6'T he check to growth of the service sector and its rationalisation will be the principle structural shock' of European integration, according to a recent Equal Opportunities Commission report on women and Europe. The news that the Tory Government is to conduct a major review of public spending in the autumn is a further indication that the ruling class in intent on making the working class in general, and women in particular, pay for the economic crisis and for European integration. This payment is not just through greater exploitation at the point of production, but through a cut in the 'social wage' which workers have received through the welfare state. Cuts in the welfare state are not just necessitated by the demands of European integration, but by long term probİems within the British economy. Social security spending currently accounts for 12.3 per cent of G.D.P and has increased by 700 per cent since 1950. Even without the additional pressures posed by the need to reduce public sector spending to nearer the European average, a key element of Tory policy to modernise the British economy would be to cut social security spending and to privatise its functions.
Cuts in the welfare state are a 'women's issue' because women make up the majority of the welfare state workforce, and because women's realisation of many of the "formal equalities' laid down in law, especially their ability to enter the paid labour force on equal terms with men, is dependent on the state's willingness to "free them up' from domestic responsibilities while providing free or affordable contraceptive and abortion facilities. As discussed below, many of the changes which have made up the Tory offensive on the public sector over the last fourteen years have particularly impacted on women, both as workers within this sector, but also because they rely on it to take advantage of formal equal rights gained in the 60s and 70s.
The labour movement faces a huge challenge in defending the limited gains it made in the welfare state. Can it build the alliances necessary to defend the welfare state, and in particular public services from the necessities imposed by European integration: bringing publie spending down to 3 per cent of GDP; cuts of £12 billion? Such a defensive struggle can only be waged if the trade unions directly involved can look outside themselves and build a broader allance of the whole working class in defence of services that have previously been taken for granted, but which have already been massively eroded with weak resistance on the part of the un-
ion:, and little organised attempt to make the issues ones of defence of the living standards of the whole working class rather than the particular trade union interests of particular sectors. The stakes in such a confrontation would be huge, which explains why the weaker ruling classes of Europe are engaged in desperate discussions to see if the time for integration can be extended as they realise the difficulty of getting their working classes to accept the massive cuts necessitated.
In building broader alliances of the class to defend the welfare state, women's position within the family, and the conditions necessary for the overturning of women's oppression will necessarily be raised. However, some sections of the labour movement and of the left would prefer to fight the defence of the welfare state on narrower, syndicalist terrain. The Militantorganised Public Sector Alliance is a case in point.
Effects on women cuts in central funding The Tories have massively increased cuts to central funding of local government and health services, spurred on by the Labour leadership's failure to fight cuts at the beginning of the process (i.e. not backing Lambeth and Liverpool but instead adopting the 'dented shield' approach) Millions of pounds have been wiped off local government spending as councils try to make up in cuts what has already been chopped centrally and is impolitic (or illegal) to raise locally. With the marketisation of the NHS, the introduction of the council tax to replace the poll tax and with the establishment of Local Management of Schools, competition is now set up beiweer and within services for a slice of an ever diminishing cake. Even once the slices have been allocated, competition between wages and redundancies, conditions for employees and spending on other resources is ensured. Women are always at the sharp end.
New pay scales are being introduced which will make it harder for women returning to public sector jobs to get the same wage as they went out of the workforce on. Pools of supply teachers, previously employed by local councils and made up of unionised and reasonably well paid and secure workers, are being replaced by private agencies which employ a largely female workforce on below union rates with no access to sick pay or maternity leave.
'Restructuring' and attacks on trade unions Derecognition, no strike agreements and individual pay bargaining clearly descriminates against those workers who are individually weakest i.e. women and Black workers.
In work places where equal opportunities for women and Black workers had been negotiated into collective agreements the bosses will once again be able to promote on the basis of 'if your face fits'
'. Individual pay bargaining also opens women up to increased sexual harassment by male supervisors or to the perception by fellow workers that sexual favours are the basis for wage increases. The workforce is further divided and weakened. Combined with appraisal as a means for monitoring productivity individual pay rates can be expected to be lower for those workers (ie. mainly women) who have commit-
ments and responsibilities outside the workplace.
There is a growing division in the workforce between 'core' and 'periphery workers, with increased part-time work and the introduction of agency and free-lance workers and short-term contracts. These diminutions in conditions of service are not just for workers in lower grades e.g. in education the inspectorate and advisory services are now nearly all employed on a free-lance basis.
