Public sector cuts hit women hard

Despite being burdened with a leadership that basically collaborates with the employers' cuts in social services and the public sector workforce, most people recognize, that financially anyway, you are better off in a Union.  On the whole, Union wages and benefits were about 35% above non Union. Last year, female Union members earned 89c to a man's dollar and non-Union women 81c.

However, the savaging of the public sector is changing the female workforce drastically. Women hold 57% of all government jobs according to the Labor Dept.  They hold 62% of local government jobs but in teaching they are even higher making up 76% of that workforce in the 2007-08 school year according to the Education Dept. Nursing is another woman dominated field.

So the attacks on education have hit women hard.  Of the 378,000 government jobs eliminated between July 2009 and March 2010, 72% were women. This is the small government they are talking about, they want to not only eliminate public services, which is "money out" for the capitalist class, they need to drive down Union density along with wages and force workers in to the private marketplace.  There is more to come, John Kasich's budget in Ohio for example will eliminate another 7000 teachers there over the next two years says Business Week.

They are "Taking a wrecking ball to what have been traditionally female -dominated professions" says Randi Weingarten, President of the AFL-CIO's American Federation of Teachers.  Unfortunately, Union leaders like Weingarten and her counterparts in the NEA and AFL-CIO are doing very little stop the wrecking crew.  Here in California, the CTA, an affiliate of the NEA with some 300,000 members in the state has limited the response to these savage attacks on workers' living standards and public services to harmless rallies, protests and the like. The Unions have in fact supported the budget put forward by Jerry Brown, the state's Democratic governor.  Brown's budget, that will force workers in to a deeper and deeper hole has even been referred to as "fair and balanced" by Labor officials. In Wisconsin and other states where workers wages, benefits and rights are under attack, the heads of organized Labor have not opposed the concessions the bosses want; they have only objected to not being able to be a privy to the discussion.

Given the complete capitulation to the capitalist offensive on the part of the workers' leaders atop organized Labor, I cannot help draw the conclusion that what we'll see here in the US at some point is an explosive movement that, like much of the uprisings in the Middle East is leaderless to a certain extent, or perhaps more accurately, is without a conscious organized leadership with structure.  Given that, it will be contradictory and brutal at times, more so than it need be, but great lessons are learned in struggle and leadership will emerge through it; a sort of "learn as we go" scenario. As Engels remarked, a movement is worth a thousand programs.

This does not mean that activists should not attempt to build a leadership that can intervene in such developments and help take a movement forward based on a direct action, fight to win program and strategy.  But the farther back we go before we go forward points to a rocky road ahead.