On the 8th of March CWI supporters in Auckland helped organise an event for International Women’s Day (IWD). A public forum was held and it focused on making the women’s movement relevant for working class women. In particular the meeting discussed the conditions for women working as cleaners, laundry workers, kitchen workers and fast food workers.

By Nicki Jonas, Services and Food Workers Union Organiser, Auckland, New Zealand (Personal Capacity)Traditionally the domain of ‘woman’s work’ it is not surprising that cleaners, kitchen workers, laundry workers and fast food workers have the lowest paid and the least valued jobs in society. At the forum we
discussed the further impact for these women as their jobs are increasingly casualised and contracted out. The aims of the forum were to promote a genuine debate on ‘which way forward for the women’s movement?’ and how best to move working people into struggle.

Over 90 people attended the forum, nearly all women and over a third youth. There was a great mix of workers, academics and high school students. An extremely high level debate took place with many moving contributions from the floor. There was a great reception for the ideas that came from a revolutionary viewpoint. We had an ‘organising panel’ with speakers from Supersizemypay, the commercial
cleaners campaign, the healthy hospitals campaign and the Say NO to Violence! campaign.

Over 45 people committed to working on the campaigns platformed by the organising panel. By all accounts the meeting was a great sucess with some important connections being made between working class activists on the night.

Below is a copy of the speech that kicked off a very lively discussion. Jill Ovens who is a lifelong trade unionist and activist spoke at the forum after organising a mass rally of 250 cleaners earlier that day. Jill works closely with CWI supporters in New Zealand on trade union work.

On womens liberation - Jill Ovens IWD 2006

I was listening to Kim Hill on Saturday and hearing interviews with Maureen Dowd, author of ?Are Men Necessary? and Jane Fonda, who has just put out another book about her life (the third). Both of them talked about what has become of feminism.


Dowd argues that feminism is dead, suffocated by narcism and consumerism. She says feminists went down the wrong path. We did a lot of things that were a waste of time, like ?deconstructing Barbie?.


Now younger women are rediscovering roles the 80s generation shucked, like having babies.


Conventional wisdom holds that women?s oppression is a thing of the past, that the women?s movement achieved its goals a long time ago. Dowd talked about Condoleza Rice and other women who have made it in the Bush administration. And of course we have a woman Prime Minister, a woman chief justice and women Governor Generals. Women head Government departments and major corporations like Telecom.


Girls can do anything! We have entered the era of post-feminism. Or so they say.
But by any meaningful measure, women around the world have not won equality with men. The gender pay gap has certainly decreased in New Zealand to the point where women?s pay is about 86 percent of men?s. But that is mostly because men?s wages have fallen over the past 30 years with the decline of manufacturing, the freezing works, etc. This is hardly a reason for either women or men to celebrate.


However much the women who have made it may try to downplay it, women?s oppression is alive and well. Ask the women who clean our hospitals by day and commercial buildings by night — the women who juggle their lives round two or three part-time, casual jobs.
Tonight I will argue that feminism is out of touch with where the vast majority of women are at, and thats why it has become irrelevant. The emphasis on personal liberation has taken us down the wrong path.


Women cannot be liberated until all humanity is liberated and that cant happen under the present economic system.


Labour MP Winnie Laban recently launched a new report on Pacific women?s ?economic well being?. In her speech, she said, ?Those of us who are succeeding in the economic system need to look to our mothers, our sisters and our aunties, and ensure they are lifted up with us. We have a responsibility to ensure that we all rise up together, and none of our sisters are left behind.?


Revolutionary talk? Well no. Winnie isn?t suggesting we need a change in the economic system that exploits and oppresses Pacific women, the most marginalised and lowest paid workers in our country.


She is encouraged that the Government is getting people off benefits and into work.
She wants Pacific women to get into key decision-making positions, to participate in the workforce and contribute to the economy, to share in the progress our country makes, to run their own businesses, and to have sustainable and well paid jobs. How we achieve this last goal is through ?collaborative partnerships between Government, business and communities?.


