Workers Solidarity Movement

Why have there been pickets outside massage parlours on Dorset St? Do they really pose any danger? Do these protests help those who work there, or actually make them more afraid and isolated? Watch the video below.

Workers Solidarity Movement position paper on Sex, Gender, and Sexuality as collectively agreed by the July 2017 National Conference. Note this sits under the Patriarchy position paper and so doesn't repeat that material.

Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

        A Workers Solidarity Movement Position Paper

Position paper on Patriarchy as collectively agreed by the July 2017 National Conference. Note this sits underneath the Anarchism, Oppression, & Exploitation position paper.

Patriarchy

        A Workers Solidarity Movement Position Paper

Every year in either Dublin or Belfast the pro and anti choice movements come head to head around the so called ‘Rally for Life’.  This year it was Dublin’s unwilling role to play host to the bigot parade.  It mattered more years than many as a referendum on the hated 8th Amendment that bans abortion is promised for next year.  It could be that the next Dublin bigot parade scheduled for 2019 will come after they have suffered a major defeat.

Saturday saw the annual anti-choice parade and yet again RTE reported a grossly inflated figure of the number marching.  They headlined it as ‘tens of thousands’ and in the body of the article quoted the organisers claiming 70,000 without further comment, appearing to endorse it.  As we are going to show below at the very least that’s a tenfold exaggeration, in fact by our count about 5300 people took part.  And while that estimate might be out by 10 or even 20% its physically impossible for it to be out by up to 1500% as that would require ten people too fit into a one meter square space.

We use the same counting methodologies (see below) for almost every demonstration that takes place in Dublin, from huge anti water charges protests to smaller but still significant ones on a huge range of issues.  We do these sorts of counts more than a dozen times a year.  We don’t always publicise the numbers we reach - organisers always tend to overestimate somewhat, most often guessing a figure that is twice what actually attended.  Generally we agree with what the demands of a demonstration are so we don’t want to appear to undermine it by publicly providing real numbers.  But we do count, we do use those counts internally in the WSM and we often communicate them directly to organisers. 

On Saturday July 1st, people who advocate the right to choose will gather at the Spire at 2pm for the counter demonstration to the 'Rally for Life', which is organised by Precious Life / Youth Defence. The first year of the All Ireland Rally of Lies was 2007. This year, the event is in Dublin. In alternate years, it is held in Belfast. Since 2011, Rally for Choice has been a counter presence. For those on Facebook, find the event page here.

To mark the 7th Counter Demo, here are 7 lies from the Rally for ‘Life’ website.

1 - They Don't '#SaveLives#

The following has been written by a collective of women activists in Ireland in part in response to an article that appeared in the Irish Times on Identity Politics and the way 'men on the left' engaged with that article.  The version here is the original form as published meaning  the signatures are those who were involved at some level in the drafting process.  Additional names were added after publication, see link at the end.  One of our members, Andrew,  produced a timeline of key documents and discussion around this piece which explains the context in a lot more details.

Intersectionality has been critiqued in both the mainstream media and on the Left as nothing more than a sophisticated version of identity politics, which is seen to undermine class struggle. We have considered these critiques and sought to clarify for ourselves whether we think that ‘intersectional feminism’ is still a useful term. As we will argue below, we think that it is incorrect to elide intersectionality with identity politics. In fact, when intersectionality theory was first formulated by Black feminists it was specifically intended to be both a critique of and an alternative to identity politics. What we continue to debate, however, is whether the term has now acquired a new set of meanings from those with which it was originally imbued, and therefore if it can be ‘reclaimed’.

This is the audio of a talk – Sex Work 101 - given by a member of the Workers Solidarity Movement after a WSM Dublin branch meeting in April 2017.

Protests took place across Ireland Saturday 22nd April to protest the plan by Health Simon Harris to give the new maternity hospital, which will cost 300 million to build, to the same nuns who ran the Magdeline laundaries!  The Sisters of Charity ran the Drumcondra and Sean MacDermott Street laundaries where expectant and recent mothers were essentially imprisoned and required to provide free labour that the numns profited from.