[ployment, cuts and childcare facilities. We must build…]

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ployment, cuts and childcare facilities.

We must build in the unions a leadership capable of defending the rights of both men and women workers and mobilising the strength of the working class in the struggle to end capitalist exploitation.

Woman Worker is the women 's paper of the Workers Socialist League, a Trotskyist orga nisation which is seeking to build a Marxist leadership in this country and internationally which, starting from today's problems and today's consciousness within the working class, will lead workers in struggle to grasp the need for socialist revolution. -Women play a major role in the struggle of the working class to overthrow the shackles of international capitalism. Women-in workplaces and in the home-are doubly oppressed by capitalism and the present crisis affecting the whole working class attacks women disproportionately.

Women's wages, in spite of the Equal Pay Act are still very low, the abolition of the Prices Commission and subsequent price rises in gas, electricity bread and milk etc., sharpen the ever present contradiction between the family wage packet and the bills.

The previous cuts in health, education and social services-begun in 1973 by the previous Tory government and pressed on with relentlessly by Callaghan and Healey will now fade into insignificance besides those threatened by Thatcher and Howe.

These cuts always attack women twice over-it is mainly the jobs of women-as ancillaries in hospitals and in schools for examplethat are cut and it is women who traditionally are expected to stay at home and care for the sick who have no hospital beds and the young children who have no nurseries.

Woman Worker seeks to give policies and programme-a way forward -to women who are oppressed by this capitalist system. We believe that the leaderships of the traditional organisations of the working class-the Labour Party and the trade unions-are not at this time-and never will be-acting in the interests of the members they were elected to serve.

The Labour Party leadership for example has just presided over a five year period in government-a period when the working class experienced the biggest cuts in its wages, and the worst unemployment, since the 1930s.

A period when women were given the paper rights of Equal Pay and the Sex Discrimination Act with one hand-and their jobs, hospitals, nurseries and abortion facilities threatened with the other.

Women are now 28% of the trade union movement-3 million trade unionists and the numbers are But what have Len Murray and trade union leadership-led by Jac Britain'-betrayed the whole mov controls, and agreed to the Labour -which meant cuts. In conferenc bureaucrats like the Labour Party cussions and votes on the real quest wages and jobs. On the specific record was even more appalling delegates trying to raise questions a Yet Woman Worker insists that trade unions and the Labour Party.

Housewives, isolated in the hor the petty questions of the day to d are ideal targets for reactionary fi potential strength of the organised The right to work is a basic much as for men-and the rights t as nurseries, education, health are class over decades of struggle-as is However, even these basic ri bureaucracy at this time-the uni the THF hotels and now the Garni because of the refusal of the leade ing of the companies and suppliers Equally the defence of hospit: closures has been sold out by un verbal support to isolated occup sections of their unions in supporti Woman Worker calls upon wom lie ahead. We believe that trade prepared to fight to improve the defend their jobs and social service:

The block that stands in their w cratic leadership in every trade unic Woman Worker calls upon its i places and union branches, to cor policies such as demanding a 'slidi rate increases, whereby wages v inflation every month. This in turn

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on the shop tloor These two articles dwell upon two women and their struggles for equal job opportunityone in the IPC box factory in Winsford, Cheshire, and the other a bus driver in Oxford.

Woman Worker This has been shown in factories like IPC (cardboard packing boxes) where the prospect of getting a better paid job in the factory became something for the women to strive for.

In this particular factory heavy work and big machinery was used by management as an excuse to prevent women being put on better graded jobs which meant they continually had the low paid positions.

This was contested by a group of women who demanded equal rights and opportunities which had been brought in by legislation (Equal Opportunities Act). They demanded to be given trial periods on these jobs.

The unions were forced to support these women. Management and some men workers opposed the move by these women. The men's opposition was from a different stance than management and a struggle had to be taken up against their view, which ranged from "you can't work with women" to the reactionary view "the women are taking our jobs from us"

The success of this action by the women brought them closer to involving themselves with the question of equal rights for women outside of the factory.

The final outcome was these women won the right to work the big machinery and have the same rights to drive stacker trucks and train on jobs previously considered men's jobs. Consequently their grading was changed and they received higher pay.

The question of nightwork has been a contentious issue for a long time. It seems by the views of the women in factories that they should be allowed to work nights alongside male workers and if necessary 24hour nursery care should be made available by employers for all the workforce who need it.

The relationship between the male and female workers are strengthened by this equal struggle in the factory.

They both learned many important lessons.

Ideas such as women are stupid or weaker than men and they should really be at home caring for the everyday household tasks were shown to be false conceptions peddled daily by the mass media in books and adverts and only serve to hold back the working class against the oppression of the capitalist class.

Then of course some women hold the view that men are the oppressor. This joint struggle shows that the pressures of work and the oppression of the home are not exclusively one or the other but a joint problem.

These struggles can be used as a stepping stone to taking these questions outside the individual factory and bringing in the wider issues of the class war as the standard of living comes under attack more and more with the crisis capitalism finds itself in. Page