In our last article we examined the underlying causes of female unemployment and discrimination against working women.! This article will review the highlights of the international struggle of female workers and show the completely new ramifications of some struggles taking place in the economically developed countries.
The Fight for Equal Pay
In most cases, as everyone knows, women earn less than men because they have lower-ranking, unskilled jobs. But in industries with a predominantly female work force, women are often paid less for doing exactly the same work men do. The explanation is almost always the same, without the bosses even having to spell it out: "It is normal, because they are women."
And when they are brought up short by women refusing to take any more and going on strike against this injustice, certain employers have the audacity to "justify" paying women 20% less than men for the same work by saying that women work 20% less!
At least this is what was recently said by the director of Yardleys in Britain, the cosmetic company controlled by the Tobacco trust, third-
British-American largest of the giants that dominate the British economy. The women who work at Yardleys lost their strike because they did not get the support of the trade unions.
On the other hand, the successful strike at Trico, which lasted more than five months in 1976, played a decisive role in the struggle of women workers in Britain for implementation of the equal-pay law.
It is no accident that Britain is the place where most of the struggles around equal pay have taken place in recent years. Faced with the spreading radicalization of women and with the growing power of the women's liberation movement-which originated in Britain at the time of the first strikes for equal pay—the British capitalists had to make certain formal concessions.
So, on the occasion of International Women's Year," they instituted the "Equal Pay Act," which gives female workers the right to take the matter to administrative tribunals if they are denied equal pay.
The outcomes of the innumerable court actions brought by female workers are an example of how capitalist justice worksan incredible number of women have seen their claims turned down by the "special commissions" set up to hear equal-pay cases. Every sort of pretext is used to "prove" that the work in question is not exactly the same as that done by men in the same industry.
Many women have won their cases-at least on paper—in spite of this. In reality, however, women have been forced in a number of cases to go out on strike to compel their bosses to abide by court rulings.
The struggle at Trico is one of the best known, because it generated large-scale solidarity actions on the part of the workers movement and the independent women's movement.
It was above all because they refused to place any confidence in the employers' courts, counting on nothing but their own forces and boycotting the tribunal when their cases came up for a hearing, that female workers at the Trico auto-parts factory were able to do away with the lower wage scale and other forms of discrimination they suffered.
Nonetheless, the very existence of a law stipulating equal pay has played an important role in raising the consciousness of female workers and instilling in them a will to fight for implementation of this right. This was seen at Electrolux, at the Magnetovox electronics factory, at the Laird Portch textile factory in Scotland, and in the struggle by Irish telephone operators.
In each case, the extent to which women won their demands depended largely on the breadth of support they received from the workers movement. In many cases the unions gave only lip-service support to strikes.
What is involved here is not a secondary question, because it exposes all the factors that lie behind unequal pay. These include the lack of background and training; the double workday that causes women's higher absenteeism rate ("they work 20% less ..."), since they are always the ones who have to stay home with a sick child; the social and cultural discrimination that "explains" why women almost never advance to positions of responsibility.
Nor is it a secondary question in terms of the challenge it poses to the bosses' interests. Everyone knows what resulted from the long successful fight of telephone workers in the United States in 1973—the courts decided in favor of the female employees and forced the company to pay out $38 million in back wages.
Jobs for All!
It is in the fight against layoffs that the efforts of women workers in different countries have the most in common. In sectors with a mostly female work force, such as textiles, electronics, and watchmaking, there have been countless factory closings in the interest of rationalizing production from the boss's point of view... and also countless factory occupations. The struggle at the Lip factory? (which, although it is rarely acknowledged, was above all a struggle of women) inspired many female workers, who took up the slogan: "Here we work, we produce, we sell."
From the strike at the Sogantal garment factory in Portugal, to the numerous strikes involving factory occupations in the textile and garment industries in France (Cerisay, Cip, St. Joseph, Rhône Poulenc, ete.), thousands of female workers have been tested in struggle. In these battles women workers both confronted problems of organization that were new for them, and-even more important-had to carry out a political debate to break down the resistance of the workers organizations and win their support.
