Widening Wage Gap for Women Workers id BAA15919; Sun, 21 Sep 1997 01:00:44 -0400 Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit ------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the September 25, 1997 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- WHAT'S BEHIND THE WIDENING WAGE GAP FOR WOMEN WORKERS? By Monica Moorehead The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the wage gap between women workers and men workers is widening. Women's earnings relative to men's have dropped sharply since the start of the Clinton administration. Overall, as earlier studies have shown, real wages have fallen for all workers in the last two decades. But women's average wages as a percentage of men's had been climbing for nearly 20 years. Then they started to decline in 1993. In 1993 working women were making a little more than 77 cents for every dollar male workers made. Today it is approximately 75 cents. This steady decline during a period of capitalist prosperity has aroused a debate among economists and labor representatives. They are asking why women's wages have been dropping. It certainly is cause for deep concern, not only for women but for the entire working class. Is it just a fluke? Or does this alarming trend reflect much deeper economic processes rooted in the capitalist system of extracting profits by exploiting workers' labor? WELFARE REPEAL DRIVES DOWN WAGES One important immediate factor contributing to women's falling wages has been the erosion of public assistance for the poor--which culminated in the 1996 passage of the horrendous welfare `reform' bill written by the Republicans and signed by President Bill Clinton. Jared Bernstein, chief economist at the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute, commented: "We'd predicted, a while ago, that if welfare reform went fully in effect nationally, and moved a couple million people from welfare to work, it would lower wages for low-wage workers as much as 12 percent. "So we shouldn't be surprised if that's occurring. If the point of welfare reform was to lower wages, this is a success. "People talked a lot about welfare recipients displacing other workers from their jobs, but now we have to worry about another kind of displacement--wage displacement, in which the wages for all low-skilled jobs are depressed by the new women from welfare looking for work." (New York Times, Sept. 15) In disproportionate numbers, the federal welfare repeal has had the biggest impact on African American women workers. Black women's average wages are 87.9 percent of Black men's. But it's the wage gap between Black and Latina women and white men that is huge. Black women's average weekly wage is $362--which is 63 percent of white men's average of $580. Latina women make an average of $316 a week--55 percent of white men's average. White women's is $428--74 percent of white men's. ASK A WORKING WOMAN It is interesting that these statistics coincide with a report recently released by the AFL-CIO Working Women's Department, entitled "Ask A Working Woman." The AFL-CIO is the country's largest working women's organization, with a membership of 5.5 million women--nearly 40 percent of its total. The report is based on a telephone survey of more than 50,000 women workers. Eighty-eight percent of those surveyed are not union members. More than half are married. There were some obvious limitations to the survey. For instance, close to three-quarters of those surveyed are white; less than 30 percent make $25,000 or under, while 36 percent of those surveyed make $40,000 and more. There was no mention of lesbian and transgendered workers. There was no specific breakdown of those who are part-time and/or low- wage workers within the service sector. So the survey was not geared to making a special effort to hear the voices of the women who are hit hardest by wage inequities and discrimination. Nevertheless, the survey showed that across the board, the most urgent, number-one concern for women is equal pay. EFFECTS OF HIGH TECH, CHANGED WORK FORCE In 1986, Workers World Party Chairperson Sam Marcy wrote a groundbreaking book: "High Tech, Low Pay--A Marxist Analysis of the Changing Character of the Working Class." In it, Marcy provides a comprehensive assessment of the changes wrought by the technological revolution within capitalist production and by the new social composition of the U.S. work force--now a majority women and people of color. These developments are still evolving today. In a chapter entitled "The Feminization of Labor," Marcy quotes from a 1986 article in the financial section of the New York Post called "Lower wages paid to women reduce real average earning." The article pointed out that real wages had been dropping since 1978 because more women had been joining the work force than men. Women workers were--and are--routinely paid less than men. "The rise in employment, about which the [Reagan] administration has congratulated itself, has not provided a proportionate rise in real Gross National Product because so much of the employment increase has been in the form of female employment at substantially below average hourly earnings." Marcy goes on to say: "These figures can help one appreciate the tremendous significance of the struggle that women have launched for `comparable worth'--the concept that jobs which require a comparable level of skill, training and intensity should receive equal pay. ... The struggle for comparable worth has broad implications for labor as a whole, since it is an effort to level wages upward by increasing the wages of the lowest-paid at a time when the whole thrust of the capitalist economy is to level wages downward." WOMEN KEY TO LABOR STRUGGLES Other important problems raised by women in the AFL-CIO survey are low pay, balancing work and family, sexual harassment, child-care needs, lack of good benefits, especially health care, and racial discrimination. This survey shows that the more that women workers become interwoven within capitalist production in an organized way, the more socially and politically conscious they will become--and therefore the more strategically important for the working-class struggle. This prospect poses a grave threat to the entire profit system, which depends on the super-exploitation of women workers. In other words, the strength of the workers' movement lies in the relationship of women to organized labor. Bring in the women, organize the women, boost women to the leadership of the unions--and the labor movement will become stronger and stronger. This is especially true with regard to immigrant women workers from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, Africa and Eastern Europe. They toil endlessly in the fields, restaurants, hospitals, hotels and sweatshops--12 to 16 hours a day for near-slave wages. Whenever the opportunity has arisen, these workers have shown a particular willingness to organize and fight. Not to mention the millions of poor women who are being forced off of welfare onto workfare. These workers are being pushed into jobs working side by side with unionized workers--but they're not recognized as workers and they receive only their meager welfare checks with no rights or benefits. This drives down the wages of all workers--which, as the Economic Policy Institute's Jared Bernstein commented, was the real purpose of welfare "reform." In addition to workfare, women are concentrated in jobs that are part-time, low-wage and dangerous to their health. And then there are the growing number of women prisoners who had no other real choice but to commit crimes of survival for themselves and their children because there are no decent-paying jobs and welfare has been eliminated. Women prisoners are forced to work for little or no wages in the fastest-growing area of capitalist production, known as the prison-industrial complex. These are the women workers labor must use its resources to reach out to. Labor's power lies in organizing women workers of all nationalities, part-time and full-time, high- tech and "unskilled," young and old. That was an important lesson of the tremendous victory in the United Parcel Service strike, in which low-paid part- time women workers played a key role. As long as the capitalists can continue to divide workers by paying the most oppressed low wages, the workers' movement will remain on the defensive. Reaching out to the most oppressed workers may not be the easiest thing to do-- but the rewards of organizing the unorganized will lay the basis for what the workers here need most: multinational working-class unity. This kind of unity can lead to workers going on the political offensive against all the greedy bosses as a class--and win some real social justice and equality. And it lays the basis for the great political and ideological struggles against capitalism itself that ultimately must come. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@workers.org. For subscription info send message to: info@workers.org. 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