions of life and labour are shit basically. And for women, both here in the UK and across the world, we have childcare costs that are some of the highest in the EU which makes working a mugs game because you're basically working just to pay it so someone else can look after your kids, the levels of sexual harassment that women experience in the workplace and the fact that basically the cost of living in the UK has gone through the roof. People's food bills have doubled. Women are paid such as low amount in so many different industries that paying the rent is really difficult. Like at a certain point, what other answer is there other than to strike? One thing that that makes me think about is I remember when we were in the May Day rooms and we were looking at the posters from decades ago of women's strikes and how the demands were remarkably similar. I wonder if that's the fact that we're still in that place. It's testament to the decline of strikes as a strategy that people think of particularly when it comes to the conditions of agenda. Do you think that that could be particularly looking at how feminism has developed over the past decade? It's interesting that at this moment strike has come back as a strategy that's on the table. Our feminism has to be rooted in the struggles of working class women and intersectionality. I think from my experience of organising women workers, low paid women workers, they're predominantly cleaners or hostesses, they're carrying out the sort of work that is an extension of the unpaid work that they do in the home. They know that, they see that because they're living it on a day-to-day basis. So what is the point of just having these struggles in the workplace against low pay, against cuts to sick pay or cuts to maternity pay or whatever it might be if we're not also having that struggle in the home? Because the whole time that work that we do in the home goes undervalued, unpaid, it's just a continuum that will happen in the workplace as well. So the whole time we're not paid for the cleaning and the caring we do in the home, it's always going to be low paid and undervalued outside of it as well. It's really interesting that you bring that up because one thing I've kind of noticed speaking to, even like other people on the left, is a lot of people find it really hard to wrap their head. There's this kind of idea of strikes as being something that happens from an institutionalised union. It happens in a particular kind of workplace in response to a particular kind of work that's like in the public sphere is waged. It makes sense in like a factory or an office or something like that. But a lot of people can't get their head around the idea that you can strike firstly as a kind of social class and that you can strike from a home or from sex or from caring. So why is it really important that we can think about women's labour in this term, in these terms? And what does it say about how we think of strikes now given the fact that they don't tend to encompass these forms of labour? Well, I think that in terms of like the women's strike is not a traditional industrial strike, but as we've seen in the UK, lots of women and some men are actually going on strike on March the 8th as well from their waged work. And so I think the take-home message around the women's strike is that and it's been conceived of this way by lots of different women around the world is as a political strike which returns the strike to some of its older history as well and it doesn't confine us just to the workplace. And that's got to do with the fact that women's work is both waged and unwaged and it's really the work, it's all the cooking, the cleaning and the caring that kind of makes the world go round and makes life possible. But what we know about that work is that despite 100 odd years of feminist agitation and demands that work remains devalued, it remains really invisible. And so I think one of the easy ways for people, I think what's really interesting actually is that the vast majority of people I've spoken to outside of the left, this is not really a question for them because actually as I said before it's actually a really simple and easy concept to grasp when your conditions of life and labour have deteriorated so much. I think then that's a question of why is it so difficult for people in the left to get their heads around and what are they hanging onto by kind of denying the fact of its legitimacy and also its urgency and why it's come to the fore now. And that's really a question for them to answer and not us. But in terms of, I think that if we think about the women's strike one way to think about it is about taking all of those private conversations, those private disagreements and those arguments that we have with our partners and with our husbands around who it is that needs to do the washing up, who needs to pick up the kids that really wear you down and that really form a basis of our domestic life and it's about taking all of those disagreements and about bringing them into the public and about making them a public form of action. And I really think that for lots of people that's a really transformative process. So the women's strike for me and I think for a lot of women around the world isn't about what necessarily happens on March the 8th. It's about the process and the kinds of conversations that women are having with each other and also that we're having with our partners what it means to actually leave the house that day and say, you know what, I'm on strike and you're going to have to deal with that. I think it's part of the process of reimagining what politics can be and also reimagining how women's demands need to be central to any kind of vision that we're moving towards in the future. And I think for me, just from my own personal experience around like, oh, are you trying to get in there? No, go on, go on, go on. I was just going to say, can you have an article that was for the website that was about why this strike is an impossible strike and how most industrial strikes, there's a set of demands and then there's a whole negotiation with the powers that be and then the workers and it's a struggle but with a women's strike it's broader than that. It doesn't have a set of demands that can be easily solved and I think that's really beautiful because when you have demands they have to be compromised. You have to be waiting on a top-down system to grant them and you're asking, well, the