To be fair, Winnie is a genuine Leftie and she probably didn?t write her speech. But my experience (brief though it was) on the National Advisory Council for the Employment of Women (NACEW) was that the Maori and Pacific reps were very focused on individual solutions such as enterprise so that brown women can ?pull themselves up? by their own efforts.


This approach was best summarised by Naomi Wolf in her 1994 book Fire with Fire. In it she coins the term ?power feminism? as an alternative to the ?victim feminism? of the past.


Sharon Smith in her book Women and Socialism: Essays on women?s liberation says this is dismissed as ?old habits left over from the revolutionary left of the 1960s ? such as reflexive anti-capitalism, an insider/outsider mentality, an aversion to the ?system?.?
Wolf argues that women should embrace capitalism and get as much money and power for ourselves as we can. She admits that capitalism ?does oppress the many for the few?, but she argues that ?enough money buys a woman out of a lot of sex oppression?.
She argues women are better off with the means of production in our own hands (to misquote Marx). ?Women?s businesses can be the power cells of the 21st Century,? she says.


Wolf says we have to stop acting like victims, walking round with clenched fists. We should stop focussing on all the things that are wrong with our lives and start thinking positive. We are powerful human beings. We are held back, not by discrimination and oppression, but by ourselves.


Others have also embraced the individualistic approach, like Gloria Steinem in her book Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-esteem. The book ends with a guide to daily meditation to achieve one?s life goals:
There are many ways of meeting your future self. Imagining a figure ahead of you on life?s path is one way. You might also think about a desired future event and imagine your future self within it. Or imagine a protecting future self who advises you in hard times, celebrates in good ones and is always there for you to ask: What would my guide say?


What a load of rubbish and this from someone who used to be our hero!
As Sharon Smith says, this new, seemingly psychological approach to feminism is ?actually based upon complete acceptance of even the most barbaric aspects of capitalist society, including war and class conflict.?
To quote Smith: ?Wolf embraces not only the pursuit of profits, but the class antagonism that goes with it. Although she does not dwell on the subject, she admits that for every woman who succeeds in business, there are many other women who cannot. After all that is the nature of capitalism ? someone actually has to produce the profits.?


Wolf ignores this. She says power feminists should welcome antagonisms of competing agendas (which are based on different class interests): ?There are going to be times when woman to woman aggression is a healthy, even energising corollary of our having reached full participation in society?Women are managing, criticising and firing other women, and their employees sometimes, understandably, hate their guts.?
Says Wolf: ?Those conflicts should not be a source of guilt to us. They do not represent a breakdown of sisterhood. In the fullness of diversity, they represent its triumph.?
But as Smith says, ?Naomi Wolf is concerned only with that minority of women who are climbing the corporate ladder ? power feminists in business suits who return home to a house that gets cleaned by a domestic servant and children whose needs are cared for by someone else, usually other women.?
?Working class women ? who do have plenty of reason to complain about low wages or lack of adequate childcare or decent health care ? are mentioned only in passing. They are the women getting fired by or cleaning the houses of the power feminists.?


Power feminism, Smith concludes, speaks only for upper middle-class women who seek to minimise aspects of gender that have been used in the past to deny women access to corporate promotions ? things like parental leave, domestic leave to care for sick children.
?Women in the corporate world tend to play down these aspects of women?s oppression that separate them from their male colleagues, precisely because they want to get ahead,? says Smith.


She asks whether feminism has changed? ?Are feminists of today betraying modern feminism?s founding principles?? And the answer is no, not really. Feminism has always represented the middle-class.


She cites Betty Friedan?s ground-breaking book The Feminine Mystique as giving ?voice to the plight of suburban, college educated middle-class women who felt trapped in their suburban homes. These women were well educated, but had no opportunity to pursue careers because sexist attitudes kept the doors of the corporate world closed to them.?
Alexandra Kollontai, the Russian revolutionary who is associated with the founding of International Women?s Day, early recognised the need to organise a working women?s movement ? as a distinct alternative to the ?bourgeois? feminists of her day.


