Stuff Your Sexist Boss! LARC, Monday 20th Feb, 7pm

Stuff Your Sexist Boss – discussion and writing evening
Monday 20th February, 7pm

LARC (London Action Resource Centre), 62 Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel
[Crèche available. Please contact lsfgender@aktivix.org if you need it, so we know how many hands we need]

What does it mean to work collectively against workplace harassment? How can direct action be used to tackle it?
If you’re a working woman, odds are you’ve been sexually harassed at some point. Sleazy comments, unwelcome touches, gross behaviour – it happens all the time. Some men think that they can treat you not as a co-worker, but as the objectified woman they think they can sexually benefit from. They use the hierarchy of the workplace and male privilege to do so, because they can get away with it.

We don’t have to put up with it! We should be in control of our own bodies, desires and places of work.
We want to provide a safe space for women to come together to discuss their experiences and share practical knowledge. We also need to think about acting in solidarity with people we know who get harassed – how can we better support our friends and co-workers?

This initiative comes out of discussions around a new Solidarity Federation leaflet, Stuff Your Sexist Boss, which aims to inform women of their rights as well as provide ideas and encouragement for how to tackle crappy behaviour at work. Whilst there’s information and online resources relating to street harassment, the workplace seems to be neglected. We hope that the discussions in this workshop will help contribute to the leaflet. The workshop however will not be restricted to feeding ideas for a leaflet and is not intended to be a writing session.

The session’s main aim is about empowering ourselves. If you worry about sharing your experiences, you can always talk without giving names or specific work places. We come together because we have all suffered the same kind of experiences and sharing them will make us stronger.

This is a meeting that is for all who self-identify as women, and is open to trans people as well.
Solidarity Federation is an anarcho-syndicalist revolutionary union initiative. We organise around workplace grievances and in our communities in the understanding that we need to take collective direct action to overthrow all structures of power, whether capitalism, the state, patriarchy or racism. We aim towards a world where values such as solidarity and mutual aid run our lives and our economic, political and social structures are based on need and equality.