Labour women: join the fight for socialism!
Jered by the unilateral action of the DHA Chair in overruling an in-house tender, to award the contract for cleaning community clinics to the private firm ICC. The action, spreading beyond the 50 community cleaners to involve up to 2,000 workers, culminated in a week-long strike which forced the authority to back down.
At the October DHA meeting, a resolution was passed which called for the suspension of competitive tendering nationally, pending a full independent inquiry into the effects of privatisation. This inquiry would include looking at the impact on industrial relations, the truth behind the much talked-about "savings", and the general effect on services.
And though the contract which sparked off the original dispute remains in the hands of ICC, those domestic staff who do LABOUR women have been hard done by in most of the analyses and assessments written about Labour Party annual conference: apart from mentioning the defeat of the "conscience clause", we've been largely ignored at the expense of coverage of other issues.
Perhaps this is not altogether surprising, as, compared with some of the other campaigning groups at Bournemouth, Labour women were much less visible than we have been before, or, at least, we were not in the same space.
Certainly, the defeat of the "conscience clause" is a big victory. It's a major step forward for all women, Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights: Contact Bill Forsythe, Membership Secretary. 17, Osborne Rd. Southville, BRISTOL BS3 1PR.
not find employment with the company have been promised redeployment to NHS jobs elswhere in the District: there is even a promise to cover their extra travel expenses!
Fowler must now either issue an unprecedented legally-binding instruction that the DHA must privatise, or leave the DHA to get on with the business of providing services.
The Sunderland victory in also impor tant in that it vindicates all those who argued for the spreading and escalation of local strikes against privatisation. Though the NUPE bureaucracy has successfully Isolated and stamped out the courageous 18-month strike at Barking Hospital and the 7 month strike at Scarsdale Hospital Chesterfield, local officials of NUPE and COHSE in Sunderland played a positive
SERBOUR...SOURNEHOUTH. LABOUR 85 e2nPosheparticularly working class women who depend on the NHS and can't buy themselves out of the system, that the Labour Party has now committed itseif to the right to abortion being Party policy, and being carried out. It's also a big gain in terms of Party democracy, part of the long battle to push Labour office-holders to understand that they are elected to implement Party policy, not to further their own preferences and careers.
The victory in the Labour Party would have been impossible without the strength of the women's movement: the women's movement who have pushed woman's right to choose" and the women's move. ment's strength as seen in the miners' strike, which provided an increased willingness on the part of some sections of the labour movement to take women seriously
But how far did the victory come from the strength of women organised in the Labour Party?
For some years now, socialist women in the Labour Party have worked together in the Labour Women's Action Committee to discuss priorities, issues, and organise to take on the overwhelm. ingly male weight of the Party and Socialist Viewpoint No, 9 December 1985 p32
role in building and spreading the Sunderland strike.
With the struggle against contractors
DCS still going strong at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge, after 13 months, moves to establish informal links between hospital strikes and militant health workers are continuing. A meeting of the ad-hoc National Action Committee, launched last July with the support of the Barking strikers, scheduled for Saturday November 30 at Whiston Hospital Prescot, Merseyside.
Futher details from Sylvia Burtin, Chair of the Addenbrooken Strike Committee, c/o 31, Thorleys Rd, Cambridge.
By JENNY FISHER trade UnIOns. Although It's only relatively recently that IWAC has begun to develop a life "at the grass roots", even before that it was important and influential. Many women found that LWAC-arranged gettogethers and meetings at Conferences were the only opportunity they had to find ouf what was going on, to try out their ideas, and to gain strength for the next year's battle: and this has helped to strengthen women, and support for women's "issues". in constituency Labour Parties.
Yet the focus of the Labour Women's Action Committee has been changing.
LWAC has always pushed constitutional change as not more important than policy reform, but as the priority of the women's organisation. The argument is a sound one: while women have no power in the Labour Party decision-making process, our interests and needs will be very hard to fight for. We need constitutional reform, so that the women's organisations have power (e.g. the annual Women's Conference should elect the five women's representatives to the National Executive Committee), and so that we can cut through the overwhelming male dominance of the real decision-making process (the above reform, and also the proposal to send five resolutions to Annual Conference from the Women's Conference, and have them discussed).
