I Want to Work - but What About the Cutsp

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Of all the inept bodies dreamt up by tired 'liberal' reformists the Equal Opportunities Commission must be amongst the most cynically diversionary.

Set up in 1975 to monitor the workings of the Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts, the Commission has kept its head well down in the sand as wage control and public spending cuts have made a hollow mockery of "equal opportunity for women"

The EOC has the power "to investigate and make recommendations on anything that may put women at a disadvantage including educational practices."

Hence the publication of this pamphlet, along with two alternative reports by academic hacks Robin Simpson and Peter Moss. e I Want to Work but What About the Kids? starts from the basic principle that capitalism must be presérved at all costs but that if we all close our eyes and make a wish then we might just be granted one or two reforms.

The Oxford Trades Council's one-day conference on Day Care for the Under Fives was attended by over 50 delegates eager It makes the TUC Charter on the Under Fives (reviewed earlier in Socialist Press) seem almost revolutionary by comparison.

The pious opening remarks set the tone for what follows:

"The Commission would like to see the implementation of policies which maxiSAVE OU mise choices for both sexes and which make it feasible, for parents who wish to do so, to combine work and family, their domestic and public lives."

There is reference to "the present shortage of day care facilities" but the effect of the cuts is carefully skirted around.

As if discovering some deeply hidden truth for the first time ever, the EOC announces that millions of women are being forced to stay at home because of the lack of nursery facilities!

However, it is when the report comes to its recommendations that the nature of its politics is exposed.

Mingled with correct demands for flexible hours and all-year round provision of child care facilities are some proposals which go directly against the interests of working people.

For instance, the EOC is clearly against free state nursery education- "day care provision must be available at a price parents can realistically afford"

The report only briefly touches on the unsuitability of playgroups for working parents: and it advocates the setting up of workplace nurseries by employers.

Some of the EOC's findings are very similar to points in the TUC's Charter.

One of the better sections spells out the need for a unified administration of nursery provision, ending the present division between the Education Department and Social Services.

School age

The report also brings in the need for facilities to cater for school-age children needs of working parents, and for school-age children a service of extended day and holiday schemes should be made availof working parents, though again the demands are totally inadequate.

The additional document "Day Care for School Age Children" by Robin Simpson 1S mainly concerned with showing how cheaply such care can be provided.

The nearest the main I Want to Work... report comes to discussing funding is to say that:

"We recognise that the proposals we are making will require considerable reallocation scarce resources"

Priorities

In other words the EOC falls straight into the trap of arguing priorities.

A further major omission is the lack of any real reference to day care workers themselves.

Child-minders and nursery nurses in particular are amongst the most exploited and oppressed of all women workers.

Even by its own standards of woolly-minded liberalism one would have thought the EOC would have more than a paragraph to say on their position. Perhaps the most fundanental assumption behind the EOC's work is that the family unit must be maintained come what may.

Threat

Inevitably the huge increase in the number of women going out to work is seen as a threat to the family as an individual unit.

So the EOC attempts to make liberal adjustments to the relationship between the needs of working women and the needs of capitalism and the family.

This is why whole sections of reformists, Stalinists and bourgeois feminists, whilst claiming to have no illusions in the EOC, continue to boost it and demand that it be given more teeth.

The EOC, whether its powers are increased or not, will remain by its very nature a watch-dog not for working women but for the ruling class, and this report offers no way forward for women who want to fight for more nursery provision.

[Workers Socialist League MANIFESTO * LABOUR SACK KAGHANE THE CRISIS OF CAPITALISI STILL AVAILABLE: WSL Manifesto - spelling out the programme of the WSL and Our attitude to the 1979 General Election. 5p plus 7p "post trom WSL, 31, Dart mouth Park Hill, London NW5 1HR.

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PHOȚO: Laurence Sparham (IFL) DONT CUT US