TWENTY FIVE years after strikes for equal pay by women machinists at Ford which eventually lead to the equal pay legislation of the 1970's, women are still earning just two-thirds of men's pay.
Why are women still doing worse jobs for worse wages and in worse conditions than men?
The main reason for the lack of equality is women's subordination in the family and their responsibility for housework and childcare. But there are additional, related causes.
Historically, women have been excluded from certain jobs and concentrated in others. For example today women still make up less than 5% of Ford's total workforce.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many male trade unionists wanted to keep women out of certain trades, fearing that their cheaper labour would bring lower wages.
Organise
It was to take many decades of struggle before many male trade unionists understood that the way to prevent women for work, only to find discrimination and segregation into the worst jobs at the worst rates of pay, with their educational qualifications frequently not recognised or valued.
Yet much 'women's work' in the service sector mirrors their work in the home - cooking, cleaning, serving 'caring • between 1959-6 were unionised at twice the rate they joined the workforce. Unions were quick to recruit women but slow to deliver action on equal pay and conditions.
The ideas of the emerging women's movement in the United States began to spread across the Atlantic and the first women's groups were formed.
In 1968 women machinists at Ford's Dagenham plant held a one-day stoppage, followed by a three-week strike, in support of their claim for upgrading.
In 1969, after a series of meetings, lobbies and demonstrations organised by the National Joint Campaign Committee for Women's Equal Rights, every trade union passed resolutions supporting equal pay and it Fair shorter working days and better parental leave.
Full implementation of this policy would have required a radical economic policy involving huge investment in pensions, benefits and nurseries.
The document was greeted with scepticism in many Labour Party women's sections. Women criticised the lack of commitment to labour and trade union policies on fertility control and abortion rights - without which there could be no equality in the labour market.
Positive action
Also missing was a commitment to a positive action programme on employment and education which would have addressed women's historical exclusion from certain jobs and from higher education.
Others drew attention to the demand of the women's liberation movement for 24 hour day Nothing without struggle: women workers must fight for their skills to be recognised nurseries so the responsibility for the reproduction of the labour force would be shifted onto society as a whole.
Of course the real problem with the proposal was not omissions in the document itself but the absence of a class struggle perspective Women have continued to be part of the workforce. A few have done quite well under Thatcherism. But the majority are still confined to low paid service jobs, often temporary and increasingly, flexible.
ut flexibilitv hasbeen introduced on the employers' terms not women's meaning a lack of employment protection and rights such as sick pay or maternity pay.
Women's work continues to be conditioned by women's supposed relation to the tamily. Tory cuts mean even less state provision of care for children, the elderly and the sick.
Instead women have to find jobs which fit round 'their NHS responsibilities in the home. Male manual workers are working more overtime than they did in the 1970s, reinforcing women's responsibility for childcare and housework.
And now the Tories are proposing to worsen women's position by raising their retirement age, like men's, to 65.
New generation Their continuing mass participation in the workforce, and the equality legislation of the have resulted in a generation of women who irmly believe in women's equal rights at work, but this requires a radical transformation of society.
As a starting point for any socialist programme, women's responsibilities for childcare and housework would have to be socialised, abortion and contraception made freely available and quotas for education and employment introduced.
Degrading THE HEALTH CARE UNION SOUTH YORKS & EAST MIDLANOS