“Our members have put out a clear mandate — we need a liveable wage for [educational support professionals], we need more mental health supports, we need class size caps and we need competitive wages with other districts,” said Greta Callahan, president of the teacher chapter of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers at a news conference announcing the strike. “[District officials] have not moved significantly on any of those things. They are not even pretending to avoid a strike.”
On this day, 8 March 1917, thousands of housewives and women workers in St Petersburg, Russia defied union leaders’ appeals for calm and took to the streets against high prices and hunger, thus igniting the February revolution (so-called because of the different calendar in use at the time). The following day, 200,000 workers joined them by striking, shouting slogans against the tsar and the war. Some military units began to join the workers, and by 15 March, tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate.
On 8 March 1918, women in Austria celebrated International Women’s Day on this date for the first time as thousands took to the streets protesting against World War I. There is a popular myth that March 8 was chosen on the anniversary of an 1857 strike of women workers in New York, and a further stoppage on the same date in 1908, however this is incorrect, as this excellent history of the radical, working class origins of International Women’s Day explains: https://libcom.org/history/temma-kaplan-socialist-origins-international-womens-day https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1937100233141784/?type=3
