"Forty-five hours at the factory, plus ten hours traveling time (because work is fifteen kilometers away from home). Leave the house at 6:30 in the morning; work until 12:15. Work again from 1:00 to 6:00 in the evening-that makes nine hours. Plus two hours of travel, but you don't get paid for anything except the nine hours. At 6:00, when 1 get home, I have to begin the housework. All this adds up to sixteen hours a day, or ninety-six hours a week at the minimum. And I've been living this life for thirteen years now...
-An immigrant worker in Switzerland who has a child.
Low wages, unending workdays, repetitive and alienating unskilled labor-the workers movement hardly talked about these conditions ten or twenty years ago. It began to talk about them much more often after women began to radicalize and organize themselves.
There was still more reluctance to talk about the double workday, brutalizing household chores, and the continual worry and guilt about the children, because of the feeling that these were a woman's natural condition. We had even forgotten that as early as the turn of the century female workers were involved in struggles that called into question not only their superexploitation but also the "second workday" that began every evening.
Today more than ever before, in the context of the economic crisis, the words "superexploitation" and "special oppression" are appropriate. We will try in this article to show concretely what they mean for the majority of female workers, and to show how the statistics on female employment reveal a general tendency in all the advanced capitalist countries.
It is true that last hired, first fired, doubly oppressed," is a slogan, a formula. But it is a slogan based on cruel reality.
Starvation Wages
Often two to three times more numerous than they were thirty years ago, women represent between 35% and 38% of the work force in most European countries. In Sweden and the United States, it is 40%. In Spain and Portugal, where the number of women in the work force is much lower (28% and 25% respectively), the percentage is rising.
Italy is an exception with a constant decline in female employment since World
War II (from 25% to 17% of the work force). This can be explained by a series of factors. These include the fact that many female agricultural workers did not find wage employment when the big migration to the cities occurred following the last war, the dominant ideology that woman's place was in the home, plus an acute economic crisis and structural unemployment.
But in general, women have entered industry and service jobs in massive numbers, in the process reinforcing the division that traditionally existed between "male" and "female" jobs.
It is true that in many of the advanced capitalist countries there are laws "guaranteeing" women equal pay for equal work, and the bosses solemnly claim to abide by Convention 100 of the International Labor Organization—an agreement signed more than twenty-five years ago! The problem is, simply, that women do not get the same type of work that men do. And the bourgeoisie knows this perfectly well, since it moves heaven and earth to keep women in "typically female" jobs.
In France, 95.6% of the assembly-line workers in the garment trade are women! How can you explain the growing gap between male and female wages in countries like the United States, at a time when the rate of female employment is increasing, except by the predominance of women in the worst-paid occupations? Full-time female workers in the U.S. now earn 57% what men earn, compared to 64% in 1974.
In addition, there has been a substantial increase in part-time work in most of the advanced capitalist countries during recent years. More than a third of the employed women in most industrialized coun tries are part-time workers. Their employment is designed to produce a "seincome"-not real economic cond independence-and fits in very well with the traditional idea of women's role. In almost 50% of female workers Japan "chose" this type of employment in 1973.
A Real Choice?
In all the countries under consideration, women represent between 70% and 90% of the work force in textiles, garments, shoes, and tobacco—in other words the industries with the worst working conditions, where a lack of job security leads to reliance on overtime. They are there not because they chose this type of employment but because it was the only thing they could find.
the same conditions as in 1962. If you had to work without stopping to make 3,000 pieces in 1962, making 7,000 meant you could not even go to the bathroom!
All women workers are not as conscious as that immigrant worker of the superexploitation they suffer. However, more and more women are beginning to revolt against working conditions that cause all sorts of illnesses and the premature aging of those who work like animals on an assembly line. What the Italians call "white abortion" (that is, miscarriages caused by the hellish pace or by workplace pollution) is today at the center of several trade-union struggles in Italy.
