Equal Rights Meeting

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ERSITY Union officials at Leyland's Cowley Plant are to be called on to explain what fight they will lead to open all jobs in the factory to women.

A public meeting, called by Oxford and District Trades Union Council, overwhelmingly supported a resolution to campaign for equal opportunity in the factory and to keep a permanent sub-committee on the trades council to fight for women's rights.

The question of the factory employment and a united fight inside the trade union movement emerged as the keynote of a meeting of 120 people, boycotted by every single trades council officer. The strength that emerged has built up an impetus that the officers will find impossible to sidestep.

A motion, calling on Trades Council to invite officials to explain publicly their position on women working in the factory comes in the wake of an exemption order which now allows women to work nights in the body plant.

This, together with a motion to make the woren's rights sub committee permanent and to allow it to call open meetings was overwhelmingly carried.

All four main speakers stressed the class nature of women's oppression.

Vicki Ryan from ASTMS sketched an outline of the struggle by women, pointing out how that struggle only moved into the working class when it was taken up in mass action by women workers.

"Progress towards equal rights for women has been very slow and there have been times when the tide seemed to turn against us."

The two major wars brought more women into the factories as the war economies demanded more exploitation than men alone could give in the factories. At the end of the wars the women were driven back into the home.

The Equal Pay and Equal Opportunity Acts had merely taught employers to use simple rules to evade them.

Mary Roger, a member of the National Union of Teachers equality sub committee, said that 16 years of equal pay for teachers had not altered the pattern of women in the lower paid jobs.

Young children learned at school from watching the teachers that the woman usually filled the subordinate positions.

She quoted from children's reading books which work to cement sex roles from the earliest age.

Cathy Sherlock, one of the Randolph strikers said: "Catering is the lowest paid, lousiest work there is. Everyone is paid so badly that you can't even point to specific cases of discrimination against women.

"The higher the class of hotel the greater the gap between what they pay earn wages and profits.

"The only way that workt can fight against managements li this is through struggle.

At the time of the meeti TGWU officials Geoff Hulett Oxford and Alan Law in Birmin ham were being pressured into final pretence at a fight.

"The sordid truth is the on reason why this happened at all w the union wanted to sell us out b they wanted to make Hulett ti scapegoat and Hulett didn't li this so he started fighting for t The same is true with Alan La' "The real answer is for more ar more women to join the union ar then to take action.

"Although the union may have closed shop in the car factories Cowley and Dagenham there a sweat shops exploiting women ar immigrants just round the corner Pam Jones from the Elizabel Garrett Anderson, took up pomt about the bureaucracy. "H had to threaten to withdraw all o membership in the district befo Alan Fisher would change his li from that of David Ennals."

She recounted the history of tl occupation, the worker hesitations, the betrayals and t eventual overwhelming decision.

The woman who started t] hospital was the first wome doctor. "She was told she shou always wear nurse's uniform ar not appear too intelligent."