The ideological offensive: 'client choice'
In the welfare state element sof the New Management Techniques have been introduced around the ideology of 'Client Choice'
Under the ideology of client choice, most service users are receiving less choice as provision of many services is stopped completely, or in the case of education, where the limited choice available is with the school which can prove itself to be adding most 'value'. However, building as it does in some areas on the traditional welfare state's reluctance to treat users as real people, the ideology of client choice has resulted in some anomalies. For example, some people with disabilities can now themselves become purchasers of services, receiving benefits which are then used to "purchase' the services of paid carers, allowing them more choice about who cares for them and how. Of course, the workers involved have worsened conditions as the employees of individuals rather than local government, and the level of benefit supplied cannot really give the "client' the level of services they need anyway. But as with much 'care in the community" the Tories are using 'client choice' to whittie away both at levels of service and at the rights and levels of unionisation of the welfare state workforce Cuts in the welfare state - women as service users, women as carers Women have also been massively attacked as a reduction in services means they are forced more and more into a role as unpaid carer. The enormous reduction in the 'social care offered by the state as the ruling class tries to make individual members of the working class responsible for the day-to-day reproduction of the working class, shifts the burden back onto the family and away from the state.
This undermining of women's 'social wage' has been intensified as European integration has increasingly led to the levelling down of women's access to social security provision through 'equality'
. For example, the raising of the state pension age for women to 65 has been done in the name of 'equality' to meet European directives. Only 15 per cent of women receive the full state pension in any case, although that percentage can be expected to rise as women reaching pension age have spent more of their lives in paid employment. Contradictorily, the state pension is of more importance to women than men as over two-thirds of women have no occupational pension. Older women are particularly reliant on many of the social services that will be cut while their direct income is often at poverty levels - 43 per cent of women pensioners hat e
incomes of less than 2:d per week. Britain has long been one of the worst countries in Europe for maternity and child care provision. It is the only country to have no legal provision for parenlal leave cqually available to paternity leave and the only country to have worsened its materity provision in the 80s. Britain is the only country in which maternity leave is not a universal right and it was Britain which argued that the European provision for maternity leaves should be set at the level of 14 weeks sick pay rather than 14 weeks pay as originally intended. As has generally been the case, the provision of European benefits for women have been set at the lowest possible rate, and most often that is Britain's.
Similarly, nursery provision in Britain is among the worst in Europe, and is a bone of contention between the state and the private sector; with the government arguing that individual employers get the benefit of women's labour and should therefore fund the nurseries, while employers argue government should make the provision. The losers as usual are women who usually end up with make do and mend solutions: only 300 employers in Britain run work place nurseries.
Cuts in health and social service care mean a disproportionate weight of responsibility being placed on women who are expected to take on, unpaid, the "caring' role the state is no longer willing to perform. 6.8 million people in Britain are carers for relatives or friends. 17 per cent of women are carers and the estimated savings to the state of that unpaid caring is £24 billion (source: Caring Costs charity).
This attempt to "privatise' social care back into the family occurs in a situation very different from that in which the ruling class wow a pretend * cieve individual tamiles previousiy carned our this role. The process of industrial capitalism has geographically split many families so that women now frequently live hundreds of miles from the elderly person for whom they are meant to 'care'.
. The adoption by the state for some decades of a 'caring' role means that many families do not expect to have to look after their own members. Above all, the entry of women in massive numbers into paid employment, especially the public sector, after the Second World War means that women's expectations have changed: they expect to achieve some level of financial independence as a result of waged labour, and they do not expect to do for free the kind of 'caring' jobs which they have been paid to do for a number of years. While women's unpaid role as carers in the family helped to explain their low pay when they did the same kind of work for the state, their payment, even at low levels, for doing these jobs in the public sector, helps explain their reluctance to do them for free this time around. This does not mean, however, that they won't do them. As hospitals have closed long stay wards under the guise of 'community' care, many thousands of people have 'slipped' out of the system, presumably back into the families who had previously decided they couldn't cope. Measures like 'hotel charges' for post-operative care are further assaults on the family (and women's) 'free' provision of what have previously been state-provided services. How many working class people will sacrifice £30 a day to stay in hospital if they can get care at home for free? In attacking public services, the Tories are forcing women even more into assuming the responsibilities within the
family which force them to accept the cheap, flexible jobs employers want them to do.