These middle-class feminists concentrated their efforts on winning the right to vote, but they were out of touch with the women of the working class who suffered from harsh conditions at work, hunger and insecurity.
Talking about working women in her book Towards a History of the Working Women?s Movement in Russia, Kollontai says: ?Their most urgent demands were: a shorter working day, higher wages, more human treatment from the factory authorities, less police supervision and more scope for independent action. Such needs were foreign to the bourgeois feminists.?


Later, in The Social Basis of the Woman Question, Kollontai wrote: ?However apparently radical the demands of the feminists, one must not lose sight of the fact that the feminists cannot, on account of their class position, fight for that fundamental transformation of society, without which the liberation of women cannot be complete.?
In February 1917, women textile workers organised a demonstration for International Women?s Day ?in opposition to the war, high prices and the situation of the woman worker?. It led to a massive strike movement which in turn overthrew the Tsar. As one observer said: ?The Russian Revolution was begun by hungry women and children demanding bread and herrings.?


In March 1917, the Bolsheviks launched a working women?s school to train women workers as professional organisers. In the factories they addressed issues of concern to working women ? the eight-hour day, maternity protection and equal pay for women. They convinced working class men of the need to support the demands of the working women.


And when the Bolsheviks got into power in October, they introduced a full programme of social and political equality for women, including the principle of equal pay for equal work, paid maternity leave for four months before and after childbirth and childcare at Government expense.


From the mid-1920s, backwards ideas about women emerged within the leadership and, with the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy?s power in the late 1920s, the rights women had won were rapidly whittled away.


Says Smith: ?The ideal of revolutionary democratic workers? power was replaced with its opposite ? state control and repression. Stalinism became a tragic example of ?Socialism from above? which scrapped not only workers? power, but also women?s liberation.?


Then, as now, bourgeois feminism or ?power? feminism cannot speak to the needs of the vast majority of women who can?t escape their oppression, who don?t have access to the opportunities for education and a career that would allow them to earn big money, who have to work two and three jobs to earn enough to put food on the table.


As Smith says: ?For working-class women, there are no individual solutions to being overworked and underpaid? It matters little to most working-class women whether their manager is a man or a woman.?


Our society places the responsibility for raising children and looking after our elders almost entirely on individual families and much of that responsibility falls on women. This is not only because most sole parent families are headed by women, but also because traditional ?men?s work? has become highly casualised or has disappeared with the collapse of our manufacturing base. There is a lot of unemployment and under-employment of Maori and Pacific men.
For low-income families, this means the women face a constant struggle to pay the rent, to buy the kids? school uniforms and pay their ?voluntary? school fees.


In this land of plenty, we have the resources to provide free education and free health, free school lunches, full employment with secure jobs (real jobs, not casual, part-time work), but instead we choose to organise our society around the quest for profits.


As long as this is the case, workers, especially women workers who are the most oppressed, must organise in unions to fight for a fair share, to demand decent pay and conditions, respect and dignity.


We need to fight for collective agreements across whole industries or occupational groups nationwide ? like the old awards, so we can exercise our power. Divided we are weak; united we are strong.


That?s what these multi-employer collective agreements are about. MECAs. Today the SFWU launched our campaign to get a MECA in all the hospitals in New Zealand covering hospital cleaners, kitchen workers and orderlies.


Our plan is to lift the pay of hospital cleaners and kitchen workers from $10.28 like at Tauranga Hospital to $14, $15, $16 an hour for every hospital service worker in the country.


This will go a long way towards closing the pay gap for Maori and Pacific women workers, who make up by far the majority of hospital service workers, especially in Auckland. And this in turn will help to reduce poverty, as Maori and Pacific women are often the sole breadwinners for their families.