If some women came out of these confrontations very skeptical about the usefulness of the trade unions, others became more determined to participate in the fight to transform their unions into instruments that could defend the interests of all workers, above all the most exploited and oppressed layers.
One important aspect of the fight for jobs for all is the struggle against the cutbacks that capitalists in every country are using to shift the burden for social services onto the shoulders of working people and those who use hospitals, childcare centers, and schools. Those hit hardest, both as workers and as users of the services, are usually women.
The recent struggle of female workers in Britain against a rash of hospital closings is an example for the working class as a whole. Not only did the patients and staffs of hospitals like Elisabeth Garrett Anderson, Hounslow, Weir, and Plaistow decide to take over their hospitals to block the "rationalization" drive of the Labour government; more often than not, they also carried this out against the advice of their trade-union leadership.
The strikers used this struggle to initiate a deepgoing discussion on capitalist medi-
Workers assembly at Lip watch cine, on the absence of preventive medicine, on the link between the fight for free, legal abortion and the capitalists' general attacks on the rights of working people; on the objective needs of the working class, which can be resolved only in the framework of a socialist society.
The struggle for jobs for all also has to take into account the needs of those who are mothers of families. This means opening child-care centers at workplaces because they usually do not exist in the community. It means making the employers provide good cheap cafeterias for those-and they are the vast majoritywho are forced by the anarchic development of the cities to travel too far to go home for lunch.
This is what led, in 1976, to the first strike by the workers at Induyco, a textile factory in Madrid. This is what led them eventually to a realization of the specific oppression they suffered, and of the way the boss was taking advantage of the fact they were women to manipulate them.
Six months later they went back out on strike for basically political reasons, demanding the rehiring of two women who had been laid off for playing too active a role in the first struggle. Jobs for all, in other words, means struggling against the terrible forms of superexploitation that prevent women from exercising their right to work.
The proof of this lies in the common themes that emerge from the struggles of female workers in the big department
James Adamson/Sygma factory in Besançon, France, during 1973 strike and occupation of plant.
stores. Whether it is at Simago or the Cort'Ingles in Madrid, at Sainsbury's in Britain, or, a few years ago, at the Nouvelles Galeries in France, women put forward the same demands in fighting against the monsters that these big chains are. The demands include improvement of working conditions, an end to obligatory overtime, wage increases, an end to harassment by managers, the right to sit down, and so forth.
In several cases-as at Cort'Ingles, for example-the workers understood the im portance of solidarity between the women who fabricate garments and the women who sell them. In fact, the boss of the saleswomen of Cort'Ingles was also the boss of the workers at Induyco. During the second Induyco strike, many saleswomen stopped work in solidarity with the picket line put up at the store entrance to urge people not to shop there.
This type of struggle brings together themes discussed above. The women fighters are in the traditionally female sections of the proletariat, but they have assimilated some of the most advanced experiences of the working class in recent years.
The struggles are of a new type that express the growth of the radicalization and show the influence of an independent movement on female workers. They affect sectors never before active, explicitly raising problems related to the role of women in capitalist society. These include the double workday, the question of women's economic and social independence, and the division of labor.
In the hotel business, for example, women have begun to rebel. Here the work force turns over rapidly because of the low wages and the way employees are treated (often nearly 75% of the personnel is new every year), and women make up more than two-thirds of the workers.
In Portugal a series of hotel occupations were organized in 1975. These occurred, however, in the context of a very particular political situation.
Today in Britain it is the wardrobe keepers, cleaning women, and cooks of the Trust House Forte (THF) chain, who are on strike. Last year they fought for a wage increase by organizing picket lines in front of the Hotel Randolph in Oxford, telling people that they earned less than £20 a week, barely half the salary of a laborer and a third the salary of an industrial worker. And they never see those "princely tips" you hear so much about.