women's strike is about nurturing resistance and a political power in people who have not been able to, I guess, bring their issues to a public space, to a public arena and I think that's really important as well. I'm really sorry. No, today, I was just enjoying listening to everyone. For me, the reason this resonated with me it's not so much because I'm a union organiser or because of my politics as a socialist or someone that's on the left. It's because I'm a mum and I only really knew that I was a feminist when I had children after I had babies because there are many different layers of oppression, really, that you experience once you've had babies, just the struggle in your own home, in the kitchen or the bedroom or wherever it is to have equality and an equal sharing of that domestic and reproductive labour, just having to have those continuous arguments over and over again and feeling that you're like a nagging woman. That's how women often get portrayed and it's not like there's so much organising. It's motherhood and the work that I do at home. These are skills that I've had to learn. I don't just inherently have these skills because I'm a woman. These are characteristics and skills that I've had to learn and sometimes these lessons have been really hard to learn and it's like we're socialised into those roles and men are socialised in a completely different way to carry out other roles and women that are in that situation totally get that because they're living it on a day-to-day basis. Like Camille said, the concept for women experiencing those things it's not a difficult concept to grasp. Perhaps for people that aren't necessarily in that situation it might seem a bit obscure but it's not. That makes me think of one of the women that used to babysit me loads as a kid. She's like very UKIP-y, we disagree on everything but the one thing we agree on is wages for housework. She's a mum of five and it is that thing of that it's only within these really esoteric circles that I think it doesn't make as much. It seems to be such a difficult thing for people to get their heads around and also one of the biggest, something that feminism contributed to political conversations was this idea that what happens in the private there is no private and public sphere there is no hard and fast division and it's that idea that you're having all of these arguments with your partner it's not because you're with a uniquely shit dude or you have a uniquely shit dad it's because that's a political setup that situates you both in that position. Obviously, and we were talking a bit earlier about the different iterations of the feminist movement I was wondering how you see this as fitting into other parts of the women's movement that are happening now so things like Me Too, things like the Women's March do you see this as part of that or bringing something to it or how do you see the relationship between those parts of the movement? I think that what we're witnessing in places like in South America places like North America and also here in the UK in a variety of different ways is a real rupture around how the gendered contract is kind of being negotiated and I think with Me Too there's a similarity between the women's strike what we were talking about before about taking all of those individual experiences and conflicts and arguments around women's work and about making them public Me Too was a kind of similar thing it was about linking up and starting to see the kind of connections that exist around questions around sexual harassment in the workplace that you're not alone that actually millions of women around the world responded to that moment and outpouring and really the flood is relentless at this point we've toppled a whole variety of previously really important figures out of the entertainment business and it shows no sign of abating in any way and it's really taken different forms around the world in terms of places like Finland we had 90% of women in some industries signing open petitions talking about the Me Too phenomenas in their industry I think though the question is despite a desire maybe for it hashtags and memes aren't going to save us and they're certainly not going to dismantle systemic violence and exploitation so the women's strike is a question around what kinds of political power and what kinds of collective action do we need to take to change the very system that produces women as inferior and secondary in the first place and also shines a light on saying that obviously sexual harassment isn't just something that happens in Hollywood sexual harassment and gendered violence is endemic across all industries and it's really at the heart of women's labour exploitation and that's I think the conversation of adding the question around labour and work and strikes and all of the kind of conversations that come up when you start talking about a strike to this current moment around Me Too I think what the Me Too movement was so interesting in highlighting was a lot of the things that put women in that low wage labour and in the domestic sphere all of the things that are taken as reasons why women are naturally good at particular kinds of labour the very places where that's weaponised against them in the form of violence Did anyone else have anything to respond to that question about the relationship to the Me Too movement and the women's march? I think with a lot of women's feminism at the moment is quite internet based and that's the same thing you can see with a lot of the left and what I think is really great about the women's strike is that all the things that we have on social media is to get people together in a space in a public space to make it an IRL interaction with politics and I think that's essential now because everyone gets caught up with social media and hashtags as if hashtags won't change bring about liberation or change anything I don't know that much about the women's march so I can't say anything about that I think it's really powerful that people could share their experiences with Me Too but I feel that we need more concrete ways of politicising other than just the performative participation of social media we need to actually participate with each other by looking at each other and seeing how we can energise and support each other flash to flash, face to face I also think it's about unionisation in terms of where we see instances of women being able to fight back about violence in