Women & Unions: Contributions to Organized Labor 2000 Fri, 11 Feb 2000 21:47:18 -0500 Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - Michael Eisenscher From an international internet labor forum/list: WOMEN AND UNIONS: CONTRIBUTION TO ORGANIZED LABOUR 2000 Linda Briskin, York University, Canada This post takes up the issue of women and unions. First, it examines the impact of women's organizing on union transformation. In Canada and many other Western countries, union women have taken significant initiatives around representation, leadership practices and the organization of union work, separate organizing, redefining union issues, expanding the collective bargaining agenda, and building alliances and coalitions across unions and with social movements. In many cases, these challenges have changed the ways that unions do their work, and have moved unions toward greater inclusivity and more democratic practices. Second, given that increasing competition among workers is at the heart of restructuring and globalization, both equity and solidarity (ie. "unity in diversity") must be central to union strategies. This means addressing discriminatory practices inside unions and workplaces based not only on gender but also on race, ethnicity, citizenship, ability, age and sexuality. Taking account of such differences will not create more divisions among union members; rather, it will acknowledge existing differences. In so doing, the unions can build equality in practice, and increase the potential for transformed, inclusive and activist unions. Indeed, organizing these multiple constituencies, many of whom have traditionally been marginalized, will be central to the survival of the labour movement, and will provide the foundation for addressing the complexity of solidarity in a global context. The patterns of restructuring, regional integration and globalization discussed on this list over the last months are seriously undermining equality gains. Decreased funding to state services like health, education and welfare programs, increased calls for labour flexibility and competitive wage bargaining across national boundaries, contracting out and the creation of more non-standard, part-time, part-year service work, the shift to homework, and the ideology of radical individualism all negatively impact on women and minority workers (although unevenly depending on their age, race, ability, citizenship and class). In this context, women workers need unions more than ever. Unions provide a vehicle for struggling around fundamental issues affecting their home and work lives, and union activity fosters not only personal empowerment but political awareness and collective solidarity. Undoubtedly, unions in the West also need women, most obviously to bolster declining union membership caused by the erosion in the largely male industrial union base. Unions are looking to women workers for revitalization and growth, and to new sectors of the economy to replace their traditional support. Thus unions are simultaneously confronting the necessity to organize the unorganized and to develop strategies for the realities of homework and casualization at the same time as they face the task of representing increasingly diverse constituencies of workers. Before I explore these issues in more detail, I would like to make some general comments. There has been some conversation on the list about activist and academic interests in unions. I have difficulty with this binary since there are many activists in the academy. The academy is often a unionized workplace (my union was on strike for two months in 1997), and undoubtedly a site of political practice (for example, in Canada, students have organized a national student strike around access issues for Feb 2, 2000). I myself have both an activist and scholarly interest in unions. For the last two decades I have been a union activist, first in the Ontario Public Sector Employees Union (OPSEU) and currently in the York University Faculty Association (YUFA). I have also been writing about women and unions since 1983 when I co-edited a collection entitled UNION SISTERS. (Some recent references are listed below if anyone is interested.) However, I also recognize the limits of this experience. In my research, I have focussed on the unions in North America, Western Europe and the Nordic countries. Among these countries there are significant variations in the strategies of union women, and in the equity practices of unions. Nevertheless, the situation of women workers organizing in/for unions in countries of the East and the South is dramatically different. I hope this posting will encourage a dialogue around women and unions that bridges these divides. TRANSFORMING UNIONS The successes outlined below do not erase the fact that women unionists continue to face significant barriers to union participation. This posting concentrates on successes both to counterbalance the emphasis on barriers in most of the literature, and to underscore that unions can learn much from the strategies of union women. REPRESENTATION Concerns about representation have been a major focus in unions. Many key Canadian unions and federations now have affirmative action policies that designate or add seats on leadership bodies for women in an attempt to address their under-representation in top elected positions. Undoubtedly, these strategies have increased women's