WLA will work to abolish the apparatus of racism and sexism which continue to maintain women’s oppression within the economic system that relies and depends upon our labour power and our social reproductive capacities.

WLA prioritises the abolition of the codependent dynamics of racism and sexism.

Sexism normalises the central significance of women’s caring and nurturing roles, enabling the domestic labour women perform to appear ‘natural’ as a ‘gender’ role.

Racism normalises the oppression and exploitation of Black people and for women, combines with sexism in specific ways.

WLA will work to challenge women’s oppression in society and our super- exploitation as workers.

We understand this to be founded on the clash between women’s role in social production and our role in domestic reproduction – in other words the double burden of women’s labour in the home and at work.

Women’s jobs at work are traditionally offshoots of our domestic responsibilities – cooking cleaning caring – all undervalued and low paid. In addition, women workers often have to juggle their two roles at work and at home. This life-long double burden together with job segregation accounts for women’s low pay (super- exploitation) as workers. In this way women’s oppression and super-exploitation are inextricably linked. 

WLA recognises that although women form 56% of total union membership, trade unions still primarily represent the interests of white male members and as such mirror the hierarchy of the world of work.

The low status of women and Black people in the workplace is reflected in their continuing low status within the labour movement.

Women’s self-organisation must be defended & extended, guaranteeing that our issues are integral to every aspect of trade union organisation and collective bargaining.

 This means retaining and extending women’s only committees, courses and conferences to ensure that women’s issues/concerns are collectively articulated and actioned.

WLA is committed to opposing religious fundamentalist and far right movements. Both are based on supremacist and anti-rights ideologies that seek to uphold hierarchical structures of discrimination, oppression and inequality.

These authoritarian movements share many common features in pursuit of their goals: to gain access to state resources and political power; to extend social control over women and other vulnerable sub-groups and to police dissent through intimidation and violence.

Challenging religious fundamentalism and all forms of authoritarian and far right politics requires concerted feminist activism and solidarity, mobilised around key universal principles of equality, democracy and human rights at local, national and transnational levels.

WLA views the struggle for women’s rights as international. We recognise that global military/industrial power relies on the exploitation of female labour in production and reproduction. The profits and the so-called benefits tend to accrue in one part of the world whilst the exploitation and losses are inflicted in another.

Manifestations of this include the ‘sex’ industry and human trafficking, which directly benefits and results from global capitalism.

We must reach out across the world to understand the issues and to recognise and support each other’s struggles for liberation.

WLA uses the term ‘Black’ because we believe that if correctly understood, it is a unifying term signalling an acknowledgment that racism does not distinguish between shades of blackness. We recognise that the term ‘black’ is not a descriptively accurate term. Like the term ‘white’ it cannot encompass the diversity of ethnicities which are sometimes misleadingly and incorrectly termed ‘race’ (a phenomenon which exists only in the mindset and ideology of racists). While the term 'white' expresses a set of assumptions that normalise the dominance and central position of European and Caucasian heritage people, the term Black’ expresses the commonality of the various forms of racist oppression which affects, in one or more ways, the lives and livelihoods of all people racialised as other than 'white'.