MIGRANTE International
March 8, 2024
Migrante International salutes and links arms with all oppressed and working women of the world who are celebrating International Working Women’s Day by organizing various protest actions, demonstrations, strikes and marches to declare and assert their collective demands for justice, rights to land and food, education, decent jobs and secure livelihood, higher wages, and healthcare.
The profit-driven global monopoly capitalist system, escalating US-led wars of aggression, interventions, occupation and militarization, corporate plunder of the environment and natural resources, government repression, persecution and widespread corruption, has resulted in millions of people all over the world facing intensifying oppression and exploitation, mass displacement, hunger, poverty, rising costs of living, basic commodities and services, landlessness, homelessness, unemployment, low-wages, drastic budgets cuts to critical social services, destruction of the environment, violence, death and rampant human rights violations. These economic and political crises are the root causes of forced migration, driving millions to leave their homelands, communities and families.
Filipino migrant workers stand in solidarity with the toiling women of the world who are courageously resisting and rising up against all forms of oppression, inequalities and injustices. They are at the forefront of global movements for social change and democracy, movements for national liberation and self-determination, and revolutionary movements. Women workers from various sectors—transport, manufacturing, agricultural, education, healthcare, public sector—are staging strikes and demonstrations asserting their rights to living wages and benefits, safety in the workplace and the right to form unions and associations. Peasant and rural women are fighting against land-grabbing, government cuts for agricultural subsidies, and neoliberal economic policies that destroy local production and livelihood. Indigenous women are advancing climate justice and defending their ancestral lands from destructive operations by multi and transnational corporations. Women migrant workers are upholding their rights to decent and humane working conditions and combating all forms of harassment, discrimination, and racism.
Filipino women migrant workers are denouncing the five decades long profit-oriented government program of exporting Filipinos, especially women as cheap, temporary labor with no rights and protection. They are fighting back and demanding accountability from the Marcos Jr. government for failing to protect and provide services and support to thousands of victims of labor exploitation, human trafficking and illegal recruitment, and punish the criminals and complicit government officials who profit from their victimization.
Joining the growing and urgent clamor of the Filipino people and women of all sectors, Filipino migrant workers are also amplifying its calls to oppose the US-Marcos Jr regime’s plans to amend the constitution (“cha-cha”) that would open the Philippine economy to foreign capitalists and imperialist plunder and control, intensify government corruption by political dynasties and bureaucrat capitalists, and expand US political and military domination in the country. This would only aggravate the economic and political conditions that force millions of Filipinos to leave the country each day.
We call on all Filipino migrant workers to unite and fight alongside the working women and oppressed peoples of the world for a better future for our families and communities to break down all systems of oppression, exploitation and foreign control. Together, we must organize and advance our struggle for freedom, democracy, justice and peace.
Long live the toiling women of the world!
Long live international solidarity!
Fight for peace, justice freedom, and democracy!
