When Debenhams placed its eleven Irish shops into liquidation in April 2020, the predominantly female workforce—many of whom had spent their whole working lives behind the bureau de change, at the cosmetic counters, and in the shoe departments—suddenly found themselves out of a job. These staff members launched an official strike on 27 May, protesting for fair redundancy pay.

In order to prevent liquidators KPMG from removing the valuable stock left behind inside the shut-up Debenhams shops, strikers took to running twenty-four-hour pickets outside all premises. Almost a year later, in April 2021, the gardaí were deployed to forcibly break the picketers’ blockade and ensure KPMG could retrieve stock, and moved protesters with such violence that shop steward Jane Crowe alleged six gardaí left her without a top or coat on, and broke her bra strap.

Before the heroic 406 day strike ended in defeat, striking Debenhams worker Madeline Whelan spoke from the picket line. ‘Our lives are on hold. And we are mostly women,’ she said. ‘We are also the people who have to go home to make the dinners and get the houses sorted.’

The corporate capture of International Women’s Day—once International Working Women’s Day—has made it seem as if all that is at stake on 8 March is women consuming more playlists, beers, and takeaways. But as countless examples demonstrate, from the striking Debenhams workers to thousands more across the globe and the decades, that’s far from the truth. What is ultimately at stake on International Women’s Day is the value of the work—paid and unpaid—that women have historically done, and continue to do. It is a stark expression that the fight for better labour conditions is intertwined with the fight for gender justice.

The history of women’s labour militancy around the world is rich and long, covering both paid and unpaid work, and intimately intertwined with the achievements and fluctuations of the labour movement itself. In 1888, young girls and women stopped work in London’s Bryant and May match factory in response to dangerous working conditions. In 1937, women workers at Woolworth’s in Detroit struck for the forty-hour week. The 1968 Dagenham women’s strike was instrumental in the passage of Britain’s Equal Pay Act; the Grunwick dispute, less than ten years later, cast a spotlight on the exploitation that migrant women workers doubly faced. In 1975, a strike by sex workers in France ignited the ongoing movement for decriminalisation, while in the same year the Icelandic women’s strike saw ninety percent of women refuse to cook, clean, or work, bringing the country ‘almost to a standstill’.

Despite the declining power of organised labour more recently, heralded by the ascendancy of neoliberalism, this history is kept alive by a modern worker militancy that today spans sectors. Disputes in workplaces ranging from bars to university campuses have highlighted how female workers are more likely to be on the receiving end of the ravages of precarity and low pay—which puts women on the frontline of capital’s attempts to scratch away at the victories workers have won in previous decades and centuries.

More than fifty percent of those on zero hour contracts are women. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated in 2021 that women were a third more likely to work in occupations that were ‘shut down’ over the Covid-19 lockdowns, and therefore at increased risk of job loss while also being less eligible for furlough. In the same year, figures from the Living Wage foundation noted that women were more likely to be in jobs paying less than a real living wage—twenty-four percent of women, compared with seventeen percent of men. These problems beget more problems: low-paid jobs are often the ones in which workers are more likely to face problems like sexual harassment, for example, and less likely to be able to leave as a result. At home, the Covid-19 lockdowns reinforced the conventional gender division of unpaid housework and childcare, while provisions recently put in place to improve access to abortions, which were vital for working women, are now due to be revoked.

This situation is a historical phenomenon itself. Women entered the labour market en masse later than men, in part in response to the disappearance of the family wage and crisis of the solo breadwinner model, and the paid employment available to those newly seeking work was predominantly in the low-wage care and service economy. Subordinated within the family, yet responsible for sustaining it, women’s availability for providing care at home diminished at the same time as the collapsing welfare state reduced access to alternative formal and informal sites of care.

If Covid-19 has brought new recognition for the work of caregiving, it has been accompanied by a dangerous valorisation of care that has reinforced the idea of caring labour as an expression of women’s innate capacity for altruistic love. In her 1985 work ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’, Donna Haraway noted that work was being redefined as both ‘literally female and feminised’, whether or not it was performed by men. For her, this was a process by which workers were ‘made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force’, and ‘seen less as workers than as servers’.

UCU’s current industrial action, in particular, has mobilised against the expectation that through their love for pupils, staff can overcome the failures of the university. Reflecting on the weaponisation of care in higher education, Emily Baughan, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sheffield, wrote: ‘Our love was the precondition that made our exploitation possible.’ In work like social care, childcare, teaching, and nursing, this remains a defining feature and one bosses and government ministers alike rely on to ensure overwork and prevent workers from taking industrial action or making basic demands. It is here that the characterisation of the caring ‘NHS hero’ becomes a hindrance.

A changed nappy, a set of manicured nails, a sponge bath in a care home, a hot school dinner; the sustaining of collective life through work has been regularly devalued simply because it is done predominantly by women. This is the reality of International Women’s Day. Women’s rights must attend to all forms of work: the work women are paid for, and the work they are expected to do for free.