workers' rights, women's rights, and the social roots of economic inequality

[niyad]

Workers' Rights, Women's Rights, and the Social Roots of Economic Inequality
by Angi Becker Stevens

From Wisconsin to my home state of Michigan to New York, it seems as though half the country is embroiled in a battle for the rights of the working class. Hardly a week goes by without news of protests taking place at yet another state capitol in response to yet another draconian state budget that benefits the rich at the expense of the working people. The AFL-CIO recently held a national day of action on April 4th, organized under the slogan “We Are One.” The rallying of the people in the face of oppression is encouraging; at no other point in my life can I recall unions and labor rights occupying so much of the national consciousness. But one thing that seems to be largely left out of the dialogue is the fact that women are disproportionately impacted by union busting, attacks on public-sector employees, and slashes to social service programs. Katha Pollitt offers an excellent outline of these impacts in a recent piece for The Nation, pointing out that slashing jobs and benefits in the public sector disproportionately targets jobs held predominantly by women, that women account for a majority of people relying on social services, and that many proposed cuts target programs that specifically benefit women such as WIC and the Title X funding for family planning. As Pollitt says, “it’s almost as if there was some kind of concerted plan to undo forty years of progress for women—and, especially, to make sure poor women stay poor.”

As we strive to raise awareness of how these attacks on working people particularly affect women, we need to also take the opportunity to illuminate the broader social picture. Namely, we need to ask: why are the conditions of our society such that women are in this position to begin with? Why is it that 28% of unmarried working women with children fall below the poverty line, compared to just 6% of men? Statistics this staggering are not the result of any new GOP budget plans—though such budgets will surely make the statistics even worse (while at the same time offering far less in the way of assistance). Rather, they are a result of the structural inequalities that have never ceased to exist in our society. What we need is to open up a dialogue about why women are disproportionately the ones living in poverty and in desperate need of social services in the first place. We need to take this opportunity to send a wake-up call that in spite of all the gains we’ve made in the past fifty years, in spite of greatly improved access to education and employment, male privilege is still very much alive and well.

We cannot ever fully achieve economic equality without achieving social equality as well; systems of economic and social privilege serve to reinforce and uphold one another. As long as women shoulder an unequal responsibility for children—both financially and in the role of primary caretaker—we will remain at an inevitable disadvantage, a disadvantage that is further compounded when we lack the ability to even make reproductive choices. As long as women are viewed as inferior to men, jobs that are held primarily by women—such as teaching and nursing—will continue to be devalued by our society. And without real strides in social justice, women of color—lacking both gender and racial privilege—will continue to be even more severely harmed by attacks on the working class. These few examples are merely the tip of the inequality iceberg, but they serve as a starting point for recognizing how impossible it is to work for economic justice without also dismantling the underlying structures of social injustice.

This is not—as some will claim—about trying to co-opt a workers’ movement and use it to our own personal advantage. It is about trying to build a movement that recognizes the degree to which inequalities of class, gender, race, and sexual orientation are entangled. We are only fighting half the battle if we fight to defend the poor without also examining—and fighting to change—the social inequities that determine who is more likely to be poor in the first place.


http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/09-1

[marew]

1. The rethug playbook...

No one but the extremely wealthy matter. So many arrogant, extremely selfish people. I find it downright depressing. How can so many people not care? Suffering means nothing to them. I do not get it.

[niyad]

2. a whole lot of brainwashing about the lazy poor, wanton women, and the "chosen", not to mention

the sublims in the daily pap known as television "news"

[Raksha]

5. And all of those negative stereotypes come together in the image of the "welfare queen."

Poor, lazy, black, female, manipulative...and to top it all off, a promiscuous slut! How could your average ignorant WASP male not fall for it?

From a propaganda POV it was a stroke of genius, and unfortunately it still works.

[socialist_n_TN]

3. Well here's the thing about that. Economic rights...........

and economic justice LEAD to all other rights. That's one reason that my leftist focus IS economic justice.

If the wealth of this country is redistributed more fairly and everybody gets a fair shake in the workplace, then basically, everybody IS free or soon WILL be. With economic justice you can concentrate on issues like getting money out of politics, which would lead to legal recognition of equal rights for all Americans.

It's also easier to rally the general population over economic rights than over any rights of a specific subset of humanity. Economic justice affects EVERYBODY.

[niyad]

4. and you think women's rights DON'T affect everybody???

[socialist_n_TN]

8. Of course they do.........

I know that, you know that, most people on here know that, but a lot of people DON'T know that. Even women. But IF every worker (INCLUDING women workers) is protected in the workplace from ANY sort of discrimination AND earned equal pay (which is not the case NOW) then all the rest of it comes MUCH easier.

I have no problems with women's rights (I have two working and grown daughters), but RIGHT NOW, I wouldn't turn down an alliance with a misogynist in the economic fight because we all need EVERYBODY to understand that RIGHT NOW there are only TWO sides, the wealthy capitalist exploiters and the rest of us.

[Warren DeMontague]

6. Yes. What we need right now more than anything is a broad series of workshops aimed at re-educating

the gender biased proletariat through paradigm disrupting, confrontational heteronormative stereotype challenging techniques, with the broader goal of widespread destabilization of the patriarchy.




Yeah. And good luck with that, too.

[Raksha]

7. K & R - this is a core insight that can't be stressed often enough or strongly enough:

namely the fact that systems of domination and control reinforce each other.

Re "It is about trying to build a movement that recognizes the degree to which inequalities of class, gender, race, and sexual orientation are entangled."

When I read that I was reminded immediately of the book I just finished reading, Starhawk's Webs of Power: Notes From the Global Uprising. In the chapter called "Building a Diverse Movement" she has a whole section about this called "Interlocking Systems of Oppression." An excerpt:

Racism, sexism, heterosexism and all of the related systems of oppression are, in reality, interlocking and intertwined. They reinforce and feed on each other, and to end any one of them we have to address them all. All depend on the construct of power as domination: the ability and entitlement that some elite groups have to set conditions, command compliance, control resources, and impose punishment on the many. All depend on isolating the individual, on convincing people that their pain is a result of personal failing rather than part of a larger structure of oppression directed at whole classes of people. (op. cit., p. 186)