08) UNION WOMEN: HOW EQUAL ARE WE?

By Helen Kennedy

            The angry and frustrated energies of union women have been vocalized in a new initiative to reassess the movement toward equality within the labour movement. "Leadership, Feminism and Equality in Unions in Canada" is a project led by four labour women, Linda Briskin, Sue Genge, Marg McPhail and Marion Pollack.

            During the spring of 2012, the organizers held facilitated conversations with 50 union women from across the country, but excluding Quebec. From these interviews, they found agreement that there is a "serious problem within the labour movement in advancing women's equality work and supporting feminist activists at all levels."

            Five themes emerged from these discussions, as documented in detail on the list‑serve at http://womenunions.apps01.yorku.ca/

            Many women cited the loss of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, and other national women's groups, as having a huge impact on the ability of women in labour to fight for equality gains: "Once we lost NAC and started losing a number of the other national women's organizations ... women in the trade union movement also started losing support."

            The impact of austerity policies emerges as one of the key issues for debate. In their fight to halt the slide towards job loss and concession bargaining, unions have framed the debate for "Wage Fairness". And thus women's fight for equal pay or pay equity is subsumed by a vague demand to maintain fairness. In many cases, bargaining campaigns that included the fight for women to make equal pay to their male counterparts would have been a more popular (and possibly successful) strategy.

            As frustrated as the union women's voices are, there is also an optimism that emerges from the conversations. Women support the need to have these discussions locally, to begin to rebuild the powerful voice for women at the grassroots level. There was also a suggestion that women look at rebuilding groups like Organized Working Women in Ontario, BC's Union Sisters, and Saskatchewan Working Women as ways to win labour support for women's issues.

            Many women have started convening discussion groups using the results of these conversations to begin. In Ontario, the project has presented their results at an Ontario Federation of Labour Women's Summit. In the upcoming Women's Day edition of Our Times, there is an article on the Summit as well as the first of three articles on the project itself.

            The Leadership, Feminism and Equality in Unions in Canada Project gives a needed boost to women in the labour movement, some of whom have fought for equality for decades and border on severe burnout. But the benefit will be more than refuelling our energies. The Project may help to rebuild a movement that includes the diversity of all working women, and a society that provides universal childcare, pensions for all, pay equity, a truly universal healthcare system that respects women's reproductive rights, and eliminates all forms of violence against women.

(The above article is from the March 1-15, 2013, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)