But the campaign for constitutional reform could be handled in two ways. To be successful, it had to grasp the fundamentally revolutionary nature
of those constitutional changes. In demanding power in decision-making, women were mounting challenge not only to the male dominance of the Labour Party, but also to the political status quo.
There is a real fight to make Labour Party men take women seriously; but there's also a tight to change status quo. The Labour Party leaders are women out of pure, malicious sexism, though there's plenty of that about. They are determined to fend off any challenge by any section of the working class which threatens to expose the workings of the capitalist system.
For Labour women would do just that. As soon as we got near any power, the demands that are passed with complete understanding Women's Conference would be put forward on the floor of Annual Conference, with more women delegates to vote represented by women on the NEC who would constantly implemented
Take that example of "a woman's right to choose". A commitment to free abortion on demand is meaningless unless health spending is increased. But the Labour leadership won't even give a commitment to restore the cuts in the NHS, let alone increase spending. The commitment lo a woman's right to choose goes further anyway: requiring further spending on education, on contraception provision, on clinics, on screening, on support for single mothers, on housing, changes in employment... well, the list is endless really.
it's important that women understand just how much they are demanding; exactly what's at stake; and why the Labour leadership is putting up such a fight against us.
Either the battle is fought in that way, taking on those issues; or, the other option, is to scale down the demands and their substance, and go for winning concessions by convincing those who have to make them that they don't really have that much to fear.
And this is the road that Labour women are in danger of going down: a road that could win us — again - a few paper, token victories -In the future, but would lose us all the substance we're fighting for.
Where were Labour women at Bournemouth? Some of us were on the floor of conference, fighting with women in the Black Sections campaign, who are battling for demands which are just as revolutionary, and just as open to meaningless, empty fudging (such as affiliation as a society, rather than full rights for Black Sections), and who saw their vote treble. Some of us were confined to standing still with admiration, unable to keep up with sisters working for lesbian and gay rights as they zipped around, convinced whole trade union delegations to support "no hoper cause number one" made proud speeches to Conference, and - in
LADIE IF I WERE WILLING TO PAY A LIVING HAGE I WOULD HAVE HIRED MEN, IN THE FIRST RACE! Conference terms — began and successfully concluded the first round of teenwhile, the official ca Women's organisation was handing out publicity for a revue.
I'll accept allegations of undue personal hostility towards revues, and they may well swell the coffers; movement with the "official" Labour Party. Revues are things you read about in the official Conference diary - including the WAC revue, now that it has taken to the bizarre idea of swallowing its previous political principles enough at the idea of a bit of free publicity to register.
Revues have a cosy, "business as usual" air about them: where has all our anger gone? Our militancy? Our
We must learn the lessons of the Women Against Pit Closures movement. After all that women put into the miners' strike - which does not need repeating here - you'd have thought the NUM would have granted the quite reasonable, request for affiliation? No. And not
Pit Closures represents to the NUM the same threat as Labour women do to the Labour Party leadership: not just the threat of being women, but the threat of the demands and the determina-
succeed of working women, of socialist women.
Women on the Steering Committee of WAPC put a very "reasonable" interpretation on the demand for affiliation: an observer at Conference, and the main gain of presented as the possibility of par-
Tin NUM Educational
But this reasonableness was no more attractive to the die-hards of the Socialist Viewpoint No. 9 December 1985 p33
NUM than the more radical opportunities seen by other women, who looked to affiliation to be a continuance of women being recognised as having a rightful place within the concerns of the union, of being taken
Indeed, the NUM men who were won over to supporting WAPC's right
those who had been convinced of the need to take women seriously - convinced by the fact that women had sustained the strike; those who applauded women for organising as women and saw women as they class allies they are; recognise that women had in many, many places led the strike.
We do ourselves no service by conceding on the scope of our demands, or not fighting angrily and truthfully for our full rights to play an equal and a leading part in the struggle for are disturbed at the political accomname. The WAC AGM, postponed from December, and now to be held
will see the debate come out. Hopefully, it will also see WAC turning back towards its natural allies in the Labour Party: sisters fighting
rights and for Lesbian rights, and not continuing to move away from them. Hopefully it will see
women's role in the miners' strike, and join with mining fighting for continued defence of the
attacks. And hopefully it will renounce any temporary faith it may have had in the presses us all; and stop taking the light forward on their terms.
Complete the break from Healyism! An Open Letter to WRP members following the expulsion of Gerry Healy.
-WRP