Women
International Women's Day 1998
Women Workers of the World: Fight for a Socialist Future.
It is more than 140 years since, in New York on March 8th 1857, the first mass demonstration of women workers took place in revolt against abysmal pay and working conditions. It is 150 years since, on the eve of revolution spreading across Europe, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published their famous indictment of capitalism - the Communist Manifesto. How far has the lot of half the world's population been bettered since then and how far is there still to go?
The poorest countries
Most of the world's women still live and toil in countries that, in spite of wresting formal independence from the colonial oppressor, are dominated by imperialism and its multinational giants. They 'feel with their skins' that process which Marx and Engels referred to as the pauperisation of the masses. If in the 'advanced' capitalist countries and the state-owned planned economies, there were periods when sections of workers, including women, saw real improvements in their lives, in the 'Third World' there was no relief. On the contrary.
The 48 least developed countries of the world are twice as poor as they were just 20 years ago and have seen their involvement in international trade dwindle to a mere 0.3%. Grinding poverty and crippling debt, have been aggravated in the more recent period by the dictates of the International Monetary Fund's 'Structural Adjustment' austerity programmes, particularly in Africa but also in many other places. Now the conditions of IMF 'bail-outs' in Asia are plunging millions of workers into poverty. In countries with no 'safety net' of unemployment benefits, women will bear the brunt of being amongst the first to be made redundant and the ones who have to find sustenance for other family members who have no income.
World-wide 1.3 billion people live on less than $1 a day. The wars, famines, 'ethnic cleansing', military dictatorships and so-called 'natural' disasters that plague the poorest countries in the world wreak greatest havoc with the lives of women and their children. They are starved, made homeless and landless, persecuted through torture and rape, killed by landmines, bombings and gunfire.
Women in the 'Third World' carry out the overwhelming majority of tasks in the countryside. They see the very earth, the rivers and the forests on which they depend, wrecked and polluted by multinational companies, intent on making the maximum profit from their operations. Those activists who speak out and campaign for even the most basic democratic and trade union rights, including many dedicated and self-sacrificing women, are fighting an uphill battle. Many face imprisonment without trial, sexual torture and even summary execution.
Newly Industrialised
Marx and Engels' harrowing descriptions of the working conditions that accompanied the rise of capitalism in Europe are all too appropriate for what has become the norm in many countries of Asia and Latin America. This includes the Newly Industrialised Countries or 'Tigers', held up until recently as models of economic success. In China, in Thailand, in Mexico (the examples are numberless) it is common for women to be working in sweat shops 10, 14 and 16 hours a day, six or even seven days a week. (And this when one-third of the world's workforce - 800 million people - are either under- or unemployed!). Many millions live in insanitary hovels or favellahs. Child labour is widespread. In these countries, as in Europe I50 years ago, organisers of trade unions or even of self-help groups are physically attacked and victimised.
Undaunted, in Argentina, in South Korea and other countries, there are the Mothers of the Disappeared and Mothers of the Tortured who continue their weekly demonstrations in pursuit of justice. In Brazil, many women play a leading role in the movement of the landless workers (MST). In the mass occupations to reclaim land stolen from the people by the latifundia magnates, they brave the guns and knives of thugs and police alike. In Sri Lanka, the magnificent strike of nearly million mostly female tea plantation workers this February shines like a beacon to workers everywhere
Examples to follow
It is struggles like these that we celebrate on March 8th. As the world teeters on the brink of economic crisis, brought on by the 'meltdown' in Asia, it is clear that nothing will improve for working women without a fight. In the course of the past 150 years there has been many an example to follow. Even before the turn of the century, women were pioneers in organising trade unions and leading strikes. They have taken their place - often in the front ranks - in movements to change society, to rid it of fascism and of war.