That?s why it is no coincidence that the Service and Food Workers Union (SFWU) launched its campaign for a national hospitals MECA today on March 8, International Women?s Day.
Pay equity is about closing the gender pay gap and also reducing disparities among workers of different ethnicity. For every dollar the average Kiwi Pakeha man earns, Pakeha women earn 82 cents, Maori men earn 76 cents, Pacific men 74 cents, Maori women 71 cents and Pacific women 67 cents.


Pacific women earn so much less than all other groups of workers because a high proportion (one quarter) work in a narrow range of occupations, including cleaning, packing, shop assistants and caregiving.
It is well known internationally that the more women who enter an occupation, the more the pay drops relative to other occupations. This is called ?occupational segregation? and it is about how ?women?s work? is valued in our society.


For example, a caregiver in a public mental health facility was telling me she earns $12 an hour, while her husband, a factory worker, is on $17 an hour. Back in 1987, when she was a pyschopaedic aid (a job mostly done by men at that time), she was herself on $17 an hour.


Even among the low-paid workers who will be covered by the SFWU MECA, occupational segregation is evident. In the big Auckland hospitals ? Middlemore, North Shore and Auckland Hospital ? orderlies, who are most likely to be Pakeha men, earn around $14 an hour, while cleaners and kitchen workers, who are overwhelmingly Maori and Pacific women, earn just over $12 an hour.


Yet the educational qualifications, level of skill and experience base is not significantly different. What it boils down to is how different jobs within the hospital are valued ? and this depends on who does them.
The Labour Government has committed to addressing pay equity in the public sector, setting up a Pay Equity Unit within the Department of Labour.


But what has really made a difference for women in the public health sector was the NZNO nurses? national pay settlement, which was separately funded by the Government. The PSA has also taken this approach in its ?pay jolt? for allied health professionals.
Unions have found that this is the only way to get a substantial increase in pay rates. You can?t do it site by site, employer by employer. That?s what the ECA did ? divide workers so they had no power.


Pay rates for hospital service workers have fallen further and further behind healthcare assistants, who perform different but comparable jobs. The healthcare assistants, who were part of the Nurses? settlement, received a boost in pay rates taking them over $16 an hour in 2006 at the top of the scale.


Unlike nurses, allied health professionals and healthcare assistants, hospital service workers have been largely contracted out to big multi-national companies like Spotless, so the task of bringing these workers into a national MECA is going to be that much more challenging for the SFWU.


Contractors compete with each other for public hospital contracts based on keeping down the cost of labour. By allowing contracting-out to continue in the public sector, the Government is complicit in maintaining low pay rates, poor working conditions and over-work.
The Government could bring these workers back into direct employment in its own hospitals. At the very least, it could act as a ?responsible contractor? by requiring those companies with public hospital contracts to sign up to the MECA ? or lose their contract!
By doing this, and supporting the SFWU MECA with a large injection of targeted funding to increase pay rates across the industry, Labour would be fulfilling its obligations to the very workers who put it back in power for a third term.


This and other campaigns in aged care, commercial cleaners and supermarkets, are important if we are serious about ending the ?feminisation of poverty? We should all get involved. But these campaigns are only part the picture.


Not all women are in the paid workforce. Working class women need to link together to support each others? struggles. The Government?s Working for Families package discriminates against beneficiary families. This is not good enough.


To eliminate poverty we need measures such as universal basic incomes or living minimum wages that will ensure that all families (whatever form they take) have enough to meet their needs.


I don?t know about you, but I had enough of the ?greedies? in the last election demanding tax cuts and saying I should be able to spend my own money however I want. Yet all around them there is substandard housing that causes so much ill health, desperation that drives people to crime, children who cant concentrate in school because they dont get enough to eat.


These are not individual problems. They belong to all of us. As individual men and women, we may well have equality in our relationships, but we will not be liberated until all are liberated. Together we can transform society into one in which people work co-operatively to satisfy their individual and social needs.


To me, that?s what International Women?s Day is about.