Work-Free Sunday is a Right!

For years now, YCW Bavaria has been actively campaigning for the protection of Sunday to be free from work. It aims for the workers to have time to spend with family, play soccer with friends, establish relationships with the community, go to Church, participate in social voluntary work and build organizations. The action is against big shops that open on Sunday and some shops that extend the closing hours until 11 in the evening.

Sundays and legal holidays are defined as days of rest protected by the Basic Law and the Bavarian Constitution. However, some shops open during sales periods, Sunday markets and feast days, and on other special occasions, taking advantage of community activities to open.

15 March 2019 — Charleroi, Belgium: Demonstration Against Repression

Charleroi demonstration March 15th

Discrimination and racism on the part of the police, repression of people’s movements, migrants hunting, tracking down of homeless people, widespread filing of personal records… It is most urgent to get organized and denounce the security logic. The Stop Repression campaign has been mobilizing against police violence and state repression for eight years now. We hope many of you will join us in the streets of Charleroi on March 15 for the International Day Against Police Violence!

Stop repression of migrations!

Subject to a repression organized at the highest levels of the state, the only crime of refugees and undocumented people is to look for a better future. They are arrested with brutality and placed in closed centers pending deportation. Closed centers are real prisons, and detention conditions are so bad that some migrants attempt to take their own life. Nowadays, even families with children can end up in a closed center. Nobody is spared by those racist security measures taken by the authorities.

Solidarity is also criminalized: legal proceedings against people who host them, violence against citizens who legally film arbitrary arrests. Migrants hunting is carried out to the detriment of mankind, the rule of law and solidarity among peoples. It sometimes ends up in a tragic bloodshed, like on 17 May 2018 when a police officer, still free today, killed little Mawda. To give itself the tools to implement its inhuman policies, the current government decided to build three new centers, including one in Wallonia, in Jumet. Faced with the state’s headlong rush, let’s demand the closure of all closed centers, the regularization of all undocumented people, and the freedom of movement for migrants.

Young Christian Workers Raise their Voice, Not Only On Women’s Day!

109 years ago, the Second International Conference of Women was held in Copenhagen, the demand for universal suffrage for all women was reiterated and, at the proposal of Clara Zetkin, 8 March was proclaimed International Women's Day. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the labour movement maintained a traditional patriarchal position on women's equality and demands. It was in the middle of the nineteenth century when the women's movements became stronger, with the struggle for women's suffrage, the demand for equality, the denunciation of social, family and labour oppression.

I am a young Nicaraguan, I am 28 years old. I have no children and I live in my parents' house. “I’m currently employed at the Hansae export-processing zone in Nicaragua in a garment factory. I have been working there as a machine operator for 1 year. My work schedule is from 7 am to 5 pm, with a 30-minute break to have lunch.
 
In Nicaragua, gender violence is a daily reality. The number of femicide cases is increasing. “We are being killed" in our homes. We are educated to assume a role of domestic, we assume responsibilities that society imposes on us culturally for being women: "cooking, washing, raising children, cleaning, and so on.” Every day, when I commute from home to work, I am subjected to sexual harassment in the street. Society sees this practice as normal and harmless, though it is a form of gender-based violence, and I really feel I’m harassed when walking in public.