In 1914, on International Women's Day, they organised demonstrations for peace in a number of different countries. The two horrific world wars that have taken place this century reinforced their hatred of rulers who send millions to their death. But they also brought millions of working class women out of the home to participate in the workforce. These women began to realise their own strength, assert their own demands and challenge the existing order. In the course of wars, women have also played an important part in revolutionary, partisan and resistance movements, showing a courage and self-sacrifice second to none. (In strife-torn Northern Ireland over recent years, in the absence of a serious campaign by the trade union tops for unity against sectarianism and the class enemy, it was women workers who have been the most audacious in organising action to cut across sectarian divisions and government attacks)
Revolution and counter-revolution
In Russia, it was the female textile workers of Petrograd, striking on 23rd of February 1917 (March 8th by the old calendar), and calling out their brothers in the metal factories, that set off a movement which brought down the hated Csarist regime. The struggle they started against food shortages and mass slaughter in the trenches, paved the way for the Bolshevik Party to lead the only successful socialist revolution in history just 8 months later in October. The immediate introduction of the 8 hour day, civil marriage and divorce, legalised abortion and a massive programme for communal child care, cooking and washing, all promised to transform the lives of working women. Teams of women revolutionaries travelled to far-distant towns and villages and lived amongst nomadic peoples to hold meetings and teach literacy, health and birth control in order to give women a chance to participate in building socialism and take control over their own lives.
Later, the reverses suffered by working women under the bureaucratic dictatorship of Stalin were enormous and in themselves were an indication of how far short of socialism society remained. In the Soviet Union and in most of the state-owned planned economies that developed elsewhere, around 95% of women participated in the workforce. But their health and fertility were badly affected by conditions of work and by 'family planning' through multiple abortions, in the almost total absence of contraceptive devices. Lip-service was paid to equality in the home. Women might be relieved of household chores on one day a year - March 8th - and given some flowers!
Nowadays in these countries, it is women (apart from the handful of very rich) who are at the sharp end of the reintroduction of capitalism, with all its ugliest attributes - mass unemployment, abolition of state provisions, a mushrooming in pornography, violence and prostitution and hardly a help-line or a refuge to turn to. Female earnings have dropped on average from around 70% of male earnings to 40%! The memory of the gains of the revolution is all but wiped out.
Reform and counter-reform
Although the process of gaining equal rights went furthest in countries where private ownership of industry and land was actually eliminated and state ownership and planning were established, women also benefited from reforms in countries like France where capitalism only narrowly survived a whole number of revolutionary movements. Throughout this century, where capitalism developed strong working classes (its potential 'grave-diggers', as Marx and Engels put it) the struggles of women, together with the organised labour movement, often meant big strides forward. In many countries they gained not only the right to vote but an end to night-work and child labour, shorter working hours, much improved wage rates and health and safety legislation. Bit by bit, governments were forced to use public funds to make education and welfare provisions which went a long way to ease the numerous burdens traditionally laid on the shoulders of working class women, enable them to work outside the home and give them confidence.
But today, in the so-called advanced capitalist countries where there are no fewer than 100 million people presently unemployed - a majority of them are women. They are now twice as likely as men to be on the jobless registers. Even during recent periods of economic upswing, an actual pauperisation of sections of the European and American working class has taken place, alongside the fabulous enrichment of 'fat cat' owners and directors of both private and public corporations. Monetarist, neo-liberal policies, pioneered by a female representative of the ruling class - Margaret Thatcher - and hitting hardest at women from the working class, have now been accepted by most of the world's labour movement leaders. They have embraced the market and capitalism, hiding behind the collapse of so-called socialism in the Stalinist states of Russia and Eastern Europe.
The fight against unemployment, casualisation and home-working
The divide between the richest and the poorest - within countries and between countries - has actually increased. There has also been a 'feminisation' of poverty. It is working class women who bear the brunt of the massive cut -backs in public spending taking place in Europe and elsewhere. It is their jobs in education, health and welfare that are the first to go and it is they who are expected to make good the lost 'services' to the elderly, the sick and the young through their own herculean efforts.
Women workers are also often first in the firing line in private industry - thrown out of work, given reduced hours, put onto casual or totally 'flexible' working contracts. One-third of working women in Europe are in part-time jobs - not from choice but through lack of child care provision that would enable them to work full-time. For similar reasons, millions of women are doing dangerous and abysmally paid work at home on sub-contract to some of the biggest and best-known world monopolies. In Europe there are now 8 million 'teleworkers' - predominantly women. In India 93% of working women are in the euphemistically called 'informal' sector.
