------------------------ Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the March 13, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
POISED TO SHAKE UP THE OLD ORDER: WOMEN ON LABOR'S CUTTING EDGE By Deirdre Griswold For many decades, all across the United States--indeed, in much of the world--the ground has been swelling and shifting in preparation for a social earthquake that cannot be suppressed much longer. The vast change taking place is on a very fundamental level. It has the most profound implications for the future of human society. It involves the flood of women who have entered the work force and become a potent element in the struggle of the working class. To appreciate the immense changes, it is useful to look back at what life was like early in the last century, when Inter na tional Women's Day was first established. Sweatshop conditions were so terrible in New York City that in 1909 a strike of mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant garment workers was dubbed "The Uprising of the 20,000." This struggle prompted the Socialist International, meeting in Copenhagen the next year, to declare an International Women's Day. At that time, however, women who worked outside the home were a very small minority. In most of the world, including the rapidly developing capitalist countries, the vast majority of women worked from dawn until long after dusk cooking, cleaning, sewing, raising children, and performing all the laborious tasks of running a large household without refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines or other appliances now standard in industrialized countries. They labored very hard, but not for pay and not outside the home. In the United States in 1900, women made up only 18.3 percent of the official--paid--work force. VAST MAJORITY OF WOMEN ARE NOW WAGE WORKERS Fifty years later, that figure had grown to only 29.6 percent. Today, however, women make up 46.6 percent of the labor force in the United States--nearly half. (These and other figures cited in this article come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau.) That figure shows the breakdown between men and women in the work force. But looking at just women, how many of them are now working outside the home? At least 60 percent of the women in the United States today work outside the home. An astonishing 99 out of every 100 women will work for pay at some point in their lives. Even the majority of women with young children have to go out and work. In 2000, among married couples with children, two-thirds of the women worked--65.8 percent as compared to 57.5 percent in 1980. With kids to take care of at home, maybe most of these women worked just part time? Oh no. Women worked full time in 60 percent of dual-worker families in 2000, compared with only 44 percent of such families in 1980. These statistics don't cover the fact that people today are living in many relationships other than the "traditional" family of husband, wife and children. In 1997, for example, 28 percent of the families with children under 18 were maintained by a single parent--usually the mother. Single parents of course have a harder time financially and, if they work, in providing child care, because couples can often coordinate their work schedules to accommodate the needs of children. Women in lesbian relationships have a lower family income not only because women are paid less than men on average, but because they have the disadvantage in most states of not being recognized as domestic partners. Not just the percentage but the absolute number of working women has also shot up--from 5.3 million in 1900, to 18.4 million in 1950, to 66 million in 2001. The overall population of the United States is now just 3.6 times what it was in 1900, but the number of working women has multiplied 12.5 times over this period. NEW REALITY, OLD SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS These figures represent a huge realignment of forces that is pressing relentlessly against the outmoded social and political institutions of this country. The 66 million working women by and large take much more progressive stands on both international and domestic issues than do men. The capitalist market's penetration into every aspect of life has brought women out of the home to an extent that the 19th-century socialists who campaigned for the liberation of women could have barely imagined. Women are no longer isolated from each other or from society at large. They have gained enormous confidence in areas that had been considered men's exclusive domain. But the burden placed on working women has not been lifted at all. Forget the ads that show relaxed, smiling women managing stunningly beautiful homes at the push of a button. Married working women were putting in a 46-hour week on the job in 1998, and then had to come home and deal with everything there. Women are suffering en masse from sleep deprivation. In the go-go decade of 1989 to 1999, women accounted for 85 percent of the increase in people working more than one job. They had to work two jobs, just to keep their heads above water. While all workers are exploited in the sense that they produce a surplus that goes into the boss's pocket, women workers are subject to super- exploitation, above and beyond that of men. Have there been gains? Yes, big ones. But they need to be understood in the context of a period in which the working class as a whole has been losing ground. In 1970, when the modern women's movement was beginning to press for equal pay for comparable work, a popular button read "59." It referred to the fact that on average, women at that time earned only 59 cents for every dollar that a man earned. The figure today is 76--after many, many struggles, both individual and collective. And it is even higher among young women. In the 20-24 age bracket, women are earning 91.5 percent of men's median wages. While this is far from equality, it still is an important advance. It represents a gain of hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages over an average woman's lifetime. But there are other sides to this story. African American women are earning only 67 cents for every dollar that men in general earn. Among Latinas, it is worse, 55 cents, which is lower than what women overall were getting in 1970. Furthermore, the decreasing gap between women's and men's wages does not only reflect a gain by women. It is also caused by a decline in men's real wages over this same period, especially as big corporations have eliminated many of the higher-paying, unionized industrial jobs typically performed by men. So while women's wages have improved, and women are working longer hours than ever, the financial status of the traditional patriarchal family has declined. Karl Marx proved in great detail that the laws of capitalism constantly batter down the workers' share of what they have created by pitting worker against worker in a competitive job market. While every company's public relations are meant to convince you that the bosses consider each worker to be an individual human being, in fact the time the workers spend on the job is to the capitalists just another commodity, to be bought at the lowest price possible. Marx showed that, unless the workers organize and fight collectively to improve their position, the compensation they receive will be pushed down to the lowest level required to maintain and reproduce them as sources of labor power. The stagnation and even decline of workers' real wages as a whole confirms this view. Workers are more productive than ever. With the newest technology, one worker can do the same job that it took many to do only a few decades ago. So why are people working longer and earning less? It is because, without a vigorous class struggle, the lion's share of what workers produce increasingly goes to the bosses. Here is where women workers' role in the labor movement comes in. WOMEN ARE MOST DYNAMIC SECTION OF LABOR Women are the most dynamic section of organized labor, along with immigrants and men of color. Union membership in general in the United States has been declining, from 14.9 percent of the work force in 1995 to 13.2 percent in 2002, especially as industrial jobs have disappeared. In just the last two years, 1.9 million factory jobs have been lost. But women are organizing and joining unions as never before. The biggest union organizing victory since 1937 was won in Los Angeles four years ago by the Service Employees union, which organized 74,000 home health- care workers, almost all of them women of color. The areas of the economy employing more women--health care, education, government, food service--are exactly where the unions have been most vigorous. The Service Employees union is now the biggest AFL-CIO affiliate, with 1.5 million workers. Some 40 percent of government workers are organized, compared to less than 10 percent in private business. While in 1962 women accounted for only 19 percent of union membership, by 1997 that figure was up to 42 percent and rising. What women have found is that they do much better with a union. In 2001, women union members earned at least 30 percent more than nonunion women. The figures are even higher for the nationally oppressed: African American union members earn 45 percent more than their nonunion counterparts. For Latino workers the union advantage totals 54 percent. And, in a most telling figure, in 1998 women in unions earned more than unorganized men. This can be the basis for greater solidarity between men and women as both recognize the benefits of organization. Women are now essential to socialized production. They have enormous problems juggling everything because of capitalist oppression, but they know they can't go back: Their problems must be solved collectively. They are now leaders in the movement for deep social change that pushes ever more insistently against the entrenched reactionary guardians of the old order. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe wwnews- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] Support the voice of resistance http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php) ------------------ This message is sent to you by Workers World News Service. To subscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