When females are better educated than ever before, to the point where now in many countries there are more girls than boys in secondary school, why should they still be trapped in the worst paying jobs doing the most alienating work?
An Old Story
While the democratization of education has meant a noticeable increase in the number of years of schooling girls receive, nevertheless the old divisions in professional training have not disappeared. In France, there are more females than males in the last years of compulsory school, but only 22% of apprentices are women. This means they do not get the professional training or certification that would enable them to find, if not job security, at least skilled work. So it is not surprising that the majority of them have to work in mass production jobs that do not require any apprenticeship.
In the technical high schools, the number of females is proportionally higher than in the apprenticeship programs, but the tracking system works in a traditional way. If a third of the students are female, as in France, it is because 80% of them have chosen the program for secretarial and typing jobs.
As for the university, although the percentage of female students is up to 40% in some countries, such as the United States and France, it is only 25% in others like Switzerland and Germany. And the same kind of tracking occurs at the university: Most of the female students opt for the faculties of letters and social sciences, leaving to their male counterparts the hard sciences that prepare them for the more prestigious and lucrative professions. And even where there are as many women as men in medical school, as is the case in some American universities, we find that they tend to go into the typically "female" specializations of pediatries and gynecology and only represent a miniscule percentage of the researchers.
These various statistics are not all equally important. Those above, for example, concern only a privileged minority of women. But they do show that the same factors govern the "choices" made by
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Production line in Nikon camera factory near Tokyo.
females when they reach the point of going on to apprenticeships or graduate school. This "choice" is determined by the image they have of themselves and by the way society and everyone around them looks at women, which only perpetuates the discrimination that has warped their education from childhood on.
And even when they question this image, even when they do it because they have come into contact with the women's liberation movement, even when they choose a "male profession," they run into a series of very concrete obstacles limiting their freedom of action and their ability to achieve independence. This is because they are women, and society expects them to fulfill a certain number of specific tasks; it is because one of the basic characteristics of the capitalist system is to count on the institution of the family to assume responsibility without cost for part of the reproduction of the work force.
For Child Care and Laundry Facilities
At the present time in most of the advanced capitalist countries 50% to 60% of employed women are married, and 40% to 50% have children. This means that the question of services is vital if they are to be relieved of at least part of the domestic work which men think is women's responsibility.
But today—and it is not the least important contradiction of the family-the number of child-care centers, fast-food outlets, and laundromats is totally ridiculous in comparison to the needs in every advanced country. Whether you are talking about 6 or 15 or 30 places for each 100 children of working mothers in Canada, Finland, and Belgium respectively, it is obvious that many working mothers have no choice but to find individual solutions: leaving their children with a relative or foster parents, going through all sorts of acrobatics in terms of the hours they work, or stretching their budget to pay for private child care.
Even when a woman is lucky enough to find a place for her child in the public child-care centers, her worries are not over. Often she has to use a center which is very far from her home, she has problems balancing her budget at the end of the month, and she worries all the time she is at work because of the conditions that prevail in many of these centers (overcrowding of children, workers who are not trained, a lack of medical supervision in the private nurseries especially, ete.). Sometimes there are laundromats, but they are expensive; and the fast food places, if they are cheap, usually have poor-quality food.
And while men may accept the idea of "helping" women now and then, you cannot say at the present time that any great number really take responsibility for their share of domestic chores.
This is the general situation that countless women point to when they have had enough, when they have begun to struggle to change things-whether or not they have a clear understanding of the necessity of overturning the system in its entirety so as to create the material bases for the socialization of the thousand and one domestic tasks that stand in the way of the liberation of women.
What is important to us here is to get a better understanding of how the present economic crisis tends to drive women back into their homes and lock them more and more into their domestic chores, while at the same time sharpening certain contradictions of the system.
On one hand, the increase in the absolute number of employed women has been accompanied by a campaign of the bosses to make women assume an even larger responsibility for household chores, some of which had previously been relegated to institutions other than the family.