'Out-working' was a practice graphically described by Marx and Engels but which all but died out with the development of capitalism and factory working. Now the bosses have revived it, as their system goes into deeper long-term crisis. In pursuit of the cheapest, most flexible and compliant workforce, even in the developed economies, they cut organised mainly male jobs in factories to a minimum, and sub-contract to individual, mainly female workers isolated in their homes the manufacture of anything from clothes and shoes to electronic circuit-boards. In this way they have no outlay, except on raw materials. They use rapacious and hated middlemen to intimidate women into 'turning round' a job in the fastest possible time, as and when they need it done. They literally bank on their 'hired hands' not combining against them in trade union associations.
Nevertheless, from Bolivia to Britain, India to Italy, women have been to the fore in organising, linking up and campaigning to protect such workers. As a result of their pressure, an international Conference held in 1996 of representatives from 124 countries adopted a charter of rights for home-workers and an agreement on minimum wages and conditions. But, just like the international 'agreement' made in 1951 on equal pay for work of equal value, without struggle it runs the risk of remaining a dead letter. No real reforms are won without a fight - of both men and women workers. Resources must be put in to genuine international campaigns on the part of the trade unions. (Internationally women make up more than one third of their membership, in some places 50%) Action must be organised by the strongest sections of workers - on these issues and against the bosses' whole system of exploitation - if lasting improvements are to be made.
200 million women world-wide are employed by sub-contractors, with no protection by law for accident, sickness, disablement etc. Women make up 80 - 85% of workers in the Export Processing or Free Trade Zones, established in over 50 so-called 'developing' countries to attract foreign firms including household names like Philips, Sony, Nike, Reebok, Wrangler. They also are not covered by labour laws. Sexual harassment is rife. Trade unions are banned and driven underground.
A measure of progress?
The Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, champion of workers' democracy against the totalitarianism of Stalin, always maintained that genuine progress in society (and towards socialism in an economy where capitalism had been eliminated) could be accurately gauged by the situation of working class women - the tangible improvements in their lives or otherwise. Only when they are totally freed from their 'double burden', he insisted, and enabled to participate on an equal basis with men in education, work, trade unions and politics, science, art and culture, would it be possible to say that humanity was truly freed from all the hallmarks of capitalist oppression. By this measure, the gruesome facts about women's plight on a global scale show how far there is to go!
Women make up 70% of the world's poor and more than 60% (600 million) of the world's illiterate. Although they do not constitute half of the world's official workforce, it has been estimated that they do two-thirds of the world's work and receive one tenth of the world's income. (In Africa they do 80% of the work, and receive less than 1% of the income!) An international trade union study calculates that if the 'household tasks' done by women - cleaning, cooking, washing, child care etc - were considered as productive activity, the total production or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the world would be valued 24-30% higher!
The position allotted to working women by capitalism is to 'serve' or maintain all the other family members as well as to serve bosses in the workplace. This role, especially at times of economic cutbacks, is reinforced by all the most odious propaganda, moralising and religious bigotry. Even in the third most economically powerful country in the world - Germany - the Catholic church is now being used to resurrect a campaign against existing limited but hard-won abortion rights.
Unequal chances
Women everywhere experience discrimination of some kind during their lives. The majority of females from working class or peasant backgrounds have far worse chances than males of getting a decent education, good employment or equal pay when they do the same job as men. (Even in the second wealthiest country in the world - Japan - on average, women are paid less than half what is paid to men!)
In some countries, because of poverty and prejudice, females are so undervalued that they are selectively aborted, killed in infancy or deliberately undernourished. Because of this, it is estimated, there are at least 60 million women 'missing' from the world! In some countries, brides must come with substantial dowries. In India 6,500 wives are killed per year, often by burning, for not having provided sufficient wealth to their husband's family. In other cases, including in China, where the practice was eliminated along with capitalism, now, with its re-establishment, girls are once again being sold as child brides and young women are handed over by their families to rich men as concubines. 90 million women are known to have suffered genital mutilation - a 'tradition' which emphasises the subjugation of women in certain communities (including in Europe). In 'modern' capitalist South Africa in 1994 at least 100 women were burned as witches. The local police do nothing to stop such horrific practices. The same applies in many countries where they are in the pay of those who rule.
