Ten Demands for Chile’s Feminist General Strike

Chile’s 8M links feminist strike action to collective care and labor rights, making bodily autonomy and territorial power part of one contested agenda.

The ten demands for Chile’s feminist general strike expand the strike from a workplace event to the institutions sustaining everyday life. Published in February 2019 for the 8 March action, this outline should not be backdated into a response to October’s protests or the later pandemic.

The demands connect employment, social security, care, housing and nonsexist education with violence, abortion and sexual and gender diversity. Migrant women’s organizing and union rights, Indigenous territory and extractivism also enter the program. A common agenda does not make every injustice identical. It asks who receives wages, carries subsistence costs and controls bodies and land.

This combination changes the imagined striker. People without formal wages still work, while family and migration systems can make public withdrawal especially difficult. Naming care forces a movement to confront its own conditions: when stopping work affects someone who needs assistance, participation and collective support must be organized rather than treated as tests of individual courage.

The ten-point outline is a mobilizing document, not an evaluation of policy effects or evidence that every Chilean woman shares one program. Combining territorial, class and social demands does not settle resource conflicts or representation. Its value is to give common struggle concrete content whose tensions remain discussable.

Chile’s 2023 time-use survey offers a different route to measuring unpaid labor. The 2015 Ni Una Menos manifesto helps compare how opposition to violence becomes a demand on public institutions. Statistics, declarations and action can interrogate one another without becoming interchangeable.