Swiss women strike for more money, time and respect
bbc.com
bbc.com
Things are better today than in the past thanks to people fighting for their and others rights. And the job is not finished.
Democracy is not something that happens once each four years. It's important to vote, but as important is to express your dissatisfaction with the wrongdoings of the system.
> Ms Born, who joined a newsroom staffed entirely by men in 1986, is quietly optimistic. "We've achieved some good things since 1991," she points out. "We have maternity leave now."
Parental leave seams such a natural right to have that it's strange that there exists any opposition to it. Mothers and fathers benefit from it. Fighting for women's rights is also figthing for a more just and balance society for everyone.
Yet our government (I'm swiss) stubbornly refuses to introduce a paternity leave. This will hopefully change in the coming years because they will be forced to through an initiative (one collected enough signatures already and a vote will follow).
There's opposition to it for a number of reasons:
1. Employers are people, and peoples first reactions to anything is almost universally selfish: "how does this negatively affect me? And why should I suffer financially for someone else's gain?"
2. Most policy makers are still men, and policy makers only decide policy based on their own experiences. If they haven't suffered from lack of maternity leave, they won't prioritize it as an issue.
Protest is a means of shaking the sleeping masses and getting your message into the public consciousness. That's how you make change happen when nobody in power is motivated to change. Once you build enough momentum, they have to change.
He also has enough time to plan the replacement since the leave can be announce 6 months or so in advance.
https://www.bsv.admin.ch/bsv/en/home/social-insurance/eo-msv...
https://www.ahv-iv.ch/en/Leaflets-forms/Leaflets/Contributio...
There are other mandatory insurance deductions. Let's say the employer and the employee agree upon a wage of CHF 7500 a month, then first the employer deducts premiums of 5.125% or CHF 384 and also adds CHF 384 on his own and sends the money to the compensation office where the employer is located.
From my own experience as an employer I know that the compensation offices are very strict and know how levy the monies even from small mom-and-pop shops with employees. They are also helpful, as an employer you can call them or visit them and do what is neccessary. It's an efficient and tightly organized system.
What are “women’s rights”? Is parental leave for men (or non-female genders or whatever is the correct way nowadays to refer to people who are not women) one of “women’s rights”?
They are hugely under-represented in blue-collar jobs, as well. And over-represented in the health sciences, many fields of academia, and social work. Would all that be unfair to men?
They can repeat this operation as often as they please.
Switzerland is a modern country and many have the same liberal values we all know but there appears to be a sizeable proportion which regard women for their, shall we say, utilitarian value and little else.
Given this backdrop, this strike shows that while there has been progress there is still a long way to go. Comparisons with the situation in other countries is a little unfair.
It's especially not the case in jobs requiring a degree, because degree holders are way more likely to have opted out and done either the civil service or pretended they were unfit and pay an extra tax instead.
However I guess it can slow things down from a different angle because currently the only gender currently legally oppressed is men, since the law guarantee the same rights to all but forces men into the conscription. This can breed some resentment, especially since progressives regularly fail to address it properly.
I am Switzerland so I don't have the context maybe but calling swiss culture male dominated seems pretty strange to me. Can you explain what that even means?
I am all for taking parental leave supported with full pay and benefits for a good long time, but is there a point where that support stops? Six months? A year? Two?
It's not for everyone but some people will exit the work force for years for family. I don't think it is surprising or discrimination to expect there to be a gender bias in people making that decision. Those people are included in statistics.
Is it right to expect that choice to have financial consequences or do we want to fully financially support that decision for some as a society and make it a money neutral decision?
Forcing people to trade their future income and security to raise kids is terrible.
Living myself in Switzerland, married with a mother who stayed at home during the first 15 years of parentship, I can tell you we solved this without the government, we solved it as a team.
Just like we solved all our private matters.
The one thing we love about this country is that people here do NOT see tax as a solution to all. As a matter of fact, since this is a country with direct democracy, if we'd feel tax would be the solution we could initiate a referendum and solve that within months.
Roads, parks, power lines, communications cables, police, welfare, healthcare, sewage, electricity, clean water, healthy food, safe consumer products, clean environment, justice, protection for the vulnerable, duck wetlands, women's shelters, protection of creative works... These all cost money, and you pay for them with your taxes. Not everything goes equally to everyone, and not everything benefits everyone (by necessity), but the aggregate benefit is huge.
I am not at all that anything is, but I am saying in many cases we are closer to the finish line than the starting line. (If we come to think of it there are things which have been completed to the extent that many people don't even know they existed)
In some cases the good fight for equality has transferred into something besides good or equal.
When do you start thinking about how to cross the finish line and what should you do?
>However, women in Switzerland still earn on average 20% less than men, they are under-represented in management positions, and childcare remains not only expensive, but in short supply.
Women are less valuable? How will a strike solve this? I mean if this was true and I was a business owner I would only hire women because I could pay 20 % less. But of course that's not the way it works. Those "facts" are manipulative.
And the reason may not be in the realm of misogynist inclinations depicted at high levels of government, it may be the case on average women choose professions that pay less.
We know that men are more likely to go into “nerdy” professions such as math or engineering, whereas women are more likely to go into the caring professions and to spend more time looking after children [0].
0: Geary (2010); Halpern (2012); Maccoby and Jacklin (1974)
Ah I see you edited. Yes that was exactly my point. If they expect to get the same money for nursing that you can get for designing rockets then that's basically Communism.
One can argue its a society problem, but its not an education problem. Woman are overrepresented and get more education in general.