Life on a one-woman bus

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fighting low pay \ WORKER? growing. the TUC done for women? The : Jones and his 'give a year for ment on the question of wage government's 'economic policy' after conference, trade union leadership manoeuvred out disons or workers' living standards, juestions affecting women the with sexist attacks on women abortion facilities. i is vital that women do join the e and their interests confined to / care of children and husbands, ces which seek to destroy the orking class. uman right-for women just as the state-provided services such ard won rights by the working e right to join a trade union. ts are being sold out by the sation struggles in Grunwicks, Steak Houses were lost simply hips to organise effective blackncerned. nurseries and schools against bureaucrats who while giving ons refuse to call out major strike action. to recognise the real tasks that ionists-male and female-are conditions and wages and to must be removed-the bureauand the Labour Party. lers to organise in their workit the membership to fighting scale of wages' on top of flat automatically increase with I! necessitate the union branch I have been working as a trained bus driver since September last year, after nearly five week's training, and one failed PSV test. There are now five women and around 200 men drivers in the garage-two of the women have been driving buses for quite a number of years. The shift system means working as early as 4.45 am in the morning-at other times as late as 12.30 at night.

We work a 'guaranteed' 45-hour week although the basic week is supposed to be 40 hours, and the top rate of pay is roughly £1 .40 an hour.

Each working week is either 6 or 5 days, usually 6, and with a child allowance I take home anything in the region of £50 to £65 a week. Wages vary according to whether you are ill or not-if you take a day off because your child is ill, you lose a day's pay. I have had to leave my daughter in bed at home and go off to work.

There are several 12-hour duties starting at 5 in the morning, and finishing at 5 in the afternoon, with maybe 2 hours' break during the day at different times-most of the breaks are unpaid. They only pay you for the hours and minutes you actually drive buses.

You are allowed to work 10 hours of actual driving in any 24, and you are allowed to drive 5½ hours in the cab without a break. EEC regulations for drivers working beyond the 36km range of the home garage have these hours shortened, and UK regulations will fall in line during the next few years.

Twelve hours on a busy road, taking perhaps E100 in fares, not exceeding 30p each fare, selling 600-plus tickets as well as driving, leaves you so tired and dizzy, the day feels like an all-out effort that can never be repeated. But next day you get up at an unnatural hour and do it all over again. I didn't imagine anyone could be expected to work so hard, to the full stretch of their mental and physical ability, for hours and hours on end™ for a low basic rate of pay, for the whole of their working lives.

Drivers die young of heart attacks and ulcers.

They put on weight because of the sedentary position of work, and if they have an accident they are in the front seat for injuries. They work such long overtime in the summer when coach excursions overburden the workload for the service bus drivers that they have to take time off in the winter to get over it.

They are a cheerful lot, and working among them is heartwarming and friendly. Some say bus driving is not a woman's job, but they still go-out establishing a cost-of-living committee which increases.

Other policies will include the commitment to occupations and strike action to defend factories, hospitals, schools etc., from closure.

Woman Worker would like to see its readers giving a lead to women-and men-workers in their places of work by becoming shop stewards, branch officers and conference delegates and thereby extending this fight for programme throughout their unions and against their union leadership.

Similarly we would like to see our readers taking our fighting policies into the Labour Party and supporting our call for the removal of the right wing leadership of Callaghan and Healey and their replacement by a leadership prepared to fight to improve the lot of the working class.

Woman Worker will stand in the long traditions of the international Bolshevik movement's work among women. We will be publishing theoretical articles, not to promote an abstract debate but to broaden and deepen our understanding of the politics of Marxism, Leninism and Trotskyism and the sharp programmatic tasks we will need to undertake to build the world revolutionary party to bring about the overthrow of capitalism on an international scale and the establishment of socialism.

These tasks will inevitably bring us into conflict with the feminists of the "Women's movement" who are so blinkered by their conviction that "autonomy" for women will bring about their liberation-by building autonomous women's groupings in the unions-that they refuse to confront the key questions of leadership and programme, arguing even at times that leadership equals dictatorship and oppression.

