Give women equal pay, EFF urges

The Economic Freedom Fighters has called on all local companies and state departments to review salaries and make sure women have pay parity.

Cape Town – As the country marked Women’s Day, the Economic Freedom Fighters on Tuesday called on all South African companies and state departments to review salaries and make sure women have pay parity.

“On the 60th anniversary of the 1956 Women’s March, the EFF calls on all companies and state departments to review salaries and give women the same salaries that men receive for the same jobs,” EFF spokesperson Mbuyiseni Ndlozi said.

Ndlozi said it was a fact that women still earned less than men for the same work, and that South Africa remained a patriarchal society where women were not safe and neither their rights nor their intellectual strength respected.

“Women in our country still find themselves restricted and unsafe in our communities. As a point of departure, the levels of violence against women in both domestic and public spaces reproduce the restrictions on their freedoms that the pass laws represented,” said Ndlozi.

“It is a fact that rape is still the patriarchal tool to shame, silence and reduce women as simply subservient to men.”

He urged the country to consider the extent to which women remained objectified.

“Society has not transcended the reality that women are more than their looks, and the reduction to their bodies constitute the basis for why they are abused and silenced.”

African News Agency (ANA)