participation in top leadership. The increased awareness of representational issues has had spin-off effects in other areas: employment equity for union staff; affirmative action seats for visible minorities, and gays and lesbians; equity representation in education courses; and improvements in gender distribution in local leadership. However, the focus on top leadership may make invisible local and informal leadership by women, thereby exacerbating women's low status in unions, and reproducing traditional patterns of organization and male domination. LEADERSHIP PRACTICES Out of women's organizing in unions, and in response to male-dominated and hierarchical union practices, a new approach to leadership and alternative ways of working can be identified among some women activists and leaders which emphasizes process, accountability and constituency building, and participation rather than representation. Many of these innovations are informed by the organizing strategies of the grassroots women's movement, and are consistent with demands for union transformation made by rank and file activists. REDEFINING UNION ISSUES/EXPANDING THE AGENDA OF COLLECTIVE BARGAINING Over the last two decades, women unionists have successfully pressured unions to take up issues of childcare, reproductive rights, sexual harassment and violence against women, pay equity, affirmative action and employment equity, etc. Around each of these issues, union men and union hierarchies questioned the legitimacy of unions addressing such issues. With each victory (expressed in policy statements, expansion in the collective bargaining agenda, changes to political focus), the boundaries of what constitutes a legitimate union issue have shifted, the understanding of what is seen to be relevant to the workplace has altered, and the support for social unionism has increased. These transformations have set the stage for two other shifts: gendering union issues and recognizing diversity. Gendering issues has meant a subtle move from an identification of a women's platform of concerns to a recognition of the gender implications in all issues. This is evident in recent discussions on free trade, on economic restructuring, on seniority, on health and safety, and on telework. Second, issues are frequently scrutinised for their impact on diverse groups of women. For example, discussions of sexual harassment acknowledge the specific forms of sexual harassment experienced by women of colour. Discussions of family benefits increasingly reject traditional definitions of 'family' that exclude gay and lesbian couples. Undoubtedly, these shifts have had impacts on the collective bargaining agenda. Making gender realities visible has undermined the notion of a generic worker with a homogeneous and self-evident set of interests and challenged the idea that abstractly calling for solidarity or seeking a common denominator like class will suffice to strengthen the union movement. SEPARATE ORGANIZING Despite calls for mainstreaming (see, for eg. the 1995 report of the European Trade Union Confederation), evidence suggests a growing acceptance and legitimation of separate organizing ('special structures' in the language of the ILO and sometimes called 'self organizing'), at least in the public discourse of unions, and increasing formalization of structures to facilitate it. For example, the constitution of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) mandates women's committees at all levels of the union, and that of UNISON in Britain supports self-organizing structures for women, black workers, workers with disabilities, and gay and lesbian workers. Those committed to women's empowerment in the unions raise strategic concerns about whether separate organizing leads to ghettoization or marginalization of women's concerns. Increasingly there is a call for the mainstreaming of women's issues as the alternative. However, mainstreaming on its own is not the answer. I would argue that union women's continued success depends upon maintaining a strategic balance between autonomy from the structures and practices of the labour movement, and integration (or mainstreaming) into those structures. The autonomy pull supports fundamental revisioning of union practices and prevents political marginalization and the dissipation of the radical claims for inclusivity and democratization often embedded in separate organizing initiatives. Autonomy measures provide the vehicles for women to assert their rights (to full time work at a living wage, to social welfare measures, health care, to protection against violence) in opposition to the trajectories of current economic and political policies. And they provide the context for building alliances between union women and the community-based women's movement. Integration into union structures prevents organizational marginalization, and creates the conditions for both resource allocation, and gendering union policy and strategy. Integration measures, which ensure that women are strategically placed in union structures, will help deter the unions from accommodating the conservative values which co-exist with and support restructuring. Union women's separate organizing has been instrumental in raising the issues of other marginalized groups. Highlighting gender-specific patterns of discrimination has encouraged many unions to respond to the concerns of other groups of workers: in the