Solidarity Statement with victims of Rana Plaza and to the women workers marching on this Global Day of Feminist Action

RANA PLAZA is everywhere, as so are our movements fighting for justice!

It has been two years since the Rana Plaza complex, producing clothes for international brands, collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing more than one thousand women workers and leaving hundreds severely injured and unable to work. In these two years the World March of Women, which has been uniting feminists all over the world and weaving alliances with movements marching for societies free of all forms of exploitation, built its 4th International Action for 2015.

Today, April 24, in a big feminist global and decentralized twenty four hours of action, women all over the world will express solidarity with the victims of the Rana Plaza disaster and will denounce economic violence against women, exposing how the inhumane working conditions of large multinational companies everywhere affect women and build on the exploitation of their bodies, territories, productive and reproductive work.

In a context of rising rights violations against environmental defenders, women are more at risk of violence, prejudice, exclusion, and repudiation, including sexual harassment, sexual violence and rape. Whether peasant leaders involved in confrontations regarding land disputes, indigenous women protecting their territories from polluting projects such as hydroelectric dams, monoculture plantations or the extraction of oil, gas and minerals, or urban workers denouncing lower wages and fighting for decent work, for public spaces, for clean air and healthy food – women environmental defenders uphold the right to self determination and the right to defend their rights. And these are the women who, in movement, can change the world, in opposition to the corporate-driven political-economic system that subject them to many types of human rights abuses, often committed by corporations or on their behalf.

Friends of the Earth groups in many countries, from Honduras to Nepal, expressed solidarity or joined activities with women who suffer in the work or are victims of the reinforcement of the patriarchy with the increasing militarization of territories and land grabbing.

Economic violence against women has to stop. As Friends of the Earth International we fight together with the World March of Women to dismantle corporate power and for transnational corporations to be brought to justice for their humans right abuses and environmental crimes.

We are together today wherever a feminist action is happening close to us, to show Rana Plaza is everywhere. And we’ll march together until our bodies, food, communications, territories and life are free from economic violence and corporate greed!

Jagoda Munic
Chairwoman of Friends of the Earth International