the workplace is when they have a union and also I think then that what the women's strike starts to do both experiences of violence outside of the workplace with experiences of violence in the workplace as well and so it's not enough just to have a union at work actually we need to be using our labour power and the strength that we have as workers to start effecting other spheres of life whether that be demanding ecological justice and using our labour power to ensure that we're not continuing to fuck the earth and bring about the apocalypse in a really short period of time or whether or not women start to use our industrial strength to create the changes that we need outside of the wage labour market and I think it's like with me too it's become so much about getting people fired when like what I've found with the women's strike assembly is that I've made connections and found support networks with women who are also wanting to unionise to work together towards this event or this movement and creating a movement positive justice strike as well creating support networks through that I think that the women's strike and the me too movement need to become intertwined so for example like I was reading about the experiences of American female hospitality workers and particularly waitresses that rely on tips to top up their really low wages and they have to behave in a certain way towards their customers if they're going to get those tips and that involves allowing men to touch them having to kind of stroke men's egos behaving in a certain way that apparently women should behave in order to get those tips and it's back to that point that you made it's about unionisation it's about having the industrial and collective strength to challenge the structures that force women into that position in the first place and that's obviously particularly an issue for migrant women as well and particularly if you're an undocumented worker how can you possibly challenge if your boss is exploiting you and he's demanding other things off of you as well so you keep your job how do you challenge that if you are in a particularly vulnerable position and again it's back to having strong workplace organising and women leading that workplace organising and I don't think it's just around traditional recognised unions like what we've seen across the board in London is grass roots, militant unions organising migrant workers some of them with irregular immigration status overwhelmingly in the service sector and what's the one thing that's getting the goods in terms of bringing about the London living wage it's the tactic of a strike it's the ability, the confidence and actually going out and doing it not just threatening it apologising for doing it but actually going out on strike and we're seeing previously unheard of or unimaginable kind of gains where outsourced workers are being brought back in house back into the kinds of conditions that some of the people who hire up the food chain have taken for granted for a long time things like maternity pay, sick pay, holiday pay and so I think that actually migrant women in grass roots unions have really actually leading the working class in the United Kingdom at the moment and it's a wake up call to trade unions to both organise those people to be combative and also to I think the women's strike is about challenging the fact that industrial struggle doesn't end at the employment contract like that's something, that's a loss we've lost that in terms of like we are the workers of the world and we make the world and our lives extend past our employment contracts and I think we've got to start to think about using the leverage that we have in the workplace to start demanding the kinds of change that we want to see across the board and like so much of that relies on like an internalisation of like you have no political power you have no political voice especially if you're undocumented this idea of like we have complete control over you and it's about kind of like using that through your labour power you actually have the power to shut this shit down essentially but on the topic as well of like particularly kind of migrant women in this country sort of leading the left in kind of becoming much more militant and doing the kinds of actions that gets the goods as I'm sure you all know and a lot of you guys at home will know there are currently women in Yale's Wood which is an all women's detention centre in Bedfordshire that have been on hunger strike for several days now and they are protesting the inhuman conditions that they are facing in indefinite detention so in what a lot of the detainees have referred to as a prison essentially women have been experiencing sexual violence they've been experiencing really underpaid like low wage labour and they've also been experiencing the denial of healthcare particularly specialised healthcare for pregnant and trans women and this has been amounted to one detainee has called systemic torture and this is all in addition obviously to the fact of indefinite detention and all detention which is a form of violence in itself and one that the British Medical Association has actually said needs to be phased out because of its impact on the health of detainees so obviously like this is really relevant because it's a form of strike and it's being led by women but could you tell me a bit about the role that you know like borders detention centres and like immigration policy as a whole plays in creating the conditions for this kind of structural as well as interpersonal violences that women face in all of their workplaces. So like with the solidarity with the y Osred hunger strikers firstly I think we need to be paying attention to what they're doing and it's really ridiculous the conditions that they're living in and how Britain can like delude itself into thinking oh yeah we're such a progressive and liberal society or whatever like yeah it's fucked up and I was trying to stop myself from saying that and I remembered yeah it's right I was just like updating myself on it and then hunger strikers have had to like sign documents where like they're away the liability of Sarko and the Home Office if they die for example and also like their medication is being denied because they're striking and some hunger strikers have even been deported and it's all like how being a migrants within the UK you have to police yourself in like whether you're in your interaction in the