On the other, the increase in female unemployment comes in a period of inflation in which the wife's paycheck often represents part of the absolute minimum amount necessary for the family to exist; it is no longer the case, as it perhaps was at certain times in previous economic cycles, that the wages women bring home go for "extras" (that is, a certain number of consumer durables, such as refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, automobiles, and so forth, that the working family could not otherwise afford).
Last Hired, First Fired
All the statistics are there: the rise in unemployment, which is now 8.3% in a country like Canada (more than 10% in Québec), with women and youth accounting for most of the increase. In France, 82% of job seekers under twenty-five years of age who have been unemployed for a long time are females.
In Germany, the unemployment curve is indicative of the tendency in most other countries in terms of the ratios of the increases. From 1974 to 1976, while the number of unemployed men increased by more than 50% (going from 2.2% to 3.4%), that of females almost doubled (from 3.1% to 5.9%).
And this tendency has if anything in- Chand i creased in all the advanced countries over the last few years. What are the basic reasons for these "preferential" firings of women? There are objective reasons tied to the crisis of capitalism, but there are also subjective reasons for the systematic discrimination women suffer everywhere we look.
First of all there is a restructuring of the process of production as soon as the crisis begins to affect the most backward sectors, the industries that are the least developed technologically, those that are not competitive. Whether the capitalists are forced to close their doors, or try to improve their returns by replacing a part of the work force with machines, the result is the same for the male and female workers concerned: layoffs and unemployment. And it happens that these sectors are precisely and above all those that employ a majority of women: textiles, the garment trade, footwear, tobacco, watchmaking, etc.
A typical case is the Farah pants factory in Belgium, an American multinational company that without any warning laid off the 250 women who worked there, of which a substantial percentage were immigrants. The same kind of brutal layoffs are occurring at thousands of little factories of this type. Whether these factories are independent operations or subsidiaries of larger corporations, the last thing the management is worried about is the fate of the male and female workers who lose their jobs.
The disappearance of 1,500 textile jobs within a few months in a Portuguese city like Porto, and the prediction of 12,000 more layoffs in the rest of the country in coming months explains the rise in cottage industries, since this is the only alternative for the women who have lost their jobs. This is the case in the north of Portugal as well as in other parts of Europe where that type of production has roots and where it is already prevalent (Spain, Italy, and even Britain in the immigrant ghettos of the cities).
Moreover, the cutbacks in state expendi. tures hit hardest, as everybody knows, in the social sectors that are not profitable from the capitalist point of view, trying not to affect or touch except as a last resort funding that helps the private sector or directly serves its profits (certain improvements in the urban infrastructure, for example.
So when the distinguished members of parliament start looking for a place to cut back, they begin with child-care centers, hospitals, schools, homes for the elderly, and other social institutions. The £8 billion that the British Labour government took out of the public sector in 1976-besides being a direct attack on the working population, which female workers bore the brunt of-condemned thousands of state employees, especially female employees, to unemployment. A similar measure was taken a few months later by the Italian government, which decided to end all loans to local governments, causing hundreds of additional layoffs in a sector employing mostly women.
The closing of child-care centers, schoolroom classes, and homes for the elderly means that many women have to quit work to take care of the children and older relatives who are no longer cared for by social institutions.
These measures affect not only the countries that have been hit hardest by the economie crisis. They represent a general pattern found not only in Britain but also in Canada, or in Québec, where hospital units have been systematically shut down (the gynecology services before anything else, because they are considered secondary"). One thing is obvious from looking at the budgets of all the capitalist coun tries: Whatever the initial target of major cuts (child-care centers, hospitals, schools), it is always primarily in an area where women make up most of the victims, either as workers or as users of the services.
Their Place? In the Home!
