Scious I Bolivia

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their wares but proletarian women only have access to economic support through their husbands.

Young girls or 'Cholas' are brought in tom the city by bar-owners who buy them clothes and keep them to attract custom.

Miners go to bars to drink and dance after pay day and the 'cholas' are wooed assiduously by many suitors. There is no question of sexual activity since these suitors make sure that the 'chola' is never left alone with any one of them.

If she agrees to marry her fiance must reimburse the bar-owner for the money he has spent in finding, transporting and kitting out the girl, capital he will use to replace her with.

expectancy :: Deaths are frequent since life expectancy for a Bolivian miner is only 35 years, since all of them get struck with silicosis and tuberculosis. Widows are evicted from the tiny homes provided for some of the workforce and paid some small compensation. They generally remarry.

Miners work 7 days a week, up to 12 hours underground for just under a day. K 7 days a week, 12 hours a day for about £l a day On top of this they receive an allowance of food coupons for cheap bread, meat, sugar and rice which they can exchange at the 'pulperia' or company store.

These stores are understocked as a rule and women spend hours queueing for what little food is available. The other disadvantage to this method of payment is that, since it is not part of the nominal wage, the company pays no. pension or sickness allowance on it.

Those who are lucky work under the conditions described above. Others work the exhausted miners as 'locatarios' with their own tools and equipment, getting paid for the tin they actually extract.

Those still less fortunate stand knee deep in the river for over 12 hours a day panning for tin.

The least coveted job is tearing your hands to ribbons picking out scraps of tin from the rubble dynamited out of the mines. This is not underground and women have fought for the right to do this work. • Women organise in . the Housewives Committee which has observer status in the Miners Federation-the body to which the mining unions are all affiliated.

The Committee- organises atound the food stocks at the 'pulperia' and is extremely fierce in picketing of strik ces, mobilising demonstrations and going on hunger strikes. Some of these struggles are taken up on the independent initiative of the Housewives Committee while other are in class solidarity with the miners.

The division of labour is strictly sexual. The women cook, clean and look after their children while they men go down the mines.

There is, however, a remarkable amount of independence allowed inside this framework.

Perhaps because of the long hours of work of the men, women are free to attend their meetings and organise around the activities of the committee. Conversely, they do not restrict their companions from political activity-perhaps because the class lines are so sharply drawn.

The local radio station is controlled by the miners themselves during strikes, so housewives in the mining towns are not susceptible to reactionary boürgeois propaganda as is often the case with European working class housewives who can be more easily conned into betraying their own class interests.

Although important gains. have been made by the Housewives Committee which, unlike cross-class feminist groupings, organised along class lines, it fails to challenge sexual roles. Its policies have a clearly socialist perspective, but one in which they would continue to service a healthy and unexploited labour force Whitelaw-dreaming about old Empire days?