workplace with law, with justice system and that you have this black mark on you whether it's with your skin colour or just like your nationality where you're constantly feeling under threat that you cannot speak out, you cannot say anything you cannot make any demands to be treated fairly migrant women or migrant and parent women because they're dehumanised within mainstream media they can be violated or whether it's like through microaggressions or like their hijab being pulled off or just people shouting things at them welcome discrimination from housing or getting starting jobs and these are all structural as well as physical ways that you can experience violence because of your status, your citizenship status and even if you are a citizen but you just look or sound as if you're not that instantly means that you face forms of police brutality stuff and search or like just through I guess like internalised racism that your bosses might have towards you because they expect you to behave in a certain way you're supposed to be a lot more subordinate, you're supposed to assume the subordinate role I also think it's about thinking about how we take the strategy of the women's strike to start to think through some other areas that we want to change for instance how do we get rid of prevent out of the education system how do we get rid of it out of high schools and out of universities well in primary and high school who are the workers in that industry that industry is overwhelmingly a female industry and certainly across the US at the moment we're starting to see women teachers really waking up, I don't know if anyone else has been following West Virginia but there's currently a wildcat strike going on there where we're refusing to go back to work until they get not only a pay-a-deal for themselves but for all state employees and so I think that what we're starting to see is this question around like it's not just around wages and conditions is it it's around what does your job do and if your job is about racially profiling students in your classroom then we need to start to think about politicising those questions and reconnecting them back to the question of how do we take action against them against those kinds of sexist or racist manifestations and I think the strike it's not the answer but it opens up a series of questions and a series of conversations and it gives us a tactic to think through some of those things and I think especially in questions around reproductive labour like lots of people have said to us but midwives can't strike but nurses can't strike and sure a skeletal staff need to stay in place because no one wants the women strike to mean that people end up getting harmed or that they can't have their babies with the kind of support and care that they need to have but what does how do we confront the absolute crisis that the NHS is in do we tell women that do we take away the one industrial strategy that women need to be able to save the NHS and how do we start to think about who's accessing the NHS so what does patient and worker action taken together start to do and I think that's what the strike for me is like it doesn't just position you as a worker or as a mother but allows you to transverse across different identities and start to think about workplaces in a way that can actually bring about the kind of change that we need to basically get rid of the Tories to stop austerity and also to confront the social crisis that's currently unfolding across the United Kingdom. It's about building power essentially. So those of you who want to show solidarity with the Yarswood hunger strike there's actually a solidarity fast that's taking place on International Women's Day and you can go to freedomfastyarswood.com to find out more. We're going on a short break now but stay tuned because we will be joined by Molly Gerlach Arthur's from the sex worker advocacy and resistance movement who will be talking about the sex work strike. Stay tuned. This is my crime. The most civilised society in the world. The most supremely power country of the art. Why do you need to build a concentrate camp like that? Why do you treat us as criminals? Do we look like non-human? I was detained four years ago. It was a very bad experience. I was there for about three weeks and I was taken to the airport to get deported back into Swaziland and that was so distressing. So people were fighting my case and fighting for me not to get deported which I really appreciate and that's why I'm here today to show the support that I got when I was in there. No I didn't get as far as getting to the plane but I got to the part whereby I was sitting in a room in the airport whilst they were preparing to take me back and I was just sitting there very hopeful that I wouldn't go back because of all the support that I knew I was getting from the media and from other people that I don't know which was very helpful for me. I am a refugee. My claim was successful which I'm very grateful for. It wasn't clear what was happening at that time but they brought me back to the detention after the deportation failed and I think I stayed here for a few days before I was released. I think Yal's Wood needs to be shut down because anyone who's in there is not a criminal and has not created any offences. They're just human beings just like everyone else and they deserve to be treated like human beings. Hello everyone, welcome back to The Fix. In this part of the show we're going to be discussing what the fuck is the sex worker strike. So joining me for this part we've got Camille Barbagallo again and we've also got Molly Gerlach Arthur's. So let's get right into it Molly Do you tell me a little bit about the plans for the 8th March sex work strike and what your core central demands are? OK, so the reason we're having this strike is that there's a huge need to recognise that sex workers are a huge and valid labour force especially in the UK and it's absolutely impossible to improve conditions in a labour force when huge parts of it are criminalised. And sex workers are already collecting. We've got Swarm in the UK sex worker advocacy and resistance movement we've got the English Collective of Prostitutes we've got East London Strippers Collective but it's really hard for sex workers voices to be heard when they can't really disclose their status and what sex worker groups are saying is that rescue missions are not working shutting down venues is not working what