Women's March Wash. DC Jan. 21st. A new day dawns. |
By Richard Mellor
Afscme
Local 444, retired
The
US is a country of extremes. It is the porn capital of the world where young 18
year-old women and men can bare all on screen or be sent to fight in wars yet can’t
buy a bottle of beer at a convenience store.
It
is also the richest and most powerful nation in history and its defense budget
at $608 billion annually, dwarfs all others. China is a poor second at a little
over $215 billion with the Russians lagging at third with a paltry $66 billion.
God
Bless America is a familiar phrase in these United States but when we look at
quality of life, God’s blessing has been very selective. We have more
billionaires than anyone else and more people in prison than anyone else. The
incomes of the most blessed, a tiny section of US society, are staggering. The wealth displayed at the Superbowl for the world to see is not America. It was bizarre to see these players kissing this oblong silver object passed along as if it was some oracle from above. Sport should be a cultural event.
Trump
makes much ado about the loss of jobs and especially blue-collar post war jobs that
were the traditional home for white males although this changed to a degree
after the rise of the CIO and the Civil Rights movement that followed. It is to
this constituency that Trump has appealed as these jobs have disappeared due
primarily to innovation and technology and moving production oversees where
human beings come cheaper.
But
as Sarah O’Connor points put in today’s Financial Times, “…prime-age male participation has been falling
in the US for 60 years without much panic. What tempered this to a degree was the entrance of women in to the
workforce. Immediately after WW11 less than one third of US women were in the
workforce and by 1999 that had risen to 60%. *As most workers are aware, back
in the 1950’s one income covered a mortgage, today that is almost impossible
certainly when we throw in childcare and other related expenses.
But
women’s labor force participation is declining along with men and was just
under 68% by 2012. This is not the case
in most advanced capitalist (OECD) countries as O’Connor points out and the US
now has a lower female labor force participation than Japan. Similar factors
that have affected male rates affect women’s but there is another major factor
and that is the barbaric nature of US capitalism.
In
the age of the Internet most people are aware of the disparity in statistics
like health care, infant mortality, crime, homelessness working hours,
incarceration and basic social services between the US and other OECD countries;
even tiny Cuba has a better infant mortality rate than the US. It is this
human/family hostile free market haven that is also forcing women out of the
workforce reversing the trend that began after WW11. US policy is “…particularly
unsupportive of women who want to stay in work when they have children — with
the result that many drop out.”, O’Connor writes.
Despite
major gains, women still bear the brunt of housework and basically caring for
the family. In the US, pregnancy is almost treated like an illness. Meanwhile
it is the expansion of “family friendly”
leave policies in other advanced capitalist economies that O’Connor cites as the cause of “why US female labour
force participation had fallen behind.”
Consider
this staggering statistic:
The average length of paid
leave available to mothers across the OECD countries has
increased from 17 weeks in 1970 to just over a year. In the US, it was zero
in 1970 and remains zero to this day. **
The
New York Times also covered this issue last month in a very interesting
article and describes the situation so many women face no matter what their
income bracket:
“…she gave up her
$40,000-a-year job as a customer service representative at a real estate firm
in the summer of 2015 when her fragile support network collapsed. Her mother, a
part-time home health care aide, took care of the children, picking up the
older one from elementary school in the afternoon. But after she had a stroke,
she was the one who needed to be taken care of, and Ms. Stevenson stepped in to
manage her aging mother as well as her young children.”
Over
the past few years those of us connected with this blog have pointed out the
increasing role women are playing in the struggle against the capitalist offensive.
This is an aspect of the class struggle that socialists and anti-capitalists
have traditionally failed to take up sufficiently and we have made a conscious
effort to correct it.
Over
50% of the world’s manufacturing workers are women and we have seen huge
strikes in the garment industry in Bangladesh and other Asian and South East
Asian countries. In Bangladesh, women fought physical battles with the police
and company thugs. In India recently there was a one-day strike of almost 150
million workers, many, if not most of them, women. In China, Vietnam and Cambodia, women have
played a leading role in the struggle against the capitalist offensive there.
Throughout the world from Argentina to North Dakota,
Indonesia and Australia, indigenous people are fighting back against the
multi-nationals that are destroying our environment and their communities in
particular. Berta Cáceres co-founder
of the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras, an environmental rights campaigner, lost her life in this struggle
assassinated after confronting illegal logging and other environmentally
damaging activities in Hondurus. Cáceres, singled out Hillary Clinton
for her role supporting the coup that led to much of the violence in her
country.
With
the Women’s March on January 21st in the US witnessed the largest
national protest in our history as women and their supporters came out in
opposition to the degenerate Predator in Chief Trump and his policies. Some two
to four million including 750,000 in LA, 250,000 in Chicago and thousands more
throughout the country took part. Many of these women had never done anything
overtly political in their lives.
This
was an historic moment in US history and will have a profound affect on the
consciousness of millions of women, and workers and youth in general. Things
will not be the same, this genie will not be put back in the bottle. US society is in a political and economic
crisis. It is heavily indebted, it is losing its global superiority which makes
it a very dangerous animal and the two political parties of US capitalism are
in turmoil. These development have shown ever more clearly that the so-called “friend”
of the people, the Democratic Party, cannot be relied upon to defend the
American people against the rise of nationalism and fascism.
After
these events, no one can say that the American working and sections of the
middle class will not fight. Huge events like the Women’s March on Washington
affects mass consciousness and lessons will be learned. Opposition to Trump’s nationalism
and isolation will be challenged as the movement seeks to bridge borders and
build international solidarity out of which the movement will develop.
That
women will play a leading role in the struggles ahead is indisputable. They
have done so already.
*
BLS Report, PDF: Women
in the Labor Force
1 comment:
Here in California we have one of the better maternal leave policies where after going through some hoops maternity leave unpaid of up to 12 weeks is possible and some partial compensation and or continuation of benefits is also possible. Here are some details. http://www.disabilitysecrets.com/resources/disability/disability-rights/maternity-leave-rights-in-california#
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