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"Women's work" is a category easy to recognise but hard to define. Nursing, teaching, cleaning, catering - these traditional areas of work are all obvious extensions of women's role in the family, but in many other cases, especially the growth industries or those undergoing technological rationalisation, job categories are constantly subdivided into a new range of are constantly subdivided into a range of new job titles. Where this happens, it is apparently anyone's guess how the status and pay hierachy will end up - though much obviously depends on the degree of organisation of the workers involved, and the cunning of management and their advisers.
One thing, however, can be predicted - women are more likely to find themselves in jobs labelled semi-skilled and unskilled, which are apid the least. (E.G. in production occupations alone in 1971, it was estimated that over three-quarters of female workers were in semi-skilled and unskilled occupations, compared with over half the male workers who were in skilled jobs.) That there is no inherent quality in the jobs themselves to back up the equation women's work = low status/low paid' can easily be demonstrated from the well-known fact that Russian doctors - 76% of them women - do not enjoy anything like the same prestige and income as their Western, mainly male, counterparts; or from the example of an electrical firm in West London -Ultra Electronics - who rationalised Ultra Electronics - who 'rationalised" a skilled male job (wiring a radio chassis) into "women's work' at five-eighths of the male rate by having the woemn wire the chassis in halves - an equally skilled job Building an Industrial Union One set of workers particularly affected by the question of the relation between work performed and pay received are the members of the union TASS the Technical and Supervisory Section of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. Since its amalgamation into the AUEW a couple of years ago, TASS, formerly DATA, has set its sights on building one industrial union for the engineering industry, and has opened its doors to the wide range of 'allied technical workers', from aerodynamicists and microbiologists to clerks and typists.
TASS Women's School Given this disparate membership, when the union held a national weekend school for women members on the subject Your Job and Equal Pay last November, the question 'Equal Pay for what?" was naturally posed, and most of the discussion centred around the controversial questions of Job Grading and Job Evaluation.* The school - held in Newcastle and attended by about 60 women members from all over the country - took the form of introductions by two guest speakers: Harriet Hopper, from the National Committee of the AUEW's Engineering Section and Convenor at Plesseys, Sunderland; and Ken Gill, the Deputy * Job Evaluation: a scheme to place all jobs at a given place of work (or within a compant etc.) within a rigid system of grading so that they are paid according to the value of their content, according to 'scientific principles. General Secretary of TASS. Their speeches were followed by discussions in small workshops around questions of a general natu nature set by the organisers, with a reporting back session at the end, The workshops and framework provided by the questions were very helpful in stimulating, thorough discussion of the points made by the speakers, in small enough groups for most people to feel confident about speaking.
Job Evaluation - For or Against?
Introducing the first session, Ken Gill began by saying that of course the union opposed Job Evaluation, but that we must be practical and recognises that it was here to stay: already 80% of the union's membership were covered by job evaluation schemes. He argued that any way, in one sense. everyone who worked and was paid was job evaluated' and what counted in the long run was industrial strength.
Historically, DATA, and its predecessor the AESD, catering as a craft union for workers in engineering drawing and production, had dealt by and large with a small number of well-defined categories - draughtsmen, planners and estimators - with one female category, tracers, whose separate union had heen dissolved into the AESD in 1922. In these conditions, demands for minimum rates could be clearcut - especially since entry was often restricted by apprenticeship requirements. The "women's category", with fewer formal training requirements (or opportunities), had suffered from having its own separate and lower minimum rate, and Ken Gill commented that the union had "perpetuated sex divisions on more crude a scale than almost any other organisation in the labour movement". (The huge differentials E2-3 differentials found in the Engineering section, were which are usual in TASS - E6 to E8 compared with the also remarked on by Harriet Hopper the following day). With the coming of rationalisation, these categories had become fragmented into at least 250 identifiably different jobs - covered by over 1,000 titles - and apprenticeship requirements had been relaxed, so that many workers could MAKING A FAT PROFIT FOR YoU!