There are brave women fighters who literally risk their lives by trying to bring the perpetrators of atrocities against women to justice. A low-caste woman campaigner in India - Bhanwari Devi - who dared to challenge a village headman for selling a one-year-old girl to be married, was set upon by a gang of thugs and raped and beaten in an attempt to silence her. Another, in Bangladesh, was issued a death sentence by the elders of the church and forced into hiding. In a clandestine interview, Tashima Nazeem declared that "politics cannot be based on religion if women are to be free". This is true. But religion itself is used as an instrument of oppression, as well as an escape from the real world for many of those who are oppressed. It will not be removed from the social or political arena as long as capitalism survives.
Private greed; public suffering
It is the division of society into classes and nation states, as described by Marx and Engels, and the domination of the world's economy by about 350 private corporations that lie behind the suffering of most of the world's population. But it could so easily be eliminated by a different organisation of things. The United Nations estimates that just 1% of the world's income could eradicate poverty! Effective debt relief for the 20 poorest countries would cost less than the $5.5 billion spent on building Disneyland Paris!
For lack of resources to provide adequate health education and care, 600,000 women a year die from complications with pregnancy and child-birth. For each one of them, thirty more are injured, infected or disabled for life. At the very least, 75,000 women are known to die each year for trying to abort themselves and at least as many again from botched illegal operations, possibly as many as 200,000 which is 550 a day!
Women are 80% of the world's refugees who live without personal possessions in temporary accommodation - sometimes even detention camps. They are subjected to continual, humiliating hounding by the authorities and by racist tormentors. Women also constitute a large proportion of migrant workers - from Sri Lanka twice as many as men, from Indonesia three times. Most end up virtually enslaved by employers who keep their passports or 'protect' them from deportation. In domestic service, they work for little more than their keep and are often abused and sexually assaulted. Tens of thousands of women try to escape poverty by answering advertisements for marriage in another country. (20,000 'mail order brides' leave the Philippines each year). Many become imprisoned in a 'new life' of sexual and domestic exploitation.
Commodities
In most countries of the world, women are treated as second class citizens but in many, including in Europe, they are literally bought and sold. Women from Eastern Europe, lured westwards with promises of jobs as waitresses or dancers have been bought, in Prague, for example, for as little as £150 and sold into prostitution for as much as £12,000. One 'trafficker' made £5 million over 5 years, before he was arrested, by bringing 100 women from Brazil to Europe. Just as evil are the big companies like Nestle, who convince women in the third world to substitute their products for breast feeding. It has been estimated that this has been responsible for the death no less than one and a half million babies. International campaigns are needed on all these issues.
In India real successes have been notched up in an energetic campaign to organise 200,000 women into 6,000 groups fighting for education and unionisation, against the alcohol arrack and encouraging the saving 'a rupee a day'. The massive campaign in Bangalore against the multi-million dollar 'Miss World' Beauty Contest, with demonstrations 2,000 strong clashing with police, achieved international publicity. Various forces joined together to protest against women being used as marketable commodities.
Lone parents and politics
One fifth of the world's women head single-parent families. Women constitute around 90% of all lone parents bringing up children. Often in the third world, it is poverty that has forced either them or their partners to move away from their homes to seek work. Even in industrialised countries lone parents make up a large proportion of those who fall below the poverty line - their lot only worsened by their meagre allowances being stolen from them.
Across Europe, from Sweden to Portugal, Greece to Italy and France, it is erstwhile workers' parties, once champions, at least in words, of women's rights and socialism, who in government are now robbing the poor to pay the rich - just as the traditional bosses' parties did before them! In Britain, 'New Labour' is punishing single mothers as if they were naughty children (and children as if they were all potential criminals!) They are also trying to end the provision of free contraceptive pills for young women. Even in economic terms, this does not make sense: for every £1 saved, there would be an additional £11 cost from the resulting unwanted pregnancies.
Women government ministers, of whatever political persuasion - with their nannies, cleaners and cooks - know little of the trials and tribulations of the army of working class women whose anger they are stoking up anew. The fact that some women have reached the pinnacles of political power and become Prime Ministers has done nothing for the mass of working women - be it in Britain, India, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Norway or Bangladesh.
