Plght of Women Worse with Tories

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Mary Ann Todd reviews the CIS Report 'Women in the '80s', price 95p • There is a steady, quiet-for the most part unpublicised-escalation of the oppression of women taking place under the Tory government.

The CIS report Women in the 80s, gives an overall picture of the deepening of isolation, despair, poverty and abuse that the Tories are inflicting on the mass of working class women as they seek to drive up the rate of profit for bankers and industrialists.

The attack hits individuals usually hitting hardest at the least organised, least articulate women who have been conditioned to accept oppression as their lotalmost as if they are to blame.

The report itself quotes one woman (Carol):

"You end up thinking it's yourself and that you are totally inadequate. It happens to a lot of women because we haven't any outlets."

The report shows how the Thatcher government is playing on the teelings of isolation and uselessness that women are forced into.

Statistics

But what is seen by one woman as just another burden to bear is in fact happening to thousands, and in some cases, millions of other women, nationally and internationally.

This is shown by the wealth of statistics, graphs, facts and figures contained in the report.

Each set of figures is used not as a bald statement but is brought to life by comments or a story showing the kind of individual impact of each attackwhether it is unemployment, racist laws, cuts, price increases or homelessness.

The statistics provide the most overwhelmine evidence that this bankrupt system has nothing to offer women workers exploited both in the home and at their place of work.

On JOBS, for instance, the Report illustrates some grim facts. From 1973-77 unemployment among black women has increased elevenfold (1,110%), while among white women it has increased six times over (605%).

Short time working has increased ten-fold from 50,000 in 1979 to 500,000 in 1980.

A South London study of youth unemployment found that 70% of black girls had no job since leaving school as compared to 20% of white girls, 30% of white boys and 40% of black DOES 1 Ful of 150 unemIs cool leavers found TE l57 : Ers as opposed 5 3n0 i6% sé boys sere IF itse IT IT IS IT INDI TOUT ICIE IN IL earned on average only 72% as much as men in full time work, while part time women workers earn 1 Of average only 60% of full time men.

Low pay is rife: in 1979, 4.4 million women grossed less than £60 per week.

And some women's jobs are particularly exploitative: in 1970 average earnings in hairdressing were 75% of average women's earnings, while by 1980 they had fallen to 60%.

In addition, average take home pay. buys less now than it did in 1974 are poorer families pay tax.

The Report looks at PRICES, pointing out that in 1979/80, British Electricity Boards made a combined profit of £641.8 million. Yet in 1980 117,180 households were disconnected from electricity supply.

It is largely women who have to cope with families with no electricity.

Bus and rail fares rose by 24% in 1980-restricting women's mobility, often forcing them to walk to the shops and schools.

School meal prices, too, were raised to 50p in May 1980 and as a result the proportion of children taking meals fell from 63% to 24%.

It is the mothers who are Ica forced to make parted Deals i:

DESTITE Sucte Ime overcrowding or poor conditions.

The 1974 Labour government spent only 96p on housing for every £l it spent on defence.

But by 1983/4, the Tories plan to spend only 33p for every £1 on arms.

The pressures on families fall particularly hard on women in the home-in soaring statistics of violence.

25% of all violent crime is wife assault. Yet in 1978 only one refuge was available for every 60,000 battered women, while only 16% of women in refuges who try to obtain local authority housing get it.

Some may say the statistics point to attacks on the whole of the working class, not to oppression specifically against women.

But the Report shows, with simple clarity what lies behind the words when we say that women bear the brunt of unemployment, cuts and other attacks.

Through the Report we see that for increasingly more and more women all they can look forward to is to be hemmed in at home, trying lo cope with the mounting difficulties of raising a family on a low income, often in terrible housing, with no play facilities and no escape.

It points to the fact that women are not only under material pressure but are subfail 10 the guill that me on beine unatte lo DECENT DE for two days").

It is the kind of despau and hopelessness that drove a young mother to jump off her high rise flat • balcony with her two toddlers just last month after struggling to get transferred to better housing and "failing"

It is the hopelessness that means so many women seek relief through repeated prescriptions for valium and yet even "mothers little helpers' are becoming prohibitive with prescriptions £1 a time.

The irony is that the Tories are carrying out these attacks under the guise of being the champions of the family.