WHAT'S A BEAUTIFUL GIRL LIKE YOU DOINGIN A PLACE LILE THIS?
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*We place foremost in these pages the housewife as the central figure in this fe mal role. We assume that all Women are housewives and even those who work outside the home continue to be housewives' (p19)
..." and this social factory has as its pivot the woman in the home producing labour power as a commodity..
(James" introduction p7) *What we meant precisely is that housework is work is productive in the Marxian sense, that is, producting surplus value." (p 52) The basis of all the problems lies in thse quotations. In fact, Dalla Cosat actually puts the problem in a proper way in the text.
when she writes, *... within the wage, domestic work not only ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT, ILL D THE WASHING UP BUT ILL DO IT WHEN !
WANT TO DO 17 produces use values but is an essential function in the production of surplus value' (p31). She then qualifies this in the footnote cited above. Let us compare what Marx actually says about this in Capital, not to indulge in quotations, but because both writers take themselves to be basing their analysis on Marx. *The capitalist does not buy the labourer's means of subsistence but his labour power. And that which forms the variable part of his capital is not the labourer's means of subsistence but his labour power in action. What the capitalist consumes productively in the labour process is the labour power itself and not the labourer's means of subsistence. It is the labourer himself who converts the money received for his labour power into means of subsistence.' (Vol 11 p.165) Dalla Costa confuses the reporduction of labour power with the reproduction of the labourer. The labourer himself (if he is male) reproduces the labour power. Women working in the home reproduce the labourer who sells his labour power in order to live, who also can deny its sale, who forms trade unions and will have the central part in overthorwing the system. Capitalists would like us to believe that workers are just commodities, cost factors in the production process. They would also like us to believe that the essential nature of woman is to be bound to the family, the home and to produce children because this is advantageous to them. And Dalla Costa falls into his trap, as Margaret Benston and many others have done before her. Yet if we examine womens' actual position within capitalist society, it is as clear that women have always worked in that they have always reproduced the labourer; and almost all women have worked at some period of their lives in the capitalist market. Also, images of woman as sexual obiects with a sexuality, however distorted, divorced from reproduction, have been consistently been used by capitalists in order to assist them to sell commodities. Thus women face a complex triple oppression, not analytically reducible to the single reference point of the home. Since the three types of oppression are partly contradicotry, they can be utilised in ideology to weaken a woman's position in any one of them. For a woman working may feel she is neglecting her home, or accept poor pay and conditions because she feels she is filling time until the real job of home making begins, a woman in the home suffers from fears that she is no longer attractive ( a sex object) to her husband, while a woman who utilises her physical attractiveness in capitalist terms is stigmatised as immoral. And so on. We have to deal with and oppose an oppression with multiple aspects and while at one point in time or place, one aspect may seem predominant, our strategy in combating that oppression must surely inter-relate the strugglesm not to emphasize one, even if the most central one to the relative exclusion of the others. Perhaps the clearest case for this yet produced is Margaret Coulson's article in International no. 3, in the latest anthology of British writings from the Women's movement. (The Body Politic).