The combined pressure of the two trade unions of hotel workers (which were divided among themselves but united against the strike) prevented the strikers from winning their demands. But this did not stop the employees of the Metropole Hotel in London-belonging to the same chain-from striking several months later for a minimum wage of £50, with the support of almost 100% of the workers involved (the great majority of whom are women).
Women who clean office buildings at night and domestic workers have also begun to organize. This is particularly difficult for them because of their isolation. Since the famous strike of the nighttime cleaning women in Britain in 1971 and that of household workers in Sweden a few years later (two strikes which at the time seemed like exceptions), most European countries have seen struggles by these women, whose work is hardly considered a job but rather a "natural" extension of normal "women's work."
Two years ago in Portugal, cleaning women organized to form a trade union and to open centers for domestic workers in several cities. Women in Spain followed their example.
In early February 1978, the limpiezas (office cleaners) began to struggle in Euzkadi, putting forward their demands in a general assembly and organizing strike pickets. A group of chachas (domestic servants) occupied a church to publicize their campaign and win their demands.
In each case, the struggle revolved around winning a contract with the employers, including a forty-hour workweek, the right to Social Security, a month's vacation, the minimum wage, and so forth.
It is very difficult to form a stable organization of women who are so atomized, both those who work in empty offices and those who work in someone's home where they are subjected to a paternalism matched only by the superexploitation and psychological pressure they suffer.
Cleaning women and domestic servants in Canada-most of them immigrantshave been able to meet regularly, and this helps break down their isolation.
Another example is the women workers at Balai Libéré in Belgium. They decided to dispense with their boss after a threeweek strike in 1975, which taught them a few things about capitalist tactics. They got together with the boss and informed him that he had been laid off and that they were now running the show. It was hard at the beginning, but they succeeded in winning pay increases; their wages doubled in three years.
Their action helped encourage other women to organize. One group of independent domestic workers produced a film that was shown on television. In it they explained their working conditions and ended up with demands similar to those put forward by their Portuguese, Spanish, and Canadian sisters.
Many other examples could be cited of new sectors of the female work force who have begun to struggle. These range from the fight of airline stewardesses in Germany for job stability and an end to being treated as sex objects, to the struggle of the wives of merchants and artisans in the north of France. The latter organized simply to be recognized as workers. At present they have no right to any wage or social benefits, under the pretext that their work as bookkeepers, secretaries, or storekeepers was just something they did while keeping an eye on the soup kettle and the children.
In spite of the petty-bourgeois aspects of struggles like these, they say a lot about the consciousness of women in general, their determination no longer to be considered minors in a state of perpetual dependence on their husbands or their fathers.
Those Whose Work Is Invisible
It is worth emphasizing the importance of the first stirrings among women working in cottage industries. These women, who often work a fifteen- to eighteen-hourday-and sometimes more-with time out for looking after the children, never until recently considered themselves workers like other wage earners.
This stems from the interweaving of their work with their domestic responsibilities; their isolation; the absence of a fleshand-blood boss to confront (they never see anyone but a go-between who stops by their houses to drop off the pieces of cloth or leather they sew together); the attitudes of their husbands, who are often violently opposed to the idea of their wives working in a factory but can accept their doing exactly the same work at home for one-half or one-third the pay.
The result is that these workers tend to view their take-home work as part of their domestic chores. Nonetheless, in 1976, for the first time in history, workers in the cottage industries who lost their jobs as a result of the recession in the textile industry joined the committees of unemployed workers in Naples; and they were followed by housewives who had never had jobs.
This was possible because of a general understanding that their different problems were caused by deliberate capitalist policies and by their own total lack of skills. As part of these committees, they participated in the occupation of a hospital in Naples where the workers were on strike to force the management to hire more staff in order to lighten their hours and amount of work.
At the same time, women in the cottage industries in the north of France fought for the right to partial unemployment compensation. After a month of demonstrations, including occupation of the regional office of the textile and leather trade, they finally won their demand.
