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Women in the recession
Lower pay & more job losses
THE CURRENT economic crisis is an ‘equal
opportunities recession’, according to Brendan Barber, general secretary
of the TUC. This appears in a recent TUC report, Women and Recession.
The banking crisis and credit crunch have affected
all sectors of the economy from manufacturing, building and the car
industry to retail, banking and finance and the service industries.
Woolworth’s went under before Christmas with the loss of 30,000
overwhelmingly women’s jobs, followed by many other high street names
such as Principles and Barretts. Marks and Spencer recently announced
that it is closing 27 stores and losing office staff. The Confederation
of British Industry reports that nearly half of all retailers cut jobs
in January. Most of those affected are women workers.
The latest official employment statistics show that
the number of women in full-time work fell by 53,000 in the last
quarter, compared with a fall of 36,000 for men. It means that women are
losing full-time jobs at twice the rate of men because, although women
make up around half of the total workforce, when only full-time work is
counted, men still outnumber women significantly.
Women who work part time (around half of all women
who work) may not feature in the official statistics as, being
concentrated in low-paid jobs, and with a work history interrupted by
caring responsibilities, they are less likely to qualify for Job Seekers
Allowance so may not ‘sign on’. They are also less likely to have
savings or pensions so face poverty very quickly.
Any economic crisis will have a disproportionate
affect on the poorest sections of society. The affect on women worldwide
will be devastating. According to the Women’s TUC website, women and
their children account for almost three-quarters of the 1.2 billion
people living in poverty worldwide. The capitalist system was incapable
of providing even basics such as clean water, shelter and food to
millions during the ‘good’ years. Now it will expect even the poorest in
the ‘developing world’ to pay for its crisis. Daughters will be pulled
out of school when families cannot afford the fees as their education is
often seen as less important. Four out of five workers in export
manufacturing in the third world are women and they will be thrown out
of work as people in the west buy less. In countries where there is
little or no safety net, increasing numbers of women may be forced to
turn to prostitution to feed themselves and their families. This brings
with it the risk of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, and
sexual violence.
In the advanced industrial countries of Europe such
rights as have been won in the past through pressure from the organised
working class – for maternity rights, paid maternity and paternity
leave, parental leave and childcare – will be under attack as too
expensive and bad for business ‘in these difficult times’. Past
experience of the 1980s recession showed that closing a nursery can be
the easiest way of getting rid of women workers without paying
redundancy money. Already in Britain 30,000 women a year are sacked for
being pregnant, even though this is illegal. This situation is likely to
get worse as employers look to cut costs and may see pregnant women and
mothers as unproductive workers.
Lord Mandelson, Secretary of State for Business
since October 2008, has ordered a review of all policies in the pipeline
which he feels may be burdensome to business – including the proposed
extension of the right to flexitime from parents of children under six
to all those with children up to 16, and the proposal to extend paid
maternity leave from 39 to 52 weeks. It is outrageous that even these
limited reforms (slightly less ‘generous’ than current Tory policy),
which would have gone some way to ease financial and family pressures on
working parents, and working mothers in particular, may be sacrificed on
the say so of someone who, with his inflated salary and EU pension, is
so burdensome to the tax payer.
Equal pay is also likely to drop even further down
the government’s list of priorities. The Equalities Bill, due to become
law later this year, fails to impose a duty on private companies even to
carry out a pay audit to find out if their women workers are being paid
less than male equivalent workers, never mind do anything about this.
The Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), unlike its
predecessor the Equal Opportunities Commission, is not calling for
compulsory pay audits, its chief executive stating that ‘I think we do
need to be realistic about the economic climate’. The EHRC calls for a
new equal pay act but that this would be a ‘long-term exercise,
requiring several years of work’. It is now nearly 40 years since the
Equal Pay Act. How much longer are we supposed to wait?
In any case, legislation is only part of the answer.
This is clear from the debacle of ‘single status’ in local government,
where the government imposed a duty to implement equal pay and
conditions, but no extra money to do this. In the absence of a
nationwide fight from the public-sector union, UNISON, many local
authorities have imposed pay cuts on one section of workers – often
male, but not always – or cut services, in order to implement equal pay.
Where a lead was given, for example in Greenwich, where the branch
secretary is a Socialist Party member, the local authority was forced to
back down.
We do not want to share out the misery. It is vital
that the trade unions in the public and private sectors refuse to allow
one set of workers to be played off against another. The government has
spent £550 billion on bailing out the banks, and we should demand the
estimated £5 billion that is needed to fund equal pay in local
government.
The Financial Times reports that local councils in
England have axed about 10,000 jobs, with 70% expecting further losses
due to the recession. Cuts in social services, health services and local
government affect women especially, as workers, but also because they
will be expected to take up the slack as carers in the home. Traditional
gender roles, reinforced under capitalism, are used to excuse low pay
and casual work for women because their ‘primary role’ is bringing up
the family and ‘keeping house’.
The Tory government under Margaret Thatcher during
the recession of the early 1980s said ‘there is no such thing as
society, only individual families’. This was used to justify cuts and
hospital closures, blaming the social problems they had created by their
economic policies on the ‘breakdown’ of the family. Now, as then, women
are likely to be at the forefront of community campaigns and trade union
struggles against cuts.
Since the 1980s there are far more women in work.
Women now account for around half of the total workforce. Over half of
women with children under five work, compared to around a third in 1980.
Nearly three quarters of mothers of children between five and ten work.
There have been changes in the family, too. Women are much more likely
to be the breadwinner than 25 years ago. One quarter of families are now
headed by a lone parent (90% of these being women). Even in two-parent
families, women’s income makes up a significant proportion of the family
income – over half in 21% of families. However, women will effectively
be forced back into the home through unemployment.
Some better-paid women may be happy to downshift to
part time work or take a sabbatical for a few months. But this is not a
realistic option for most working-class women as they are so low paid to
start with. Every parent (not just mothers) should have a genuine choice
whether to stay at home full-time with their children and benefits for
children should reflect the real cost of bringing them up. However, they
should also have access to work outside the home and affordable,
genuinely flexible, high quality childcare. New Labour’s mantra that
work is the route out of poverty, and especially its attempt to force
lone parents off income support when their youngest child is aged seven,
is looking increasingly out of step with reality when there are two
million unemployed already.
Already, public-sector workers, the majority of them
women, have been protesting against massive cuts by Nottingham city
council, on the Wirral, in Greenwich and other areas. Thousands marched
on the 28 March demonstration organised by the TUC, along with other
groups, to send a message to the G20 leaders: ‘We will not pay for your
crisis’. One of the slogans of the march was, ‘No going back to business
as usual’. Yet this is exactly what the three major political parties
want to get back to. Capitalism can only offer inequality and insecurity
to the vast majority of women, even at its ‘best’. We need a real
alternative of a socialist society.
Eleanor Donne
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