is needed is due criminalisation what is needed is rights for workers so what we're doing on that 8th March is we are gathering at 7pm Dean Street in Soho and we're going to march through Soho wearing red, making lots of noise and just demanding decriminalisation for all sex workers in the UK. Yeah and there's obviously a really long history of particularly middle class particularly white feminist movements of not only pushing sex workers out of the movement but actually actively advocating for policies that harm sex workers ironically in the name of protecting women or protecting women's rights so can you tell me a bit about why it's really important that this women's strike doesn't just passively include sex workers but actually centralise as sex worker rights as core to its political objectives I think really including the politics is like the beige of radical politics in that we don't actually, I'm not interested in trying to build a feminist movement that tries to include a whole variety of people that have been excluded especially when there hasn't really been a reckoning about some of the politics that kind of makes sex icky where people selling sex are somehow whores and deviants and need to be rehabilitated like all of these questions need to be kind of brought to the fore and we need to have the argument out in the meantime decriminalisation of sex work is really a demand whose time has come in my eyes what we've seen around the world for decades and centuries is that criminalisation not only doesn't work but it makes the industry unsafe and it's the when you've got collusion with police, when you've got corruption and also when you empower bosses to treat workers however they want so if you want to change the sex industry the only way to do that is to give power to workers and the only way that workers can organise at work like we don't just want legal change the law amazingly won't save us but people coming together in their workplaces to start to change the sex industry can only happen under conditions of decriminalisation I think the feminism that excludes sex workers from the narrative is very much the feminism of respectability and respectability politics it's feminist who want to be seen in a certain way in a very sterile way it's feminist who want to be able to succeed in business and really what sex worker movements in the UK are saying is fuck your respectability politics it doesn't matter about being respected or seen in a certain way this is a welfare issue decriminalisation is life or death and honestly who could give a shit and see sex workers sex workers just need safety it's so contradictory isn't it because it's like as long as you reinforce and leave intact that kind of Madonna whore binary you're leaving intact the greatest weapon that's used against you and it's like the answer isn't saving or any of that bullshit it's like solidary and that seems to be just something that it's a particular middle class and also white feminist position but another thing that I've kind of found really interesting particularly and something that I think isn't highlighted that much is like the relationship that Theresa May has with sex workers actually not highlighted very much but during her stint as like home secretary one of her big things and now one of her big things is like anti trafficking anti slavery kind of work and this has often been used as a veil to basically crack down on sex workers and to also like really bolster borders so one example was there was a huge like crack down on sex work which involved like high policing of areas where sex workers work and like just after I think it was the Olympics even though there was no reason to like there was no evidence that there was any kind of rise in actual trafficking but this kind of all seems to like there seems to be a really intimate connection between migrant controls and like the oppression of sex workers so I was wondering like firstly you know if you could talk to me about you know the relationship between migrant rights and sex worker rights and how the sex work strike is kind of negotiating this idea that you can't talk about migrants rights without talking about sex worker rights and you can't talk about sex worker rights without talking about migrant worker rights essentially yeah I think that what we've seen in the UK especially over the last 10 years is this ramping up of the idea that all migrants in the sex industry are trafficked basically which is a pretty racist concept really and it's racist to the extent that it strips migrant women of any agency and it also kind of denies the fact that lots of women sell sex in a whole variety of different industries not just in the sex industry but that we sell and trade and use sex in a whole variety of different ways so I think it makes invisible first of all the kind of sexual currency that women use and trade and are expected to use in other industries and it also completely makes migrant sex workers into these kind of like the proper good victims basically who are just waiting for white men usually in police uniforms to beat down the door to drag them out to not listen to their stories to arrest them if they're not good victims enough and really there is no settlement processes there's no residency at the end of the trafficking process so really actually at the end of the day what we're seeing is that migrant women get caught up in these raid processes and actually what happens if they get deported and that's been happening for the last 10 years in more and more ways across the industry and so the question is not if you're not trafficking exists of course trafficking exists exists in the sex industry also exists in agriculture exists in domestic service it exists bonded labour and forced labour occurs when workers don't have enough power to resist the kind of processes that mean that you end up in really shit labour conditions but amazingly we have a huge amount of laws that already exist in relationship to things like this new addition of anti-trafficking kind of hysteria really just applies to migrant women men are never really considered to be trafficked and that really tells you something about the discourse around trafficking men get people smuggled because they get to have agency through their migration processes but women don't women have to be duped we have to be told a narrative that women in fact thought they were coming to bright into sell ice cream but then amazingly