Woman Worker

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demanded to be given trial periods on these jobs and the union was forced to back them.

The results were the same rights to jobs previously considered men's, higher grading and higher pay and the relationship between male and female workers was strengthened by this struggle, with the women realising it was the management not the men that oppressed them, In BL, there has been an intervention by our comrades for a number of years on equal opportunities for women.

Our comrades were able to get a campaign agreed by the BL combine committee including a demand on management to produce figures on job applications in order to show discrimination in the hiring of women workers. The Stalinists have refused to activate this campaign.

Cuts It is predominantly in the fight against public spending cuts that our work among women has been carried out this year. The cuts are the sharpest A major orientation of all such campaigns has been to direct community campaigns into the trade union movement: the solution lies in the class struggle against Tories, Labourites, and against capitalism.

It does not lie with ad hoc individual solutions, such as private playgroups and charity funding (e.g. Stoke Mandeville). The cuts will not be stopped by protest community action, petitions and letters to local papers and MPs.

We must point this out to women drawn around community campaign. In the bid to save South Oxford nursery, we had mass community support, thousands of signatures, but it didn't stop the closure.

In 1976 80,000 marched against cuts but it didn't save a single hospital bed or job.

Cuts will be stopped only by independent working class action to bring down the Tory Closures will only be effectively stopped by occupations, which continually raise the question of workers' control.

We recognise that occupations are not enough in themselves and can be easily ended, circumstances make them a crucial proposal, we fight to defend them and for them to be employer-financed but under the control of trade union and users' committees.

Health Service The defence of the NHS, a fundamental right, is crucial for all working class women. The Tories have put crippling cash limits on health spending, while even AHA figures have inflation running at 21%.

The situation is ripe for demanding a sliding scale of state expenditure index-linked to inflation determined by elected workers committees.

Model resolutions in defence of the health service should be put through every union branch but in particular those within the NHS.

The 'open the books' demand can be seen by women workers in the public sector to have its most direct relevance to the NHS.

New hospitals are vital as additions, not substitutions, for previous provision. If the AHAs fought to have our policies accepted, for instance Todmorden, Leicester and The Labour Party has, for a long time, organised women separately in Women's Sections. This is less a sign of awareness of women's oppression than a rellection of i It, since the primary role of these bodies is, "women's work" tike making carry out cakes and soft toys for bazaars. Nevertheless, in some cases there can be opportunities to raise political questions within women's sections. The 1979 Women's Conference, for instance, adopted a series of positions well to the left of the main LP conference-including a call for a sliding scale of wages.

SP and WW supporters in the Labour Party have. a flexible attitude to working in Women's sections, while arguing for them to be replaced by committees on women's rights at every level in the party-open to both women and men. their supporters to join the Labour Party to fight for the policies of SP and WW. In some cases this will be the most fruitful arena for political struggle, since many women who aren't in paid employment find it extremely hard to join or participate fully in a trade union.

Gays The WSL must urgently develop its theoretical work on sexual oppression. But this must not be used as a pretext for delaying the intervention of the WSL in the fight for gay rights, based on OUT existing The responsibility for this falls partly on gay WSL members who can most easily intervene in the gay movement in such organisations as the Gay Activists Ălliance (in which the IMG has a major intervention), in the Gay Rights at Work conferences which are planned, and in gay trade union fractions (which exist for example in NUT, NATFHE, NALGO, UPW).

The purpose of such interBi-monthly women's paper of the Workers Socialist League. Available price 16p (including postage) from WSL, BM Во 5277, London WCIV 6XX.