Canadian context, immigrant workers, gay and lesbian workers, workers from the First Nations, and those with disabilities. Women's separate organizing has also provided an important precedent. Increasingly women and men of colour, lesbians and gay men, and native peoples are organizing separately inside the union movement, often through Human Rights Committees, Aboriginal Circles and Pink Triangle Committees. Separate organizing can also provide the basis for different constituencies to come together from positions of strength, for example, the links established between health and safety committees, and women's committees in Quebec which facilitated taking up previously-ignored women's occupational health issues. Not only does separate organizing continue to be relevant, but I suggest that this strategy can make an important contribution to organizing marginalized unionists in the context of globalization and restructuring. Strategies of (and for) women unionists must pro- actively address the potential marginalization of their concerns, the neo-liberal invocation of patriarchal and individualistic values for workplaces and households, and the need to build solidarities across diversities, with un-unionized women and across national boundaries. The past two decades of separate organizing suggests that this strategy can make a contribution to these ends. BUILDING ALLIANCES AND COALITIONS ACROSS UNIONS AND WITH SOCIAL MOVEMENTS An important strategy in Canada and elsewhere has been the building of alliances and coalitions across political current, sector and institution to bring women together from the unions, political parties, and community-based groups to co-operate nationally, provincially and locally. The most successful formal expression of this, but by no means the only one, is the National Action Committee on the Status of Women/Comit* Canadien d'action sur le statut de la femme (NAC), a bi-national(includes Quebec), bilingual umbrella organization of over 600 member groups which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1997. This co-operation has meant that trade union women work with community-based feminist groups, both to build coalitions around key issues such as childcare and pay equity, and to pressure the union movement to respond to the feminist challenge. Trade union women, in turn, have had an important impact on the politics and practices of the Canadian women's movement, weakening the tendency towards individualistic solutions and introducing (and re- introducing) a class perspective. Such organizing has helped to legitimize coalition building with groups outside the union movement, thus actively challenging traditions of union isolationism and has provided a model for coalition building which Canadian unions are now adopting. Undoubtedly, corporatization, workplace restructuring, changing state forms, and processes of decommodification have put the question of coalitions and alliances, both nationally and internationally, on the strategic agenda more firmly than ever before. GENDERING DEMOCRACY A thread through all these initiatives has been a call for a substantively different form of union democracy: for structures of participation and inclusivity rather than simply representation. Demands by women activists for full participation challenge the apathy produced by the service mentality of business unionism, and shift the ground of union power structures. The parallels with concerns raised by rank and file activists is worthy of note. The democratizing vision is in stark contrast to the bureaucratic, hierarchical, overly competitive and often undemocratic practices of many unions, practices which converge with male domination to exclude women and other marginalized groups. For these reasons I call for 'gendering union democracy' which speaks to making the internal practices of unions more democratic and welcoming, and more accessible by taking account of realities such as childcare and domestic responsibilities. It means ensuring that the bargaining agenda reflects the needs of women workers, and promoting organizational structures such as women's committees that encourage the participation of women. The language of 'gendering democracy' is both useful in moving away from abstractions about democracy, and problematic in that it is does not reflect the specific visions about, and claims for, democracy that emerge from other marginalized groups in the unions: lesbian and gay workers, workers of colour, workers with disabilities. So, for example, democratizing unions for workers with disabilities will involve, at minimum, increasing accessibility. Gendering democracy is a way of actualizing the principles of equality, solidarity, justice and fairness which are such a deeply engrained part of union ideology, if not its practice. The struggle to gender democracy in the unions is critical: for women, it will be the key to gaining and maintaining access to, and a voice within, the labour movement; it will empower women to stand firm when confronting their employers; and it will strengthen the union movement's capacity to resist economic and political restructuring. Undoubtedly, the effectiveness of unions as sites of resistance for the 21st century depends on the successful re-visioning of union democracy. SOME REFERENCES If anyone does not have access to these journals and would like copies of the articles, send me your mailing address. Briskin, Linda. (1999) "Autonomy, Diversity and Integration: Union Women's Separate Organizing in North America and Western Europe in the Context of Restructuring and Globalization." Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 22, No. 5, pp. 543-554. Briskin, Linda. (1999) "Feminisms, Feminization and Democratization in Canadian Unions." In Feminist Success Stories/C*l*brons nos r*ussites f*ministes, eds. Karen Blackford, Marie-Luce Garceau and Sandra Kirby. University of Ottawa Press, pp. 73-92. Briskin, Linda. (1999). "Unions and Women's Organizing in Canada and Sweden." In Women's Organizing, Public Policy and Social Change in Sweden and Canada, eds. Linda Briskin and Mona Eliasson. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, pp. 147-183. of the York Strike of 1997." Feminist Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 105-118. Briskin, Linda. (1998) "Gendering Union Democracy." Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme 18 (1), pp. 35-38. Briskin, Linda. (1994). "Equity and Economic Restructuring in the Canadian Labour Movement." Economic and Industrial Democracy, 15 (1), 89-112. Briskin, Linda and Patricia McDermott. (Eds.). (1993). Women Challenging Unions: Feminism, Democracy and Militancy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Linda Briskin Associate Professor Social Science Division York University 4700 Keele St Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3 Tel: 416-736-5054 Fax: 416-736-5615 =================================================== Organizing Women Giving Women a Voice As increasing numbers of women join the formal workforce, more and more women are joining trade unions or are potential members. Also, women are facing other trends as enterprises are closed or displaced to other countries or regions. Women are approximately 33 percent of the global trade union membership yet they represent a mere one percent of the governing bodies of unions. Clearly women have not achieved equal status with men within the trade union movement. If trade unions are to be credible to women regarding their commitment to promoting equality as a basic human right, they must be able to show that equality is an integral part of their own policies and structures Traditional Attitudes The roles of men and women in society reflect social differences due to tradition, culture, and education which have defined the particular role women play in society. Unions have to make serious efforts to analyze these differences in consultation with their women membership and how to fully integrate women in union structures through promoting their participation at all levels. This requires raising awareness among men and women members and leaders. Lack of Women's Participation There are fundamental barriers to women's participation in trade unions which are at the base of difficulties unions face in organizing women: 7 stereotyped ideas about women's abilities, preferences and roles 7 discouragement or hostile reactions from colleagues or family members 7 informal procedures for nomination/appointments relying on male networks 7 entrenched organizational rules and bureaucratic structures which hamper women's involvement and advancement 7 burden of family responsibilities 7 high proportion of women who work part-time 7 women's lack of self confidence or lack of interest in unions which do not seem to meet their priority concerns Organizing Women Unions which are seriously committed to meeting the needs of their membership and to addressing issues to attract new membership must devise strategies to attract them to the union and find ways to overcome some of the difficulties mentioned above. But first unions have to recognize the real situation. Specific regional and national contexts Every region has specific problems and its own story. To address strategies on how to organize women in unions, this context has to be well understood at the national level. To explain union efforts and development in forging alliances and sharing information, one example is to be found in the Central and Eastern European region, which over the past ten years has been in a process of transition. During the transformation from *full* employment in the 1980's to a market economy in the 1990's, many jobs were lost in the region *many of those affecting women who were the first to feel discriminated against. Ethnic strife has also rendered many countries vulnerable and trade and commerce have suffered. Women have found themselves suddenly in a society where they did not feel represented or protected as they were before the fall of the Berlin wall. The lessons learned in this transition, including advantages and disadvantages in the democratization process, have to be understood. First trade unions have had to adapt and find strategies to help influence democratic changes, and they have been instrumental in mitigating many areas adverse to workers. However, women also must become more active partners in this process. But to do this, they must be more active in union policy and decision-making. Analyze the facts Unions must look at the real facts. Data shows that women are often underpaid by 30-40 percent in relation to men, and unions must strive to investigate the figures of membership in their own ranks. However first they must know how many women are in their own unions (not just estimates) and what and where the potential women