March 8th - International Day for the struggle of working women

COLOMBIA

Workers women, vanguard in the fight for the general strike
together with the entire working class, to defeat the regime of the American Military Bases

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Forgotten by the official bourgeois history and silenced by the reformist and Stalinist leaderships...

One hundred years after the first women’s strike in Colombia:

21 DAYS DURING WHICH 400 WORKING WOMEN PARALYZED THE TEXTILE FACTORY OF BELLO

Starting the twentieth century, the great manufacturing industry was born in Colombia, with an important epicenter in Antioquia, where factories employed women and children as a submissive and cheap workforce, reproducing the same manufacturing scheme that prevailed during the industrial revolution of 19th century Europe
As part of a wave of unrest in the middle of an incipient unionization process between 1919 and 1920, workers had to organize to improve their working conditions. The most famous stoppages were those of the artisans of Bogotá, the oil workers of Barrancas, the banana plantations in the Magdalena, the miners of Segovia, the railroads of the Magdalena and the tailors and shoemakers of Medellín, Caldas, Manizales and Bucaramanga.
The emergence of female labor in factories was a socially important phenomenon. In 1920, 73% of the workforce in the Aburrá Valley was composed of women, 85% of whom were single.
The strike of the women workers of Bello was the first that was identified with the label of “strike”, and, like the previous strikes, this was spontaneous, due to the desperation of the workers product of the abuse and the exploitation and conditions of slavery, to which they were submitted.
The Textile Factory of Bello was the first large-scale textile company that was born under the English workshops model. The owner was one of the most eminent bourgeois in Antioquia, Emilio Restrepo Callejas, also a councilor from Medellín, a renowned landowner and promoter of extensive cotton and sugarcane crops. From the beginning their looms employed women, many of them girls between 13 and 15 years old. By 1920, when the strike broke out, it occupied about 400 women and 110 men.
The conditions made the woman workers try to go on strike several times, until on February 12 a group of women stood at the factory door convincing the rest why they should stop. Among the main claims the fight was for a living wage equal to that of men, for the permission to enter to work in slippers since they were forced to do it barefoot, so the strike was named “the strike of the slippers”. Against abuses and humiliations by the foremen, reduction of working hours, revision of fines for accidents and illness.
Among the leaders, was Betsabé Espinal, a young 24-year-old worker; her comrades respected and followed her for her determined and strong character, and natural leadership.
From that same day she was elected by her comrades as protest leader, and organized her comrades in commissions. Before her braveness the threats of the foremen or the prayers of the parish priest, who arrived within a few minutes to try to convince the workers to "end this madness" and return to work meant nothing; nor did the mediation that politicians, even the mayor of Medellin, interposed.
After 21 days of total strike and occupation of the factory and before the intransigence and tenacious decision of the women workers, the advice of some businessmen and the departmental authorities, and even of the same archbishop of Medellin, the employer finally yielded to all the demands of the workers and On March 4, it marked the end of the strike with a resounding victory. A salary increase of 40% was agreed, plus regulation of the fines system, working days of 10 hours and more time for lunch, permission to use footwear in the factory, and the fulminating dismissal of the “stalker” Velásquez and the hated administrators.
The Bello strike is a milestone in the history of the Colombian labor movement; which is consciously left in oblivion; what is unforgivable that those who silence it are the labor movement leaderships by separating the class character from the struggle of working women and diluting it in petty bourgeois feminism.
This struggle, the first of the Colombian working women for their rights, is indissoluble from the struggle milestones that the world working class carried out at the beginning of the 20th century.