Fighting sexual harassment and domestic violence
A majority of women in the world experience sexual harassment at work to one degree or another - many of them daily. It ranges from unwanted attention by male workers to demands by management for sexual 'favours' on pain of dismissal and the use by bosses of rape as a means of humiliation and subjection. Successful cases have been brought by women and by their unions against employers in a number of countries. There is a much wider awareness of how widespread the problem is although there is a long way to go. In some countries no law exists under which to sue!
The same applies to the crime of domestic violence. (In Pakistan rape and other crimes against women are duly banned by law but, where they take place, they are always deemed to be the fault of the woman!) Through various campaigns, not least those organised by members of the Committee for a Workers' International, including the highly successful Campaign Against Domestic Violence in Britain, the extent of sexual harassment and domestic violence has been exposed and much work done to make them trade union and labour movement issues.
One quarter at least of all women suffer assaults in the home. In the USA one woman is beaten every 18 minutes. In Russia the number of women murdered in a year has gone from 5,300 in 1991 to 14,000 two years later in 1993. What more obnoxious indicator could there be of the speed with which society is disintegrating. It will take a new mass movement of the working class against the evils of capitalism to reverse this process and to give hope to both male and female workers that there is a real alternative.
Women in all countries and from all classes can suffer domestic violence. It is a horrific expression of the way society's mores are developed to maintain the status quo in society. Ideologies and religions that emphasise the domination of the male in the family are a tool for the maintenance of 'discipline' and respect for authority on behalf of the rulers. But a rich woman has much more chance of escaping from a violent relationship than a woman with no independent means. The provision of refuges and, indeed, the availability of decent housing for all, are vital for women (and children) suffering such abuse. But it begs the question of where, in a society geared to profit, will money be found to finance such public investment? (Even in 'advanced' Austria, where campaigns have succeeded in getting established 16 secure hostels for 'battered women', the EU recommended level would mean at least another 44 being provided).
Pride in struggle
Members of the Committee for a Workers' International believe that doing away with private ownership and profit would release massive resources for the benefit of working people. They have participated in, and often initiated, numerous campaigns and struggles on issues that affect women workers. In Britain for two years they have had the privilege of fighting alongside the valiant Women of the Waterfront (Liverpool Dockers' support group) and the Hillingdon hospital strikers. In India they have worked patiently amongst the oppressed garment workers, battling for their rights as workers and as human beings. In the fight for a decent education to be available for all, young women have come to the fore in numerous countries.
Over the years, women's participation in struggle has forced big changes in attitudes. They have gained real reforms that gave them some control over their lives in relation to reproductive rights, nursery provision and a host of other issues. In November 1995 they marched 50,000 strong through the streets of Paris. They have often been the driving force of community campaigns - against extra taxes and charges on working people, against drugs and racism and, along with workers' organisations, against hospital, school and nursery closures. Many women have taken their place in the struggle for socialism and shown themselves capable of the maximum sacrifice in pursuit of justice for their kind. The women of the defiant 'Sans Papiers' ('illegal immigrants') in France have also proved that, when the situation demands it, the struggle can be conducted with your baby strapped to your back!
Throughout history, women with or without their children, have been heroic participants in uprisings and revolutionary or guerrilla movements They have been motivated by a burning hatred of the big landowners, the factory bosses or the corrupt and self-seeking politicians who ruin their lives. They are inspired by the prospect of winning real emancipation for themselves and their families along with that of the working class. (In 1959 in Tibet, they showed utter fearlessness in a women's rebellion against Chinese rule that was finally drowned in blood). Women have made up at least a third of the armed fighters in movements like the Zapatistas in Mexico, which has its own charter for women's equality and in which indigenous Mayan women are a key influence. Women made up a similar proportion of the Eritrea and Tigre liberation armies and of the Intifada in Israel/Palestine.
They participated in these movements out of a conviction that they had nothing to lose and a great deal to gain. They will have had the unforgettable experience, after breaking down initial resistance, of being treated with respect as equals and fighting for a society without exploitation and class or sexual domination. Where such movements have receded and even where they have scored certain victories, on the basis of backwardness and scarce resources, these fighting women have been sorely disappointed. All the old attitudes towards them have returned as they have been forced back into their traditional roles. But the memories and the aspirations live on.
