Wage politics and feminist solidarity

Abstract

This article explores a case of feminist solidarity and wage politics—namely, a social movement claiming equal pay for early education teachers. In 2018, the Finnish media revealed that several municipalities in the Finnish capital area had secretly agreed not to compete with each other by paying higher wages for early education teachers even though there was a severe shortage of labor. The revelation resulted in public outrage and the rise of the No Play Money social movement that demanded higher wages for early education teachers. The driving force for the mobilization was feminist solidarity, which resulted in collective resistance toward gendered labor market practices and, ultimately, higher wages. For an institutionalized practice to change, the legitimacy of the practice must be convincingly questioned, and this requires actors who problematize previous ways of understanding the issue. This was achieved in the present case through wage politics; the politicization and contestation of mainstream conceptualizations of wage formation and appropriate wage levels for feminized work.