It is these false positions which allow the feminists to co-exist with the Stalinists of the Communist Party who play a leading bureaucratic role in every country in the world in keeping down the working class.

This bureaucratic role is of course most obvious in the Soviet states themselves. Woman Worker supports Trotsky's call for the political revolution in these states to overthrow the bureaucracy and bring about true proletarian democracy, while arguing for the defence of the economic gains of the Bolshevik revolution against imperialist attack. of their way to help any woman, if they need help.

They watch carefully for women drivers trying to skive off the full shift or the full workload. They do not think women are weaker than menwell, most of them don't.

A full bus weighs 12 tons and less than half our buses have power steering. It takes every ounce of strength I have to get the wheel round a corner with a full load on and stiff steering.

What surprised me was not that I could do it, but that I have never had to use my full strength for anything at work before, so I didn't know what it was.

It is a job of high tension, and skill which becomes automatic with experience-and accuracy with money-for if you are short at the end of the day, you pay it out of your wages. Into this position of acute tension steps the passenger, who blames the driver as the front line, man or woman, for all the faults of the bus company.

Who accuses you of drinking tea at the terminus when you have been working flat out for four hours without a break (because schedules are sa tight for time you often have to drive 30 miles or so-say to Aylesbury and back at 50 mph in a double decker bus along country roads, and turn round and come straight back again).

Drivers work 60, 70, 80 hours a week and more, and compare wage slips at the end of the week. Marriages break up and there are several men Shortly after the election victory of the Tories on anti-trade union propaganda, women are coming forward to join a union suffrance for years.

The women work at Selected Toys in Didcot, Oxfordshire, which produces dartboards for export.

The rates of pay are 40p an hour which means full time workers are only taking home, after a 40 hour week, just over £20, even with bonus payments!

All that was needed for interest to be sparked in unionisation was a woman worker who couldn't believe her first and subsequent wage packets.

She took individual action at first, complaining to management, and then said to others that enough was enough and were any interested in a union.

The response was overwhelming. Out of a workforce of 30 only a few have declined. Management hearing of the workers turning to a union at first were patronising, saying all they had to do was ask to see them if they had problems. Then they started approaching the workers individually with the threat of closure.

A meeting was arranged where a shop steward was elected. The women at this meeting gave vent to years of their exploitation and one after another told their own horror stories.

A week later the offici: from the Transto Socialist Press RATES:

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the answers in Six months £8.00 SOCIALIST Please send me trial sub/six months/one year of Socialist Press. I enclose . PRESS Name.. fighting Address policies to defend jobs, wages and social service Send to Socialist Press, 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, London NWS 1HR.

bringing up children on their own. Their commitments require they work overtime and they cannot afford not to. I seldom do, but I live in a shared way, and it is cheaper.

SET APART

I find it hard to get over being treated as some kind of pet mascot-acceptable because doing an equal job, but forever different, set apart, someone not to be sworn in front of. Swearing in front of women seems to be a big issue. Once I said "fucking" while quoting another driver, and the man I was talking to blushed-so did I, of course.

was nominated for road steward, but i declined regretfully because l am not sure how long 1 shall be able to work. Driving has dragged arthritis into my hands where it was not there before.

There is some discussion of union affairs and national politics, but much apathy, as well as actual great difficulty in attending union meetings, which are only held quarterly.

The conditions of work (there is nowhere to hang your coat. If you arrive wet to work, you stay wet) and the shift system makes family life difficult.

Many drivers do not want to go home. Their exciting life is in the garage, playing cards in the canteen with their mates, doing a useful job, however undervalued.

port and General Workers Union District Office in Reading attended a meeting where the workers gave vent to their emotions and dropped their wage packets in front of him.

The official said a letter to the management had been sent but they could be ignoring it.

It is now over two weeks since that meeting and the union official and the management have still not met.

The women are becoming impatient at this stage and are to hold a meeting to discuss whether to go through ACAS (which the official has already set in motion) or whether to force the employer into noticing the existence of their union by taking some action and demanding that the employer meets their official.

(Employers can totally disregard ACAS as it has no basis in law as can be seen from the lessons of the Grunwick recognition strike).