The capitalists do not bother to come up with very complicated reasons to "justify" this discrimination: Women are themselves responsible because they have a "natural" place, which is that of stay-athome wife and mother. It doesn't upset the bosses at all when a woman cannot put her children in a child-care center, whether it is because there is no center nearby, or because there is no place available, or because she is unemployed and cannot afford to pay anymore; it is just one of the many ways they try to discourage women from working "when the 'heads of families' themselves cannot even find work!"
This was seen recently at the Roche factory in Madrid, where the management decided to lay off fifty persons. In line with Article 45 of the labor law adopted the previous year, saying workers had to be laid off in reverse order of their seniority except in "exceptional circumstances," the management proposed a list to the minis. ter of labor. But the minister modified the list by systematically replacing the proposed names with those of fifty women. Being a woman is an "exceptional circumstance" all right, when it comes to layoffs.
In Switzerland, certain canton governments decided not to renew the contracts of some teachers because they were married and had children. In the United States, in Minnesota, two women lost their jobs in a mine simply because they were women and "suspected" of being lesbians. (A mine, you understand, is not the proper place for a woman ...)
In some instances it is not so much a question of layoffs but of being refused employment in the first place.
An example is the IBM plant at Porto, where management "does not encourage women to apply for work as programmers." (It does accept plenty of women as key-punch operators, which is repetitive and stultifying work.) And when the capitalists do not use such explicit measures as those cited here (like the rule in France forbidding an unemployed woman to place her child in a child-care center), then they find other methods of dissuasion, less overt, but effective all the same.
The Giscard government, for example, recently offered women two-year unpaid leaves to take care of their children and combined this with a demagogic campaign to persuade women to "temporarily" give up their careers to devote themselves to taking care of their children.
The same tendency exists in most European countries. For the female immigrant, this means additional discrimination. It can be shown that during the economic recession of 1974 in Switzerland, reduction of the foreign work force enabled the Swiss capitalists to hide the real rate of unemployment-which reached 21% for women compared with 6% for men.
These women workers, who in their great majority went back to their own countries-that is to say, to regions already plagued with unemploymentsimply returned to their homes, according to the capitalists, and did not receive any kind of unemployment benefits. Women workers who do qualify for unemployment benefits always get less than men, because of the place they occupy in the production process, the lower salaries they receive, and the less stable jobs that are "reserved" for them-all of which cut into the benefits to which they are entitled.
There is nothing suprising, therefore, about the resurgence of part-time work mentioned above. Far from arising solely or primarily from women's desire to find work that leaves them "leisure" time to take care of their children and housework, the increase in part-time employment stems from women's desperate need to find some kind of work, even if it is badly paid, even if it is not interesting, even if there is no job security.
They have to work, either because their families need two paychecks just to keep body and soul together, or simply because they are alone and must work to survive. One sign of this desperate need is the increase in prostitution in recent years, in particular in the big urban centers. When women are desperate and cannot sell their labor power, some reach the point of selling their bodies.
Their Role? To Manage Somehow!
In most countries, these types of discrimination against employed women and against women listed as unemployed occur in the context of galloping inflation. Price rises of 40% for margarine, 37% for vegetables, 36% for coffee and tea, 24% for milk, cheese, and eggs ... These statistics are from the list published by the British authorities in January 1977 concerning price increases in 1976.
Besides meaning a reduction in the standard of living of every member of an underprivileged family, the price increases mean added work for a housewife. Where she used to be able to make meals out of prepared food, now she has to spend long hours looking for the cheapest meats and vegetables-when she can buy them-and then work hard to prepare these things so that her husband and children can eat them. The laundry that she used to do at an automatic laundromat-when she could find one-she now does herself to save a little money for other necessities. Economizing on money, but not on time... And the same thing when it comes to making clothes.
This picture-which some might be tempted to describe as overly pessimisticapplies above all to the female workers most affected by the economic crisis.
But it is what the bourgeoisie has in store, in terms of the position of women, for the great majority of female workers and working-class housewives.