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March 8th celebrated international women's day, so don't do laundry, cook, clean and eat chocolate.

BWI Online
2006

Geneva / Switzerland, 8 March 2006: The Building and Wood Workers International (BWI) celebrates international women's day and engages to further advance womens' rights in bulding, wood, forestry and allied sectors.

For the past ten years BWI, together with its affiliates, has developed a global programme to promote the rights of women working in our sectors. Initially a male dominated work area, nowadays about 20 per cent of our membership are women working in construction, wood and forestry. But although the number of women working in our sectors is growing, women hold the poorest paid jobs and very often find themselves exposed to informal and extremely precarious, unsafe working conditions in Africa, Asia, Latin
America, Europe and other parts of the world. They are exposed to sexual harassment and violence and often find it difficult to balance their working life with their family responsibilities.

As globalisation is conquering the world's economy, some 1.3 billion people have to survive on less then 1 US dollar a day. And more than half of the world's poorest are women and their children. They suffer from aids and poverty related illnesses as well as occupational deseases.

BWI believes that trade unions have an important role to play in promoting women's rights and a gender fair work environment in order to create decent jobs for men and women. In its strategy plan 2005 - 2009 BWI has adopted a global policy to promote the mainstreaming of gender equality to be implemented in their training activities and awareness campaigns in all its regions.

"♀rganise! M♀bilise! W♀men friendly & Gender fair uni♀n" And "Empowered women, just world" are slogans used in the regional BWI campaigns to encourage women to stand up for their workers' rights. They also aim to make all unionists aware of the necessity to
- End discrimination against women in the Trade Union Movement
- Ensure that more women participate in the decision making bodies of the trade union movement.
- Create a women friendly environment at work as well as in the unions
- Create sustainable decent jobs for both men and women in our sectors
- Include women's concerns in the collective bargaining agenda and agreements.
- Aim for equal treatment including equal pay for work of equal value.
- Create a safe working environment, free of sexual harassment
- Ensure the ratification and implementation of ILO Conventions 183 and 111 and UN Conventions for women
- Strengthen women structures in our unions.
- Continue to lobby for debt cancellation for developing countries
- Continues to lobby for development support for disaster stricken countries

Unions involved in our campaign, are encouraged to use our poster which is placed on our website English, French and Spanish websites: www.bwint.org.

You are called on to celebrate the 8th of March as an opportunity to promote these messages and to intensify existing efforts to organise women and adopt and implement gender-related policies and programmes. As the President of the BWI International women's committee reminds us: "As long as women advance, no men regresses".

Founded on 9 December 2005 in Buenos Aires, BWI represents 12 million
members. BWI is based in Geneva Switzerland.