The World Movement of Christian Workers (WMCW) celebrates May 1st as one of the most important events for workers and reasserts its solidarity and communion with all men and women who are suffering from serious injustice at work.

Labour precariousness, widespread unemployment, exploitation and slavery affecting many workers are but a consequence of a market-driven approach imposed on labour by the neoliberal economic powers. Workers who are creating wealth through their labour and who should be benefitting from production as Pope John Paul II explained it in his Encyclical Laborem Exercem, are just valued by companies because of the financial profit they make for the company. In periods of recession and restructuring, workers are the first ones to lose their job without any compassion or respect for their rights and dignity.

"Let us open the future for world of solidarity" was the slogan of the last General Assembly of the WMCW. To achieve this we need to analyze the reality around us. On this 8th March, International Women's Day, we want to focus specifically on the reality of rural women in Nicaragua.

 

Women around us who live in very poor rural areas around the cities, where there is an absence of security for them, neither in the streets nor in their own homes. Women who do not see why celebrate on March 8. Women who only earn half as much as men, simply because they are women. Women forced to accept sexual favours for a contract, abused women, humiliated, exploited, used, murdered, women trapped in patriarchal societies.

 

Most of them are young. They can be seen near railway stations or in queues in front of local administration offices. They are looking for guidance information on housing or possibilities to obtain food. Their poor knowledge of the local language makes their communication difficult and too few people take time to answer their questions. In turn, when a dialogue is started, when trust overcomes fear, when brotherhood is lived, everything becomes possible and everybody comes out a winner. Whom are we referring to? Migrants, of course!

 

With its 4-year plan adopted in Nantes in October 2009 and worked out in continental seminars, the WMCW wants to open up to new prospects for and with the migrants. While some are building physical or internal walls, it is proposing to build bridges. It announces the possibility of living together and its members are given the means to build up a real fraternity.

Be they victims of an earthquake, of a natural or nuclear catastrophe as so many people are today Japan, be they young without a future as in various Arab countries, or because of unbearable political oppression for whom life has become impossible, as in the Ivory Coast and also in many other countries: there are many valid reasons to leave ones country and search for a welcome elsewhere.

It is not an easy decision for those people who take this path. It means separation from friends and family, and customs or ways of life, which remain in their country until the leave. This decision is often a choice between the insupportable and uncertainty.

On the 8 March 2011, the Movement of Christian Workers invites every woman with or without a job, migrant, volunteer, workers in the informal economy or in the invisible economy, agricultural etc; to celebrate this international day that recognise the unique contribution of women.

On our planet earth, women make up half of humanity. They are indispensable to the happiness of the larger human family, in areas such as on the cultural, social, spiritual, economic or political level.

For more than a hundred years, this day highlights the resilience and struggles of women against all forms of injustice, exploitation and violence. Indeed the 8 March recalls the historic struggle of women workers in the USA They went on strike to obtain just working conditions. One hundred and twenty nine of them perished in a fire at their factory provoked by the authorities.

At its General Assembly in Nantes (France) in October 2009, the World Movement of Christian Workers, MMTC adopted an action plan for the years 2009/2013 around the theme “Migrant Workers and Globalisation”. Starting from the reflections brought by its member movements from the four continents, it has associated itself completely with this world day of migrants and refugees.

The movement of migration has been constant throughout the history of humanity. It is difficult, even impossible to prevent the mobility of human beings. Throughout time, men and women have migrated for economic, political, social, cultural reasons.