This document outlines the key messages of EI in four areas of concern of the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, and it is in line with the Global Trade Union and EI priorities.
1. Gender equality for social justice, democracy and peace
- The Beijing+30 Declaration must include concrete commitments to build a world free of all forms of discrimination including intersecting forms of discrimination, extremism, violence and intolerance.
- Upholding women’s rights as human rights requires safeguarding freedom of association, freedom of expression, and collective bargaining, especially in face of democratic risks. These fundamental rights are essential for achieving gender equality at work, ensuring fair wages, safety, and freedom from discrimination and violence. Trade unions call for action to end occupational segregation, address intersectional discrimination, and strengthen the rule of law to guarantee equal access to justice.
- The Beijing+30 Declaration must highlight the link between gender equality and sustainable peace. Women and teachers in conflict zones must be protected, and adequate financing is needed to ensure women’s participation in peace efforts and frontline services. Economic opportunities and decent work are key to post-conflict stability.
2. Women’s labour rights and human rights
- The Beijing+30 Declaration should include a bold commitment to upholding the ILO’s fundamental principles and rights at work for all women, as well as the ratification and effective implementation of international labour standards. The commitment includes freedom of association and collective bargaining, the elimination of all forms of forced labour, the effective abolition of child labour, the elimination of discrimination in employment and occupation, and ensuring a safe and healthy working environment.
Governments must:
- Ensure universal and gender-transformative social protection systems with adequate and sustainable funding, which include decent work for women, paid parental leave, policies to facilitate transition to formal economy, and promotion of freedom of association and collective bargaining, among others.
- Ensure free quality education (including early childhood education) and affordable public services, including universal access to quality public health, care, education and lifelong learning, water, transport, among others. These services must be gender-transformative, accessible to women in all their diversity, protected from privatisation and should have sustainable funding that is based on progressive national tax systems, tax reform measures and debt relief.
- Governments should ensure that all women, regardless of gender identity and sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disability, or migration status, have equal access to free, inclusive, and high-quality education and lifelong learning. They should also ensure competitive salaries, fair working conditions, and continuous professional development for educators to address the global teacher shortage. This includes reducing excessive workloads and prioritizing teacher well-being, in line with the UN High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession’s recommendations.
3. Decent work for women
Governments must:
- Develop national jobs plans and invest in creating 575 million new decent jobs by 2030, including in education and the care sector, ensuring a gender-transformative Just Transition to environmentally sustainable economies for all. This must be accompanied by a worker-led formalization of one billion informal jobs, including those in the teaching profession, where the majority of voluntary teachers are women.
- Implement comprehensive and adequately financed care systems, based on the ILO’s "5R" framework: the recognising, reducing, and redistributing unpaid care work; rewarding paid care work, by promoting more and decent work for all care workers regardless of their intersectionality or migration status; and ensuring representation of care workers through collective bargaining and social dialogue.
- Regulate the digital transformation of work through social dialogue to promote gender equality by upholding women’s rights to decent work, fair wages, and union representation. Teacher unions must actively shape digital content and policies in education. They should also be involved in preventing the serious risks of artificial Intelligence in perpetuating gender stereotypes, intersectional discrimination, and online gender-based violence such as cyberbullying and hate speech. Legislation, developed in partnership with unions, must address the impact of digitalization on well-being, work-life balance, and the right to disconnect.
- Take urgent, systemic action to close the gender pay gap and ensure fair wages for all. This requires establishing minimum living wages, enforcing pay equity and anti-discrimination laws, implementing pay transparency measures, and increasing women's representation in underrepresented sectors like STEM. Increasing investment in feminized occupations such as the teaching profession is an essential step in this endeavor.
- Establish measures to address the heavy workload faced by education professionals, particularly women, to ensure a healthier work-life balance. This may involve workload assessments, reasonable working hours, public early childhood education services, and support systems for managing stress and workload.
4. A world of work free from gender-based violence and harassment
Governments must:
- Create and enforce a well-defined legal and policy framework which includes prevention and accountability measures and include teachers, education support personnel, and their trade unions in the planning and implementation of programmes and measures to eliminate SRGBV and other forms of violence that affect them.
- Take measures to enable a violence-free environment and world of work for women, which involves ratifying and fully implementing the International Labour Organization Convention 190, which establishes the right of everyone to a world of work free from violence and harassment, including gender-based violence and harassment.
- Increase investment in prevention and greater funding for anti-violence public services, which include gender transformative education systems, training and awareness raising programmes, accessible grievance mechanisms through social dialogue, programmes for survivors' economic recovery and legal support, and adequate labour inspection.