Within the home, Dalla Costa is absolutely right to point out taht a housewife and mother's position is only apparently isolated and that in fact she fills a curcuial role for capitalism in the production of new labourers and the maintenance' of existing ones (though her work neither directly produces commodities nor surplus value). But although she is in fact firmly tied to the capitalist system as a whole, her isolation and economic dependence do create real problems of organisati not fully recognised by Dalla Costa. It is no accident that the parts of the pamphlet dealing with the organisation and demand relating to housewives are the vaguest.. Dalla Costa proposes several things that housewives ought to do, but there is nothing on how housewives will come to make such demands their own and act upon them. Here again it can be argued that developing an understanding of their situation. and demystifvine it mav be easier where women are outside the home, in collectivities, at school or especially in work - though the movement has hardly turned its attention to the possibilities of working in relation to young women in schools. If the politics of work witl women in industry is not confined to narrow economistic demands such as equal pay, but if such demands are integrated into an understanding of why economic struggles are different for female than for male workers, a basis for reaching or mainta ing relationships with women in the home can be developed. It unfortunately also the case that because of their economic dependency, and because of the chauvinist attitudes of male wo workers, who often do not regard women as capable of understanding the issues, only the most class conscious women give full support in strile situations. It is in such situations that the women's movement can utilise the struggle to try and reach strikers wives, again integrating industrial and home based struggles. Such potentialities are not explored in the pamphlet. Finally let this not be misconstrued into the idea that this means that I am suggesting that the solution for the subordination of women in the home is work in the capitalist market. Although as Dalla Costa herself points out, 'Observers have noted that Lancashire women, cotton workers for over a century are more sexually free and helped by men in domestic chores. On the other hand, in the Yorkshire coal mining districts where a low percentage of women worked outside the home, women at more dominated by the figure of the husband. No-one in capitalism works from choice, and satisfaction in work forms an infinitesimal part of most workers jobs. Most people, including most women are forced to work in the capitalist market through economic pressure. You work because you get money fe it and you need the money. It would be ludicrous to say to women that we can be liberated through work: but until the women's movement can provide an answer to the cash nexus involved in the decision to work, we have no right to try to stop women from working - and that requires a total revolutionary perspective, linking together all the dimensions of oppression that we face, and relating our struggle against them to a strategy for overthrowing the system as a whole. "This ultimately is the dividing line between reformism and revoluation revolutionary politics within the women's movement", and it is the perspective within which we should evaluate Dalla Costa's contribution. I hope that we can have an ongoing discussion in Socialist Woman.
Rosalind Davis.
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earn their peak wages carly in their careers. As a result, the union could no longer rely on the old methods of determining wages.
Workers' Evaluation?
Ken Gill went on to argue that the best way to deal with Job Evaluation was to use it in our own interests. We should preserve the unity of the membership by mutually agreeing on the relative value of our jobs, he said, so that, as union members, we could work out locally our own alternative evaluation and grading scheme to place before menagement, thus avoiding management evaluation.
Equality, he argued, was to be fought for within the framework of this design: we should fight for equal pay and training facilities for men and women and different age-groups within the same grade. This was fair because in deciding the relative value of the jobs, we should use the analytical method of job evaluation and only take into account factors such as educational background and the function of the job, as was already done by unions u bargaining. We would not use the 'factorisation" method which evaluated the individual, and not just the job, in terms of "punctuality', cooperativeness", etc.
Repeating his theme that in the long run, what counted was muscle, Ken Gill said that in all circumstances, we should base ourselves on the possible at any particular time, and recognise there was no science or logic in levels of pay.
One question which we felt Ken Gill's speech raised rather than answered was how union evaluation differed from management evaluation in its practical results (except that possibly the membership might feel mor committed to helping the scheme through), since it was more than likely that the union members concerned would simply reproduce the 'unscientific values and prejudices already represented within the existing job structure and within society in general. We felt that giving positive support to the principle of relative grading between workers could only unite the union members in disunity, since each was then committed to maintaining his or her difference from those on the next rung below however "unscientifically" that difference had been arrived at). The same dissatisfaction was expressed by other women members present, some of whom argued that Job Evaluation was used as a substitute for action, and said they resented being 'graded like eggs in a packing station".
We also disagreed with the principle of arguing on the basis of "value d work performed" which is implicit in any form of Job Evaluation. In an economic system where we cannot receive the full value of our labour power the only way we can argue on this question is in terms of our relative values from the boss's point - which is the last thing a leading trade unionist should be eduacting his members to worry about. The same idea, in the form of 'equal pay for work of equal value' also came up in Harriet Hopper's speed the next day.
Effects of a Job Evaluation scheme.
