argia.eus
INPRIMATU
Analysis
Patriarchal debt
Ainhoa Etxaide Amorrortu 2023ko otsailaren 20a
Soldata arrakalari aurre egiteko ekimen baten aurkezpena Gasteizen 2020an (argazkia: LAB)

We working women must denounce and demand on 22 February, the international day for claiming equal pay, and we will do so again. Furthermore, there will be no waste, we have managed to recognise the existence of the wage gap and to recognise the causes of discrimination. So far we have brought the institutions, so we have positioned ourselves with the employers’ debate, we have started to put the issue of the gap on the business agenda… it is not a little. But there we are.

There is little point in bringing to the speeches “we will always be indebted to the women who have been caring”, if then there is no willingness to recognize what is really worth all this work under the conditions imposed by the system, and if we do not measure the economic cost that has meant to women, to pay what it owes us. It is a fraud to recognise the wage gap and to put the solution in the labour market. Because they know that there is no democratic model of labor relationship to advance in this way, nor is there a sociopolitical process that seeks a relationship of strength or a structural change.

We have won the struggle for recognition of the gap. But we need new steps to force a process that aims to revolutionize a model based on the sexual division of labor. The proposals are there: make a new evaluation of the works that have been reserved for women; update the salaries of the feminized sectors through the corrective variable we call patriarchal debt; reorganize the care to distribute them among men, women, the community and the public system...