A fighting programme
The Committee for a Workers' International fights for a new society. It champions the demands for:
- Real jobs for all: equal pay for work of equal value: a 35 hour week for full-time workers: full-time rights for part-time and home-workers: a decent basic minimum wage for all.
- No cuts in welfare spending
- A massive programme for building schools, hospitals and homes for all
- An end to racism, fascism and all forms of repression
It inscribes on its banner demands that would give the working woman a genuine 'right to choose' throughout her life including the universal provision of:
- Free education and health facilities for all
- Maternity and child benefit to cover the real costs of bearing and bringing up children
- Free, good quality child care at times suiting parents' needs
- Adequate, low rent accommodation
- Free contraception and abortion for all those who require it
All this means conducting a relentless campaign also against all reactionary propaganda and bigotry - religious, political, 'philosophical' - which reinforces the constraints imposed on working women in capitalist society. The CWI fights world-wide for the socialist organisation of society as the only way to release sufficient resources to fulfil all the basic needs of working class people. Huge scientific advances have been made which can help overcome the untold suffering of childless women (and men). The labour movement must take up the demand for these facilities to be available to all who want them and to banish any exclusiveness, commercialisation or profit-making from this, and indeed all, advances in medicine.
On International Women's Day, 1998, the Committee for a Workers' International pledges to redouble its efforts in developing a fighting programme for working women world-wide. With sections, members and supporters in 40 or so different countries, we will step up our efforts to organise and to coordinate solidarity for all the struggles they undertake. In the course of such work we will continue to explain that it is not women's fight for equality that undermines men but the capitalist system. It not only fails to provide the bare necessities for a decent life for workers of both sexes, it reduces them to cogs in a wheel, often without respect even for themselves.
In our written material, our meetings and our campaigns we aim to convince the best of activists to join us in the fight for a socialist alternative to capitalism and landlordism. We argue for public ownership of the biggest industries, banks and land and for democratic planning of the economy and society under the control and management of elected representatives of workers and, where appropriate, land-workers.
In the true spirit of the Communist Manifesto, we call for unity in the struggle for genuine socialism. Only through the establishment of property held in common and society run on democratic and cooperative principles, will working people - men and women - reach the full potential of their talents and abilities. Only then will personal relations be totally free. Only then can the horrors of capitalism - war, poverty and oppression - be replaced with harmonious and peaceful development on an unprecedented scale.
Mexico
In the Maquiladora (assembly) industry on the US border, Mexican workers working for US or Japanese firms receive 1/10th of manufacturing wages in the USA. Sexual harassment is widespread. One of these firms - American Global was taken to court by 118 women. They had been made to strip off and put on bikinis during a company picnic and were videoed. When they protested, they were sacked but, by a decision of the court, received severance pay.
Thailand
Preda Pholsawad is a sub-contract worker - a member of the "industrial reserve army". She eats and sleeps in the workshop. She works 16 hours a day, 6 days a week and gets 40 cents a shirt (less if short-sleeved!). 96 hours a week brings her $200 a month...until she is not needed and laid off. (Asian Labour Update. April-June 1997)
China
Women in the cities are being laid off from ailing state-run factories. They never thought that economic progress in China would mean more housewives and fewer career women. The old cultural values are being resurrected along with religion, cults and superstition. Some were never eradicated: one-third of all divorcees is women rejected for bearing female children. Hotlines recently set up for victims of domestic violence report that the problem has "got even worse with the 'rat-race' (the introduction of market 'values' and intense pressure for economic attainment) including amongst middle class men, humiliated at work".
Nicaragua
Since 1990 (when a Right-wing government took over from Sandinistas) "a serious erosion of labour rights" has been reported. Privatisation has meant sackings, worse conditions, strikes and dismissals of union leaders. There is 60% unemployment, 90% in rural areas. Women make up a majority of both unemployed and those working in the 'Free Trade Zones'. They can be made to work at least 50 hour weeks, sometimes forced to stay late into the night, with half hour lunch breaks. Clandestine organising of women workers is carried out.