Resolution of the women around mining 31.08.2008
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We, the miners' wives and the women and girls supporting the miners' movement, have actively participated in the days of the International Miners' Seminar and are deeply moved concerning the experiences and visions of the international miners' movement. We could experience from the contributions the great role of the miner's wives, the female miners and the 190 million children in the factories and collieries. We heard about their hard live, their struggles for the daily bread, their worries and fears – and saw their fighting power. We state:
1. Working conditions and live situations of the miners and their wives and families havebecome nearly unbearable worldwide in many ways.
The protecting and helping families are dissolving, men are on the road to find work and women are alone with their children and the lowest work.
In Germany we are worried about mass redundancies and mine shut downs probably destroying a whole region. Our youth doesn't have a future. We bring up our children to lead a courageous militant live! Especially young women are a great militant potential.
In the mines of Latin America, South Africa, Eastern Europe our husbands and sons are forced to work under the most primitive and critical working conditions. Every day we are anxious about their lives because work safety doesn't count at all.
Like in South Africa we have to live in shacks or like in Germany mining estates as affordable living space are being destroyed
The international mining companies are recklessly destroying our areas of life and our environment as in the Cordilleras/Philippines. For us women protection of our natural environment – some call it "mother earth" – is an exceptional affair of the heart.
Active unionists, revolutionaries, our husbands fighting for their rights are put at disadvantage, politically persecuted – often even by fascists or paramilitary forces -, dismissed or even being victims of massacres which are on the agenda in many countries. We are worried about their lives.
We women want peace! We reject armed conflicts in which those in power and the arms industry are involved to torment, mutilate and kill people and to get rich in million ways on all five continents!
All this is no more acceptable to us!
One of us said: It is better to speak once than to keep quiet for 100 times.
2. We have stood up to fight together for our lives – for our lives, for the lives of ourhusbands and for the lives of our children.
We have to learn to fight together with our husbands, but also our husbands have to learn to fight for the liberation of women and to behave accordingly. We have experienced which role we wives of the miners play and that we have to fight as hard as our husbands – and sometimes even harder and together with them!
In the struggles in the Cordilleras the women utterly fearlessly block the path of the destroying bulldozers, as Kristina of the Philippines!
During the strike of our husbands and sons in the mines of Budryk in Poland we organize the public and the solidarity.
We organize women who are desperate because they lost their husband or their son underground like Natalia from Kazakhstan, and help each other to organize our lives together. As often gainfully employed women we fight for the unity of the miners' movement and the workers' movement as a whole and the unity of the workers' movement and the militant women's movement.
It is about the matter of better working and living conditions – but also about the whole life. The struggle of the English miners' wives was an important example. During the one year lasting miners' strike they left their flats to share the struggle in the picket lines, in the illegal activities – also underground. They were in charge organizing the solidarity work even beyond borders. Therefore they commonly organized their lives, cooking, looking after the children and thus overcame the chains of traditions according to the slogan "Fighting is the men's business" and bringing up children and supporting the families is the affair of each single family.
3. The organization of the international miners' wives is meaningful and forwardlooking!
The liberation of women and the struggle of the international miners' movement for a world without exploitation and suppression belong together. We need a strong international movement of the miners' wives – and we wish to continue to cooperate and become acquainted with each other. On the other hand we want to make our contribution to the international women's movement with our experiences of the hardship of our struggle and our life, as it can learn from us being unyielding, consequent, connected to the treasures of the earth for a humane life. In this sense we want to check and to participate in the Women's Political Counsel from 3 to 4 October 2008 in Germany, in the initiators' meeting on 5 October and in the World Women's Conference of the Rank-and-File Women in Venezuela in 2011. We set out for great actions and place ourselves in the first row of the fighters!
Good luck – the women around mining
(passed on Sunday, 31 August, 2008 by 53 women and 2 men)