Women workers in the paid workforce

Left: Bangladeshi women garment workers
When I was growing up in rural Ireland my mother worked harder than anybody else in the family. As well as cooking, baking, looking after the children, washing all the clothes by hand, milking cows and feeding calves she made and mended our clothes. She owned nothing and was paid nothing. While there is still a long way to go there has been a big change in many women's position, especially those who are now in the paid workforce.

On a world scale eighty per cent of factory workers are women. This is an important step forward in that it brings hundreds of millions of women together and increases their power. Here in the USA women made up between thirty and thirty five per cent of the paid workforce in the nineteen sixties. Today they make up fifty per cent. Women still do more work than men. Work in the home and with the children is not equally shared. But now with such an increase in the numbers in the paid workforce women have more power to fight for equality and demands specific to their needs. But it is not only women who have to fight against sexism and division and the increased exploitation of women's labor. The bosses use women as cheap labor and the difference between the cost of women's labor and men's labor to divide and rule. Divide and rule, this is their strategy.

Professional childcare free at all workplaces, schools, colleges and neighborhoods, equal pay for work of equal value, maternity and paternity leave at full pay for all. These have to be at the center of the working class struggle.

It would be a mistake to expect much from the Obama regime on this or any other issue facing working class women. He appointed as his main economic adviser the arrogant sexist Larry Summers. This agent for the corporations was chased out of his leading position at Harvard for saying that women were not mentally capable of studying the hard sciences. And he is Obama's man on the economy!!!!!

Working class women just like working class men need a working peoples party to represent their interests. The Democrats and Republicans represent the corporations and their divide and rule strategy and their policy of using women and all specially oppressed minorities and peoples as cheap labor.

Sean.