Not only has this firm been exploiting men and women in the factory but has in the past sent work out to women in the home for a pittance.

Women tied to the home because of lack of nursery facilities for children are only too pleased to take in work in the home and management like that at Selected Toys are all too willing to exploit them.

All that is needed to begin to fight them is someone prepared to say enough is enough as in Selected Toys and to get women organised in the trade union movement.

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woman worker samic reaction oppresses women Iranian woman wearing the chador, with only one eye unveile Page One of the great boasts of the butcher who was Shah of Iran, was that he "westernised" his country in the face r of reactionary Islamic nationalism.

As part of his "White claims, were "liberated, he Revolution", WOLLICH he By this he means that women were allowed to vote in the rigged elections, and they did not have to wear the veil.

The reality, of course, was that working class and peasant women were doubly oppressed under the Shah's vicious regime.

SHAH The Shah's own views on women are illuminating in this respect. In an interview with a woman journalist quoted in the CARI pamphlet The Iranian Working Class", , the Shah proclaimed:

*In a man's life women only count if they are beautiful and graceful and know how to be feminine What do you want? Equality? Equality, you indeed! I do not want to sound rude but you may be equal in the eyes of the law but not-I beg your pardon for saying so-in ability.. You have produced nothing great. Nothing!"

The whole Iranian working class laboured under appalling conditions, in a situation where trade unions were useless bodies controlled by the secret police SAVAK.

In a country where illiteracy was widespread, Iranian women get the worst of the few educational opportunities.

For the women who get jobs, these were the poorest paid jobs in labour-intensive industries such as clothing and footwear, and maternity leave was almost nonexistent.

It is not surprising, therefore, that women, together with the youth and students, were frequently at the forefront of the mass demonstrations that led to the overthrow of the Shah.

Large numbers of women were among those to die, killed by British weapons supplied to the Shah's army by a British Labour government.

But the Iranian revolution, which ousted the Shah and installed an uneasy rule by the Islamic priests under the Ayatollah Khomeini, has not emancipated women.

On the contrary, Bazargan, the nominal Prime Minister, is determined to stabilise capitalist rule.

This requires a return to conditions of exploitation at work, to preserve the profits of the oil companies and other capitalist firms.

But the oppression of women in the Moslem state that Khomeini is trying to set up, goes far beyond exploitation in the factory.

One of the first proclamations of Khomeini, in his capacity as unofficial head of state, was to order all women to return to wearing the chador: the all enveloping black garment that is symbolic of the subordinate position of women under Islam.

This reactionary move, which was to have ushered in a whole range of oppressive measures, was met with huge demonstrations of women in "western" dress, supported by left-wing, militant men. These women were attacked and abused by fanatical Khomeini supporters, but the Ayatollah was forced to partially back down: he declared that his proclamation was not to be interpreted literally —he spirit meant the chador in This partial victory is far from enough to guarantee equal rights for women. The position of women in other Islamic states shows the road that Khomeini wishes to travel.

In Pakistan, the law provides for "adulterous" women to be stoned to death.

Yet husbands have a free rein to be as adulterous as they choose: women have no right to even divorce them.

Women are shut away and cannot do anything that their "owners" do not sanction.

In Algeria and other Islamic states, a woman can be put in jail for bearing an illegitimate child, or may be killed by her father or brother for disgracing the family-even if the child is the outcome of a rape.

Abortion and contraception are virtually unknown.

GAYS SHOT

Already homosexuals have been shot by "revolutionary courts" in Iran, for offending "public decency"

The full emancipation of women and the right to free sexual expression will never be won in the Islamic state of Khomeini.

Worker June Just as remains capitalism, chained by ideology of the working class exploited by women remain the reactionary the Koran.

VITAL ROLE The task for the Iranian working class, including the women and youth who played such a vital role in ousting the Shah, is to push forward with their revolution.

They must de pose Khomeini and his supporters, seize the factories and drive out the capitalists and build a secular state, controlled by the working class and peasantry, with an economy planned to satisfv the needs of workers and peasants.

Only in such a socialist state will sexual oppression be eliminated.

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because of the appalling conditions, and exploited wages they've endured under

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