All over Britain there are action committees of women who do piecework at home. These came together in Birmingham last year to discuss their organizing efforts. Their main goal was a pay increase, since in general their wages are even lower than those of hotel workers or cleaning women; they also demanded legislation protecting their jobs. They discussed setting up their own cooperatives to get out from under the thumb of their exploiters.
In each of these cases, the support of trade unions or of groups from the independent women's movement was decisive in enabling the women workers to overcome their isolation and engage in collective action.
Immigrant women play a key role in all the struggles we are discussing here; they are among the most exploited and oppressed in every country. Often without relatives and handicapped by language problems, nevertheless they can frequently be found on the front lines of these battles because they have the most at stake.
Challenge to Traditional Division of Labor
Another important aspect of the massive entry of women workers into struggle is that new concepts are put forward in their strikes, such as rejection of part-time work, the need for women to get into traditionally "male" occupations, or the fight against working conditions that endanger the health and safety of workers in general and pregnant workers in particular.
The question of part-time work is a complicated one, because there are many mothers of families, burdened with the double workday, who consider part-time employment the only way they can reconcile wage work with their family responsi bilities.
Nevertheless, part-time work generally means instability and the absence of job security (the bosses just hire on workers for the time they need them). It means jobs involving little responsibility, a rise in individual output, and not getting paid for overtime work because everything is considered "normal" under forty hours a weekall of which contribute to the organizational weakness of part-time workers.
While it is a bad deal for the workers, it is a very good deal for the employers. The Belgian employers association understood this very well when it launched a camin the commercial paign sector especially-under the pretense of "dividing up the available work in an equitable manner."
To whom was this campaign really directed? To women, obviously. This is just another way of taking advantage of the fact that women are part of the reserve army of labor, and keeping open the possibility of sending them back into their homes as soon as unemployment becomes a problem.
But the delegates of the office workers union responded with an overwhelming "no" to this false solution to the problem. They were supported by the women's movement, which organized a day of action on unemployment last November 11, focusing on the demand for shorter workdays for everyone. This is the only way of countering the social division of labor and the allocation of tasks according to sex, both in the home and in society as a whole.
The women workers at the Mondadori factory in Italy came to the same conclusions. As part of a general struggle by Italian workers to defend their jobs, these women insisted that the idea of "typically female" jobs and the "turnover" characteristic of jobs with a predominantly female work force were both directly tied to women's lack of skills, and that part-time work did nothing but reinforce this aspect of the oppression of female workers.
Faced with a drive by the employers to impose part-time work on them, these women proposed setting up a commission to inform women of the consequences of such a choice. Secondly-and more important-they launched a struggle to insure that part-time work would not be just another form of discrimination as outlined above but rather would be equally available to men and women.
The struggle at Mondadori developed in the context of a general campaign to control the "turnover" that was especially serious in that factory, and of the existence of quotas limiting the ratio of women workers.
The extremely advanced document on these issues published jointly by the women's group involved and the women's commission of the union representing Mondadori workers, represented a new stage in the discussion on the relation between the public and the private, on the traditional role of women, their isolation, and the type of struggle that has to be waged to change this situation.
The Right to the Same Jobs as Men
For several years female workers in the United
States have been fighting for affirmative-action quotas and preferential treatment to break into certain traditionally male occupations.
In the context of a broader struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment (a constitutional amendment assuring complete legal equality between men and women), American women have won court rulings that 20% of the apprenticeships in the construction industry have to go to females.
In the mining industry, seven women won an important victory last year against the Island Creek mining company in Kentucky. The company, which employed around 200 women, refused to hire these seven for the simple reason that they were females.
The women then turned to the court, which not only ruled that the company had to pay $41,000 back wages to the workers who had been discriminated against, but that in half the future job openings priority had to be given to the applications of the 276 women who had been refused work. Further, the company had to continue to hire women in a ratio of
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Notes
1. See Intercontinental Press/Inprecor, March 6, 1978, p. 262.
2. A nine-month strike by watchmakers in Besançon, France, concluded in January 1974. One of the longest strikes in French history, it included a two-and-a-half month occupation of the factory in which the workers operated the plant themselves.