“We will not make it easy for you, we will not accept voluntary redundancies, there is a better way to run the world than this”
At the launch meeting of Merseyside Women Against the Cuts – women discussed how the cuts will affect women workers and why and how we should fight back.
Doreen MacNally, who organised Women of the Waterfront in the 1997 Liverpool docks dispute, said that in her living memory working class people fought for a better deal for themselves and their children – for a National Insurance system, the NHS, housing, rights at work.
”Generations of working class people fought for these things and that any erosion of these public gains is an attack on our human rights”.
But that now it has been forgotten that you have to fight for everything; it has been forgotten that the only power we have, as a class, is to strike. Instead the trade union movement hide behind the anti-trade union laws and don’t organise action to defend our hard won gains.
“Women are the educators and we need to get it across to the next generation that we need to fight for everything”.
Avis Gilmore, Regional secretary of the NUT argued that the cuts are just an ideological attack by the Tories. That the national deficit was larger than it is now in 1948 when we set up the Welfare state. She also said that as well as fighting the cuts we also needed to make sure that a future Labour government didn’t carry on making cuts.
She explained that the Tories Academies plans are affectively to create private schools and if they are to get extra money other schools will suffer. That the scrapping of the EMA which allows working class children to get £30 a week from the age of 16-19 so they can still study will man that disadvantaged children stay that way.
In the North west 40% of people work in the public sector and 65% of them are women in low paid work – women will be affected by job cuts and cuts in services. Avis argued that we should fight all redundancies and not accept voluntary redundancies (which in the context of Wirral council just announcing that 1100 workers out of a total work force of 6000 have said they would accept voluntary redundancies is important) and explained how pensions are not a gift but are a part of our pay which we should defend.
Maria Pendaraki a trade unionist and socialist feminist from Greece also argued that the attacks being faced by working class people were the same across Europe. That in Greece – the loans agreed by the government will just mean that more money goes from the Greek working people to the finance capitalists. She said that when the loans were agreed they were given on the basis that services were privatised and cuts made but that the Greek military budget was left untouched.
She also talked about the devastating affects of the 80% cuts in teaching and that it looked like more male dominated subjects like Engineering would be untouched but that more female dominated subjects like social sciences and Humanities would face more cuts and higher fees.
She also explained that the cuts will also affect women’s refuges and support services for abused women and children which could mean women are less able to escape violence and potentially more will die.
In the meeting Ellie talked about how she helped organise the protest in Liverpool that shut down vodaphone shops last weekend – that we need more protests and that we need to tackle the dominance of a right wing press that just reinforced the opinion that the cuts were inevitable and which ignored the campaigns that were trying to organise a fight back.
The meeting attracted a layer of women who understood that when working class women begin to organise they are a powerful force and that when we struggle we are able to not only defend the jobs and services we rely on but also begin to challenge the sexism of the world in which we live and the assumptions about the roles of men and women. We agreed that we weren’t just fighting for jobs and services but that we were fighting for a better world and a better way of doing things.
We have set up an organising committee and want to make links with other women’s organisations, women trade unionists and activists. We want to fight the cuts but also educate ourselves and others about why we need a working class based women’s movement and how we can best build such a movement. If you would like to link up with our campaign contact Elaine.wtuc@live.co.uk