members might be. At the same time, unions must analyse how women are represented within their union structures and ensure that policies and action plans are put into practice which give support to meeting the needs of women and involving them actively at all levels in union activities. Involving women in organizing strategies Once women have a voice and are represented within the union, they themselves influence organizing campaigns and strategies. There are many examples coming from countries throughout the world and the participants in this Forum should share these experiences with us. Women flourish best when they receive support through groups. Often organizing is best done with the solidarity help of networks: local, national, regional, international. Trade Union Networks Central and Eastern European Trade Union Women's Networks Attempts have recently been undertaken by the international trade union movement (for example, ICFTU and International Trade Secretariats) to strengthen women's participation in the Central and Eastern European region. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions' has taken action to help unions develop policies, strategies to address organizing women through their programme in Central and Eastern Europe. From 28-30 January, 2000, the ICFTU held a Women's Conference in collaboration with the ILO in Hungary with the participation of trade union confederations working with the ICFTU from 15 countries which will be working together over the next two years to promote gender specific policy within the trade unions of Central and Eastern Europe. There will be a collection of data, both from within the unions and with the help of a research correspondent in each country, to collect data on women in the union, the labour market and society. There will be information on workers' rights (which include women's rights as a fundamental right), to discuss techniques and to better devise strategies to organize women workers. Strategies will be devised to mainstream gender equality at all levels, through education and training of both men and women on gender equality issues, and also to develop and strengthen national and international networks. Parallel to this is another working group under the auspices of ICFTU/ETUCO which has been developing gender equality materials for the Central and Eastern European Region, again in a meeting in Hungary from 31 January - 2 February, 2000. Once this material is complete, it will be used throughout the region in workers' education programmes. East- East Trade Union Networks The central objective of these networks and training projects sponsored by the trade union movement in the region, particularly through the ICFTU/ETUCO project (building networks for trade union activists working in workers' education, trade union rights, European Accession, organizing, gender equality) is to transform unions to be more democratic and build capacity within the unions. They can also serve to make unions women friendly. Essential linkages: Organizing and Union Structure Many unions are already taking steps to promote participation of women at all levels of the union structure. Some unions appoint women or support election of women at local, regional, national and congress levels. Others have also elected or appointed women to the education and training divisions, organization, negotiation and collective bargaining, occupational health and safety and environment committees, or at the highest level in reserved places on the Executive Board, where they can make an impact on a wide range of issues. But this is a slow process as the first collection of data has shown. Few women are in decision-making positions in trade unions, and union structure and policy on gender equality need to be strengthened. Organizing women is linked closely with union structure and policy. Thus unless women have a voice, organizing campaigns may not adequately address issues which attract women members. Social Justice The union has a mandate to defend social justice. This is vitally important to the women entering the workforce who face numerous obstacles due to discrimination and other factors. But unions have to be the first to put into practice what they preach, thus the very important relationship between women's participation, organizing and union structure and policy. A woman- friendly union is one that reflects the interests of their members and relates to the larger community. And women who participate actively throughout the union structure, can articulate the issues which promote recruitment, not only of women, but also inevitably of men. So the message is that unions that promote women's participation also are active in defending social justice. And this attracts members*men, women and youth. Thus a woman- friendly union ensures that all members have a future and voice in the union. For further information, Gender Equality: A Guide to Collective Bargaining, Shauna Olney, et.al, ILO, 1998 (see text on Bureau for Workers' Activities web site, publications, news) Women in Trade Unions: Organizing the Unorganized, Margaret Hosmer Martens and Swasti Mitter, ILO, 1994. Elizabeth Goodson ILO Central and Eastern European Team Mozsar utca 14 H - 1066 Budapest Hungary phone: +36 1- 301 49 00 fax: +36 1- 353 36 83 goodson@ilo.org http://www.ilo-ceet.hu ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytfem-02.11.00-21:47:11-26573