While the mainstay of the Tory offensive against women continues to be at the level of their exploitation in the labour market, their oppression as unpaid reproducers of the working class is reinforced by the bolstering of the family at a political and ideological level. The political and ideological offensive against women The Child Support Act is both a further cut in public expenditure and a major political and ideological attack. While the CSA recognises the impossibility of gluing back together the many 'families' which do not conform to the nuclear model, it attempts to make individuals pay for not conforming. Even if it does not force women back with expartners, it may deter some women from leaving their partners in the first place. Recent surveys have shown that as many as 10 per cent of women have been victims of domestic violence in the last year. Women forced for financial reasons to remain with violent partners will be particularly at risk Ostensibly the CSA is an attempt to make individual men pay for the care of children whose 'cost' has previously been paid by the state, and uses the 'feminist' argument that men should be made to take responsibility for their children, while actually penalising women by docking their social security. It will further push many families (both single women with children and the 'second' families of men targeted) into poverty, while opening women up to the violence of expartners.
It also represents a refusal by the state to recognise as "families' single women or lesbian couples who have chosen to have children by A.I.D. and to assign to these families social fathers who had previously only opted to be biological ones.
The C.S.A. has been only the first of many recent ideological attacks on single mothers, with Tory ministers vying against each other to produce the most reactionary possible statements in response to issues of 'housing' or to the 'home alone' cases.
Another example of the way in which public expenditure and the ideological offensive are being linked together is over reproductive rights. The recent case of the sextuplets born to a woman and man who chose not to live together and were not married has been used as a cause celebre to question the whole provision of reproductive technologies, both on the basis of their "improper allocation, and of their very existence given cuts in other parts of the health service.
The response of the Labour Party to the Tory onslaught on 'the family' has been almost as much of a capitulation as their response on "law and order'. Mo Mowlam has said that the Labour Party must have policies with a high 'family friendliness' appeal while Harriet Harman has proclaimed that "For to0 long the Left has let the issue of the family become the domain of the right'. At the level of policy, Labour's concession to the need to 'target' social security finance represents a massive retreat from its traditional opposition to means testing and an acceptance of the strategy of making the working class, and women in particular, pay for the crisis. Despite the Tory attacks, women's rights at the formal level have not been
attacked, and in fact in some areas have continued to be expanded e.g. recognition of rape within marriage, recognition of the need to change the definition of 'premeditation' in the case of the killing of violent partners by abused women The Tories have not chosen to confront any of the gains women made in the 60s and 70s head-on e.g. no government-backed attacks on abortion rights, no negative changes to the Sex Discrimination Act or the Equal pay Act. While they have shown reluctance to implement some European directives on equality, most changes have been implemented eg. pensions are to be equalised by a levelling down of the conditions for all workers. So at the formal level women continue to retain the gains of the 60s and 70s, or even to make advances.
Response to the ruling class offensive One of the major effects of the Tories policy of continuing to deliver bouquets of formal rights at the front door while attacking the back garden with a bulldozer, is that some layers of women continue to do quite well. While a small layer of women, without dependents and/or with high wages benefit from equal pay and reduced direct taxation, the vast majority of women have seen their pay levels reduced, working conditions worsened and their work as carers massively increased, while the independence they previously gained from their access to paid labour is under threat by their new commitments, and their access to services as diverse as contraception, abortion and safe public transport are massively undermined. This split between women is partly a class divide which has always existed, and is now intensified, but can also now be between women working in similar jobs in the private or public sector, and between women with dependent elderly relatives, or without. This division also masks the fact that attacks on the wel fare state, whatever their rationale, are de facto attacks on women's rights. In responding to attacks on the welfare state, to the introduction of the new management techniques and to initiatives such as the Public Sector Alliance, socialists have to be constantly aware of the particular needs and interests of women. The Tories will try and divide the working class where it is weakest and will use these divisions to attack the working class as a whole.
In each of the trade unions and sectors in which socialists are active we must analyse the precise way in which the current offensive attacks the workforce as a whole, but be particularly aware of ways in which the weakest sections of the class are being attacked in order that our propaganda and initiatives can reach out to all layers.
While 'equal opportunities' for women and black workers has often been an empty shell behind which wages and conditions have been structurally worse, they has also been seen as an integral commitment of the welfare state, both in the provision of services and in employment rights. The fight to protect 'equal opportunities', to defend the rights of women to service use and to employment, can be a powerful tool in counteracting the Tories offensive. November 1993