what happened is they ended up in a brothel right so that kind of making child like women is a really old trick and it's one that we need to call out and just call basically the racist bullshit that it is so I think a lot of the reason that migrants are involved in sex work is because sex work is a business is marginalised people people who are sex workers are overwhelmingly people who have not been able to succeed in the capitalist system that we live in for many reasons migration status disability gender in the sense that whether or not they are transgender or LGBTIQA plus people the work that we have under capitalism is a hostile place for anyone who does not really easily conform so I think a lot of the people who end up in sex work choose to join the industry because it's a place where their identities can't be used against them in the same way that big business can use identities against people I also think that people end up in the sex industry because it actually pays better than the vast majority of women's work it's kind of about money stupid is what I would say to Theresa May so if you don't want women to work in the sex industry you need to pay other women more money and that enables other work to actually become a viable solution because the minimum wage in this country is a poverty wage it actually means that you can claim benefits that's how low it is and so these questions around the sex industry are not removed they're central to women's work they're central to women's experiences and so we can't allow the sex industry to be packaged off as some kind of deviant problem child over here that feminism gets kind of wring its hands about and doesn't really know what to do and makes everyone feel a bit icky but instead actually we need to bring sex workers and the question around the work of sex to the center of feminism and then actually see a whole variety of other questions that open up and some of those contradictions are not easy no one's here to cheerlead the sex industry sex industry needs to be massively transformed the only people that can do that are the workers within it not the men in Westminster who are our clients not the police who are in collusion with bosses so in terms of it's an age old thing the people who know best how to create that change are those who actually experience it I would really love to see the stats on what sectors get hit the hardest by sex work strikes because I can imagine that it's like Whitehall and the city and stuff but yeah I mean and I think it's just sort of it's so because obviously sex work strikes have existed for a really long time as well but it's still something that kind of hasn't and even in conversations around intersectionality and opening up and forcing open the gates of feminism I still am not seeing sex work spoken about enough do you have any idea why that might be or do you think that's just me not looking in the right place essentially I think the whole idea of sex work and its involvement in feminism opens up a lot of questions that people don't want to address and the whole discourse that second and third way feminism was built around does not allow for women particularly to be seen in disrespectful ways so there is this kind of idea around sex that it's shameful and because women have been seen as things to provide sex that we should be moving away from that in order to gain any kind of traction in a feminist movement and a lot of the things that feminists are saying about sex work is that they're betraying the movement or they're even betraying their own genders just by doing what they need to to get by in arc after the society and I think again it all comes down to respectability and it comes down to saying that sex work doesn't need to be palatable to people for it to exist and for the people within it to be safer and I think lots of feminists just don't want to accept that sex workers are here and that it's not something that can just be deleted from society Also the sex work strike isn't just for sex workers so at 7pm on International Women's Day people haven't really had an opportunity to come out in support of decriminalisation this is your opportunity to come out in support of decriminalisation and to start having a think about your own conditions of sex in your own life and all of the different ways that actually sex is commodified even if you don't consider yourself a prostitute That's a really good note to end it on actually so thank you so much to all of our guests for making this like one of the most memorable fix shows that I've ever like that I can think of This is the end of our season at the fix now so we're going on a little break but don't worry there will be plenty of online content for you thirsty cyborgs out there we still have all of our regular podcast so Navara FM all the best the lockdown Tisgu Sawa will also be filming from this very studio every week we also have some hot video content coming out and our articles which you can find on the website so there's plenty there to fill the fixed shaped hole in your life but in the meantime it goes without saying that I will see you all on the streets this Thursday Ciao for now For every woman who is sick to death I've been sexually harassed and bullied at work For every woman going hungry and unable to heat their house For every woman who expects to earn less than her male colleague then come home and start a second shift of cooking, cleaning and caring For every woman of transgender experience who is subject to violence and whose womanhood is denied by the state her doctor, her employers and those around her For every woman who works to keep the national health and education systems functioning and has not received a pay rise in years For every woman that has faced violence at the hands of partners, friends colleagues or bosses and is not believed For every woman who is kept powerless by her stigma For every woman suffering benefit cuts and poverty wages For every woman who is told she's just going through a phase and has endured homophobia, biphobia or queerphobia at home at work or in the street For every woman who faces violence from the state through mass incarceration immigration raids and racist policing On the 8th of March 2018 women across the world are going on strike This is a call to action for women in the UK to join the strike We will refuse to work We will be on the streets We will shut things down and disrupt business as usual We strike We strike