Next week, a virtual symposium will highlight past and possible future strikes by care workers, the vast majority of whom are women.

On Thursday, March 10, members of the Brock community are invited to take part in an online symposium entitled, “Postpandemic Care Strikes: Centring Migration and Critical Race perspectives.”

The event, hosted by Simon Black in Brock’s Department of Labour Studies and Maud Perrier of the University of Bristol, will feature speakers from unions and organizations representing care workers in both the formal and informal care sectors in the Global North and Global South.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the crisis of care, but also laid bare how this crisis impacts women and families differentially depending on social location,” says Black. “As we exit the pandemic, how care workers globally assert the value of their work and demand recognition, respect and better pay is a question we will explore in this symposium.”

Black says labour history often focuses on major industrial strikes and action by working men, but that view overlooks a long tradition of women’s care strikes, including a few key examples:

• The Atlanta Washerwoman Strike of 1881, when thousands of African American laundresses went on strike to demand better pay and working conditions.
• The Icelandic women’s strike of 1975 demanding equal pay, when 90 per cent of Icelandic women refused to do both paid work and unpaid care work.
• Recent strikes by Australian and Quebec child-care workers and protests globally by domestic workers.
• Last year’s wave of health-care worker strikes in the U.S.

Next week’s event will look at such issues as how strikes could tackle racial divisions in care work and the possibilities of international and cross-sector care strikes in the context of this history.

“We have an excellent lineup of speakers representing care worker organizations from both the Global North and Global South, including a keynote talk by Premilla Nadasen, a Professor of History at Barnard College at Columbia University,” says Black. “Dr. Nadasen has researched and written extensively about the visions of liberation of poor and working-class women of colour, including in the domestic workers’ movement.”

The symposium is part of the Sociological Review Seminar Series and funded by the Sociological Review Foundation. Anyone interested in attending the virtual symposium can register online for free through Eventbrite.

What: Postpandemic Care Strikes: Centring Migration and Critical Race perspectives
When: Thursday, March 10 from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Where: Online
To register: Visit the event web page on Eventbrite