PARKSIDE PIT Camp was established in January 1992 by Women Against Pit Closures and their supporters, throughout the campaign the women occupied much of the pit.
British Coal attempted to gather 180,000 tons of limestone to fill the shafts. Many mass trespasses were held on the pit drive to stop stone for the day.
Twenty months of resistance against the closure of Parkside Colliery ended on August 20 after British Coal had started filling the shafts. Coal Board solicitors demanded £15,877 from Sylvia Pye resulting from the pit camp's eviction, involving 200 riot police and 40 bailiffs.
We want people to distribute pre-printed postcards demanding that British Coal drop áll costs against Sylvia Pye. We also have posters, stickers, newsletters, appeal forms and speakers, which we can send to your friends, family organisation or branch at your request.
We also have T-shirts, badges, pens, and postcards of the colliery for sale. A price list is available from:The "SPAFF", c/o Bernie Cavanagh, Common Road Nurseries, Short Street, Newton-Le- Willows, WA12 9J3.
Such fragmentation and casualization of women's industrial work, which is paralleled by the trend toward casual and part-time employment in the service sector, is a central component of capital's Structural adjustment policies, and the iesulting rise in unemployment, have served to drive women disproportionately out of the formal economy while also increasing their need to find some kind of income-producing work. They thus turn to the informal sector where women are increasingly forced to work as day-labourers, street vendors or prostitutes.
In some Third World countries, unemployment has reached such proportions seen in Urugnav. where MERCOSUR could raise women's retirement age by seven to nine years to jibe with Brazil's higher age.
• Maternity leave with pay, as well as child care, both legal rights in Mexico, could be eliminated formally by NAFTA.
• Affirmative-action programmes, a hard-won for both people of colour and women in the US and Canada, could be challenged as an undue burden on capitalists in both countries, "prejudicing" their competitiveness.
In the agricultural sector, NAFTA and the EU will promote the domination of agribusiness, leading to the peasant woman's further loss of economic base.
Health & Welfare THESE CHANGES in conditions and security of work directly affect women's health and general well-being as well as the welfare of those family members (especially children) for whom women are primarily responsible.
Rising prices and unemployment put stress on women's own ability to provide for basic needs, while cut-backs in public spending and the dismantling of social welfare programmes decrease state support for services such as education, health care and child care. This development is particularly deleterious to women because of their perceived role in both social and biological reproduction. At the same time, the state depends on women to "take up the slack" and provide on a private basis services that were previously provided by the government, thus furthering the process of structural adjustment.
NAFTA in particular threatens to unleash new health hazards for women as it opens the way to challenging existing enThese include the right to reproductive freedom (including the right to abortion), Sacked Timex workers: 'Flexibility' like this is what employers like about women workers THE MANIPULATION of women's Ideology