My comment article this week in the daily Plymouth Herald (05.03.24) criticises both the lack of vigour with which the trade union movement prevents workplace sexism, and the detestable take-over of International Women’s Day (IWD) by the middle class small businesses seeking to exploit “womanhood” to make a profit from cosmetics and cleaning products. IWD belongs to the Working Classes of the World and should be a point in each year to restate our need and determination for Women’s Liberation.

Friday 8th March is International Women’s Day. Trade unions have celebrated and commemorated the event every year for generations and will do so again this year. That should hardly be surprising given that women constitute the majority of trade union members, highly represented across the public sector in particular. 

International Women’s Day has absolutely nothing to do with cooking, cosmetics and clothing that some events will focus upon, sponsored by Capitalists large and small, and seeing women as consumers not citizens. Such events actively promote the role-segregation and denigration of of women inside this sexist society.

The Day’s authentic celebrations will focus upon the struggles of working class women, starting with the Bryant & May “Matchgirls Strike” of 1888, when teenage young women, today considered children, formed a union for Health & Safety at work, much derided by employers then and now, and much needed still today. It was also a struggle against women’s oppression, for social justice, building the fight for equal rights at work and at home. A woman’s right to vote, to have full representation in society, to have control over their bodies, their finances and for the right to work.

One-hundred-and-thirty-five years later the struggle for women’s liberation continues, here in the UK and across the world. Internationally, the rape and killing of women is accentuated by war and social conflict.

At home, the Age of Austerity, officially blamed upon COVID, war and climate change rather than record Corporate and Banking profits, has produced mass domestic poverty, women suffering the brunt.

Whilst women constitute the majority of trade union members in the UK, trade unions have a chequered history of fighting for women’s rights. The false divide between men and women in the workplace is exploited by employers, portraying women as a threat to jobs, weak and unreliable – ideas not always challenged. There have been bosses campaigns to identify women as a threat to men’s jobs, unchallenged by unions until women themselves organised against prejudice and discrimination, having to educate male trade unionists as well as employers.

The Great Miners Strike of 1984-5, which began 40 years ago this week, was maintained for an entire year only through the determination of the women in miners communities and beyond, active and leading on picket lines and in support groups, and changing the “male culture” of the union in the process.

Yet today, despite a series of major employment laws for equal pay, won by strike action such as the famous women’s strikes at Ford Dagenham, women workers still earn less than 82% of the man’s wage undertaking work of equal value. 

For part-time workers (of whom many are women) the gap rises to around 30 percent. Over her lifetime a woman will earn on average half of what a man will earn, primarily because of the role women still play as primary carers for children – not to mention all the other family members women will often find themselves responsible for, simply because of oppressive social norms. 

Domestic labour is an asset for the employing class, women reproducing and looking after the workforce free of charge. Women’s oppression is essential to ensure high profits, minimising the costs of social provision of welfare, nurseries and care of the elderly.

Little wonder we see the continued media promotion of the backlash against Feminism, orchestrated by the far-Right from the 1990’s onwards, which has seen a rise in workplace sexism and discrimination, including sexual abuse. Much of the gains won from the 1970’s have been eroded. There is a deepening culture of violence against women and girls, institutionally and socially.

More than 80% of all domestic abuse is from men against women in the UK, with one-in-four women experiencing an abusive relationship for an average period of 6 years of their lives (compared with 1 in 18 of men) – that’s over 6 million women experiencing abuse right now, precisely the same statistic as recorded in the early 1970’s. No change. 

Worse still, 68,000 rapes were recorded by Police in 2022-3, half of which are carried out by the woman’s partner or ex-partner and six out of seven rapes perpetrated by someone she knows, with charges brought in just 2.4% of cases, and far fewer convicted. Little wonder that 5 in 6 women who are raped don’t report it, out of lack of faith in the police and legal system. The succession of cases of sexual abuse by police officers, politicians and sportsmen deliver appalling role models.

9 out of ten girls and young women say they’ve experienced sexist name-calling at school, the era of smartphones resulting in “dick pics” and other sexual images being received, unwanted and unsolicited, and causing a common sense of threat, fear and subjugation. 

The backlash against women’s rights is being ramped-up. The misogynist Andrew Tate’s vile internet broadcasts stating that “women are men’s property” is watched by hundreds of millions, influencing the current young generation, his bile being just the tip of a deep iceberg of political male-supremacy rising-up alongside white-supremacy and racism.

Working class men are stupid idiots to denigrate women – our partners, sisters and daughters, friends and workmates. Indeed, the sense of “protection” evoked by male-dominated culture that arouses men to action when their family members are abused, is hypocritically forgotten when putting down women in the workplace with sexist remarks, shielded as “banter”, and the objectification of women’s bodies, dehumanising women and exerting power over women as a source of domination and self-aggrandisement.

In Plymouth we have experienced, all too horrifically, the results of the campaign for male-supremacy, a gunman who expressed misogynistic and homophobic views shooting his mother and four passers-by, shown to have been part of the “intel” movement promoting male domination and the hatred of women.

The International Women’s Day events this Friday should not simply be a celebration, and certainly not any vehicle for reproducing the sexist imagery and Capitalist cultural domination of women as things and products. We need a huge campaign of education and challenge against women’s subjugation and for true women’s liberation.

The sexual division in the working class should not be underestimated as a the obstacle in achieving the class unity that can win decent pay and conditions for everyone. 

It took militancy and collective action to make the gains now at risk if not lost. Any decent working class men – and we exist in our millions – should restate the pledge this week to challenge all aspects of sexism and women’s subjugation, and join with women if they’re fight against oppression. 

Trade Unionists will stand in solidarity with Plymouth’s Women’s Liberation event 12-2pm on Friday at the Sundial, Armada Way.