Patrick Jenkin is quoted from the 1977 Tory Party Conference as saying:

"Loyalty to the family ranks highest of all, higher even than loyalty to the state"

You can bet he wouldn't say that to absolve the rising number of women shophiters, thinking of their families-or the tenants who cannot pay the rent and get in arrears.

At the same time as using propaganda to elevate the whole notion of the family, the Tories are piling on the pressure to make family life for working class women a crippling burden.

The reality (and the Tories know it) is that fOI the vast proportion of people, bourgeois family life is not working.

One in every four marriages end in irretrievable bresidown. The crux of the Tor! philosophy is that it work. and if it tes: (usually the women).

They are determined to ensure that life outside their "normal" conception of the family is as difficult as possible-with no jobs, no housing, Social Securitv "sex snoopers" and pittance to live on.

A large proportion of the book is spent examining the different aspects and effects of unemployment for women. • It has some excellent figures on the hidden unemployed, pointing to working wives.

Abuse

It is difficult to read the Report and remain indifferent to the picture that is presented.

But anger, disgust and knowing of the escalating abuse to some many millions of women doesn't solve anything, and hasn't prevented any of the attacks.

As the Report states:

'The story of 1980 is one of major setbacks for the trade union movement. Job losses, wage cuts, speedup and victimisation have been occurring to an unprecedented extent . . . the massive increase in unemployment over the last 18 months has seen little successful resistance from the trade unions"

We know as Trotskyists that the central reason for this is the crisis of leadership within the labour movement.

The Report makes some references to this, in statements such as:

... of coarse the union a workplace can be effer tive only if the membership is active, but union officials are sometimes notorious for obstructing action in pursuit of improved pay and conditions"

And in a paragraph on a South Leeds trouser factory:

"When management tried to impose a wage cat of E18 per week by altering the production norms so that none of the women could earn the bonuses they depended on for their weekly wage, the women walked out. They were ordered back by the union official who the women daim was hand in glove' with management."

But the references are anonymous, the finger isn't directly pointed.

So though the Report loudly applauds the fighting spirit of those women who have struggled and does stress that women are willing to fight against all odds, it does not say why the four major struggles they reter to, as examples of women Meccano, St. Benedict's and Longworth, suffered different forms of defeat.

In each case it was the refusal of the trade union leaders concerned to take the fight the necessary steps forward to win the battleand leaving the women striggling in isolation.

As Mrs Suguidivi said in the Chix dispute:

"What we need to win is not more money or news paper articles, it's people down on the picket line helping to turn back lorries."

Without support of other workers it will be impossible for small groups of women workers to win their dispute even for the most basil rights.

This means mobilising the trade unions-which ar controlled by a leadershir which for the most parl stands opposed to giving such support.

That is the major factor in why the Tories have been able to get away with it for so long.

The Report has some important • observations about positive discrimination and women's involvement in the union:

"Unions often measure women's participation in the Women integrated onto the WHO DI bureaucracy of the unionthe committees, the conferences and the working parties-rather than the level of activity on a rank and file basis. Women are active in their workplaces.

.. Most trade union members do not see their union in terms of national structure. They judge it on how it operates to secure better pay and conditions ... Industrial action is by far the best education for trade unionists.

If women union members were encouraged both locally and nationally to use direct action in pursuit of claims then involvement in the union structure would follow."

Absence

Unfortunately the report gives very few indications of the forms of direct action necessary to defeat the Tory attacks. If it had been more specific-especially in relation to demands on the trade union bureaucracy-it is doubtful whether NUPE or the Bakers Union would have funded it.

There is also a conspicuous absence in the Report of any reference to the Tory attacks on abortion rights.

But then the report was sponsored by the British Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches.

Possibly because of this, the section on violence against women is centred very much on •events in Leeds and there is no other reference made to other questions of sexuality affecting women in the 1980s (eg the question of pornography, prostitution or the: oppression of gay women).

Factual picture

Also omitted is the wholesale attack on nursery provision and the vociferous militant action organised by women in nurseries up and down the country in Iesponse.

The Report's strength is the accurate, researched factual picture it presents of women in the 1980s in Britain, suffering the effects of the Tory government's policies.

Its weaknesses are the weaknesses which encourage reformist bodies like the Equal Opportunities Commission to offer to fund its production: it cannot tell us what to do to end this oppresson, how to bring down the Tories or show the. necessary: programme for struggle for a sorialist society.