A feminist general strike in Germany too?

What would it take to change the situation in care work?

This article was first published in the 8 March issue of the newspaper Neues Deutschland. We would like to thank ND for the opportunity to publish it on their website! Silvia Klein and Matthias Neumann, active in the Feminist Strike Working Group of the Care Revolution Network, wrote the article.

The ND article can be foundhere. For publication on our website, we have only changed the headline.

No economy, no human life can function without care work. From birth to death and every day in between, we are dependent on the support and care of other people. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, it is so difficult to enforce framework conditions that meet the needs of, for example, educators, carers or those dependent on assistance. Precisely because care work is so existential, because it establishes or arises from relationships full of responsibility, it is often performed as long as it is somehow possible.

Those who take responsibility for others need solidarity in order to be able to act for themselves. We must say together: we no longer want to maintain the current conditions of care work.

For some time now, there has been increasing consideration of a major feminist strike in 2027, in which paid and unpaid care workers take action together. Ever since the Feminist Strike Collective Zurich called in June 2025 for 14 June, the traditional feminist strike day in Switzerland, to be celebrated with a major care strike in 2027, such a project has also been a recurring theme in this country.

In this context, it is important to us that a feminist strike 2027 is not an idea with just one originator. The nationwide Feminist Strike Network, the Care Revolution Network, the Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie, Verdi activists, the League for Unpaid Labour, the Feminist Front and others, we are all developing ideas, thinking, coming together - and hope that we will become even more. In our view, the issue is growing because the time is ripe and the intolerable social conditions make it unavoidable. More and more people are thinking about such a strike, both individually and collectively. However, it is a delicate plant that needs to be carefully fertilised and watered. That is why the announcement of concrete plans will have to wait a little longer.

The plan for such a care strike, if the term is meant seriously, cannot be realised in a few months. In a nutshell, we understand a strike as a refusal to co-operate by the workers until an improvement in working conditions is achieved. In principle, it can affect both paid and unpaid labour, although the conditions for struggles for work in these areas are very different.

Bringing these different areas of care work together in an action concept requires time and dialogue among the actors. The feminist general strike in the Spanish Basque Country and parts of Navarre in autumn 2023, for example, showed how this can be achieved. Here too, preparations began around a year and a half earlier. Feminist alliances started planning with a general assembly in February 2022; the strike took place on 30 November 2023.

On this day, care facilities and industrial plants went on strike. Demonstrations and rallies were held in several cities and in the countryside. A number of key demands were discussed, for example: placing the largely privatised care facilities in state or cooperative hands; strengthening the rights of migrant care workers, including those in private households, including regular contracts and a right of residence that is not linked to the workplace; a minimum pension of €1080 for all.

There are also encouraging experiences in Germany: Strikes in paid care work have experienced an upswing in the last 15 years. There have been successes, for example, in the collective bargaining movement for relief in hospitals, where economic pressure can be exerted through strikes thanks to funding via flat rates per case. Nevertheless, because of the moral pressure on employees - "You are responsible for your patients" - solidarity alliances are also key here, which emphasise the idea that "more of us is better for everyone". A coming together of people in all care positions is all the more important where a strike does not exert any direct economic pressure, such as employees and parents in daycare centres.

In unpaid care work, there is not even an "employer" who can be forced to improve working conditions. On the one hand, this is about a fairer distribution of care work, and in view of the existing patriarchal division of labour, this means redistribution between the sexes. On the other hand, it is about the socialisation of domestic and family work. Solidarity and collective solutions for caring, cooking or solving everyday problems relieve and unite carers at the same time. The aim of the strike is to create this reorganisation based on solidarity.

We therefore need an interlinking of the various positions in care work in order to achieve improved conditions for everyone. And we are already coming together in certain areas. In the social and educational services sector, for example, it has almost become a small tradition that 8 March is a strike day if the dates of a collective bargaining round allow for it.

Supporting care wage labour struggles on a joint strike day, collectively organising childcare, cooking and neighbourhood help during the strike and redistributing the work in a gender-equitable way - if this happens en masse, we can feel our strength. Then we might experience a little of what it would be like to live in a care-centred society. And perhaps even the idea of a feminist general strike will enter the realm of the conceivable and feasible.