Trade Union Solidaires - Call for Mobilisation on International Women's Day Against the Macron Law

My translation of the Trade Union Solidaires' call for mobilisation against the Macron Law on IWD. The original in French is available here.

8 March 2015: International Day of Women's Rights
A Sunday that Macron will not!

Women's struggles helped win the rights and progress towards equality between women and men. Affected by wage and pension inequality, part-time work, job insecurity, women are mostly in charge of domestic and family tasks. Equality is a long struggle!

For several years, strong attacks against social rights are hitting all employees but women even more: in spite of professional equality laws, and despite the "gender" focus that the current government was supposed to implement on all its laws ... As evidence, the Macron law which provides among other things extension of work on Sundays and expansion of late hours. Which mostly concern women ...

Our Sunday evenings and nights belong to us!

56% of employees who work on Sundays are women (Dares figures, 2012). Majority of employees in retail, young women in poor neighborhoods are particularly affected. In an attempt to trivialise the change - gradually increasing work on Sunday openings from 5 to 12 per year, with up to 52 Sundays in some tourist areas, and establishing night of work between 9 pm and midnight, are true social regressions!

Many of the employees affected by this law (trade, hotels, cleaning) are already experiencing job insecurity, part-timers and low wages. How can we think they are "free" to choose to work on Sunday? The Macron law poses financial gain as decoy rather than imposing wage increases in sectors where wage increases are essential.

Work on Sundays and late night is free time, the time for yourself (time which women sorely lack!), A number of studies show a relationship between atypical schedules and the resurgence of problems in family life and social relations ... Women living alone with children account for almost a quarter of households, and are the ones most affected by the jobs covered by the Act. Extending Sunday work is to take the path of a more unjust society, where women are more precarious and have more difficulties in their professional and personal lives.

The law takes us further down the road of increased flexibility and to the company that "operates" 24 hours a day – 7 days a week ... Each driving the other in a vicious circle, commerce, transportation, child care, etc. .. And it will allow, sooner or later, the opportunity for employers to question the increased pay paid for work on Sundays, allowing to it become a "normal” day.

The Trade Union Solidarity calls for all employees to participate in the mobilizations of 8 March to demand:

• The end of all inequality, all violence and all forms of discrimination. 
• Removal of the Macron law!