Harriet Hopper from the Engineering Section talked about Job Evaluation from the point of view of its immediate practical effects, since she had been involved in the introduction of a Job Evaluation scheme covering four Plessey factories in Sunderland and South Shields, where the vast majority of the workforce were women. A joint panel of management and union representatives had been set up to assess the relative values of the jobs and slot them into a total structure. Akhough Harriet said she felt 'a fair consensus' was arrived at in evaluating the jobs against each other, she was unhappy about the arbitrary way the final structure was arrived at, and about the fact that the union side made the mistake of not negotiating the rates first. She felt particularly strongly about the question of women's grade rates, since separate male and female basic rates were settled for, and she felt she had been let down by the union side in her fight to get the women's basic rate raised from £11.50 to E13, when the men's minimum was £15. (E12.50 was finally conceded). A solemn management/union undertaking to bove towards equal pay' had come to nothing, which she also resented. From some points of view, Harriet felt the Job Evaluation scheme had had useful effects: for one thing, the union was well-organised enough to be able to distort the grading stru -cture via the appeals procedure, with the result that the company is in one heck of a mess. Another effect had been to eliminate the individual favourtism current before, and it had also had the useful result of making women assess their skills and the work they did more objectively, where previously they had tended to undersell themselves. For example they were arguing for women classed as semi-skilled at the South Shields factory, who because of their experience could in fact do skilled work, to be paid as skilled.
Harriet stated that from her experience, Job Evaluation was not a clearcut way to Equal Pay, but by extending what she had said about the good effects of making women conscious of their cash value as workers, and therefore more confident in their right to higher pay, she went on to argue for basing claims to to equal pay on the profitability of the work performed. At Plesseys, for example, women could now even earn more than men, although they were only on 80% of the male rate, because of their high productivity.
We took this up in the questin period by making the point that although the argument of 'equal pay for work of equal value might produce results of a sort for highly productive engineering workers, it would be of little use to clerical workers or switchboard operators, for example, or for many of the other women members of the Technical Section of the AEUW, for that matter. What was generally agreed on, however, was the need for a national minimum wage which would provide a reasonable standard of living without depending on husbands, Women's Theatre Group.
A successful feature of the school was the performance by the women's theatee group, the 'Punchin" Judies", of a play which highlighted some of the more blatant con-tricks where women are concerned, including the Equal Pay Act, women's double role as housewife and worker, and the attitude of the unions. Women in Unions On the basis of the discussion at the school, one point that immediately emerges is the need for all socialists in trade unions to be extremely clear about and conscious of the social and economic factors operating against women workersto understand for example the way women's role in the family is used as an excuse to underpay them as workers, as well as making it more difficult for them to organise in unions; and the way in which the government and media can use the resulting conflict of interest to weaken the organisations of the working class.
As long as trade unionists (including many who would consider themselves socialists) go on talking about "the women problem" in moral terms, or perhaps as an unfortunate psychological failing on the part of the ladies themselves, they are playing into the hands of the employers and government by hiding the fact that the problem lies in the structure of society and by
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permitting the unions to reflect that structure instead of challening it.
Socialist Woman has argued in past issues that one way in which the real nature of the problem can being to be recognised is by the increased active participation and organisation of women inside the trade unions. Although women represent only a tiny proporation of its membership TASS provides one example of the kind of organisation possible, on an official level, via its national and local women's sub-committees. These are set up "to consider the particular interests of female members", and active rank-and-file particpation in them by women members is possible and even encouraged. When such committees exists, they should of course be developed and strengthened. In less politically conscious unions with a less democratic internal structure, unofficial and sporadic organisation around particular issues may be all that is possible at this stage.
However, not just in the interest of women trade unionists, but to increase the ability of the working class to organise as a whole against the attacks of the government and employers, it is important that any small beginnings made are preserved and extened throughout the trade union movement.
Felicity Trodd.
The group can be contacted via Barbara Hickmott, 64, Killick Street, London N.1.
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Liberation, Context and Potentialities," which has so far been largely neglected by the movement, and does not even app