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About two hundred strikers from Imperial Typewriters recently came to London by the coachload to lobby Transport House. They sent in a delegation from the strike committee to call for an inquiry into the activities of the TGWU officials especially District Secretary Bromley who has refused to recognise or represent the strike. They also demanded the strike be made official.
The demonstration was militant - with shouts of 'Make the strike official' and "We want justice", Drowning out the leading chanters were a section of the women who were the first shop to walk out of the factory. Their militancy is not surprising considering the conditions these women had to endure.
As Ms. Doshi of the strike committee explained: "We are treated like dogs in the factory by the management and by the white shop stewards alike. Although the women are only paid 50% of the male rate, the Asian women receive less wages than the white women.
Discipline is strict - no talking on the line for the Asian women but the white women can carry on. White women get one set job a day and are paid for that whilst the Asian wo men work five or six different jobs per day and get paid for one. These women get no tea breaks.
These Asian women have no adequate trade union representation and as most can not speak English very well they can't communicate their grievances to the white shop stewards. This las led to direct harassment of the Asian women by the white shop stewards who are not at all interested in what the Asian womerhave to say. They are just told to get back to work. One woman was physically intimidated until she burst into tears in an attempt by a white shop steward to force her to speak English.
Harassment of the Asian women has extended from the shop floor - by the shop stewards and management - to the picket line. As several women explained: The police are in cohorts with the management and on the picket line the police have specifically harassed Asian women - one was dragged to the police station by her hair and sworn at in an attempt to intimidate and dissuade women from carrying on the fight.
Despite all of these intimidations, the women are still out on strike -on the picket lines - and on demonstrations. As they said on the Transport House demonstration:* We are striking for our rights and we are going to win.? Strike at Lentheric/Morny Perfume Factory There was a Transport and General Workers Union meeting at the Lentheric/Morny factory in Harringay on April 3 At this meeting the women workers on the production line heard that they were being offered a 40p. wage increase in May if the standard of living had gone up a certain amount by then. Ninety-seven people out of one hundred voted to go out on strike there and then. What they wanted was at least a three pound rise to bring up their wages to the equivalent of wages paid at Yardley in Basildon, a firm that used to be amalgamated with Lentheric/Morny. The storemen have also come out and supported the women on the picket line, where they managed to stop nearly all the lorries going in Speed-ups go on unofficially all the time on the production line. In the past, when the women asked for a wage rise, the management told them 'speed up the line and we'll ask the boss about the rise when he gets back from his holiday in Italy? They never got the rise. At the moment the women produce 7,000 four guinea bottles of perfume a day and the management are trying to drive it up to 9,000. This was the first strike ever in this factory, which has been unionised for about two years and although since they have had union representation not so many people get the sack for letting the productivity level drop, any rebellion against the speed-ups still seem to go on only at an unofficial level of the women at the beginning of the production line just going slow.
On April 5 there was another meeting at which the women were offered a EI.75 increase, but they still stayed out and continued to picket. The following Monday there was another meeting at which they were offered C2.25 and an extra 80p. for the women in the powder room for dirty' work. This the women decided to accept But hopefully by this point a lot of the perfume will have evaporated and gone off anyway. Although the firm is a huge American-owned compuny who own all the tobacoo fields in America, and the flower fields, etc. and have huge profits of millions of pounds, the strike should have cost them a few quid. As one woman said, "People think they are buying really expensive seductive perfume. What they don't know is that if you have your hands in it for a couple of hours it stains them and leaves your nails so cracked you have to cut them off. - reprinted from People's News Service, April 20, 1974 Lisbon, Portugal, May 18 (PNS) - On their acquittal from charges of 'offences against public morality on May 7 the three women writers known as the "three Marias" spoke of plans for organising a women's movement in Portugal, according to Liberation News Service.
The trial of the three women, Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Isabel Barrene and Maria Velho Da Costa, had been going on since October 1973; it concerned the book New Portuguese Letters, published in April 1972, which attacks the oppression of women in Portugal. When the secret police moved to seize the book two months after publication, only 100 of the 3.000 copies of the first edition remained.
The three said that with the freedoms resulting from the April 25 coup, they would begin organising a women's movement with the legalisation of abortion as its first priority. Maria Isabel Barreno said that thousands of women resorted to abortions performed clandestinely "under deplorable conditions'. "Today's decision is only the beginning', she added. The small courtroom was packed with women who chanted "United women shall never be vanquished', a variation of a popular chant A united people shall never be vanquished" -reprinted from People's New Service, May 18, 1974
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In pre-war capitalist Poland women were quite explicitly oppressed in all areas of social life The bourgeois legal code and Catholic religious doctrine combined in proclaiming the complete dependence of the woman on her husband vorce was impossible except on the grounds of a change in religious faith. Abortion was forbidden. Only a quarter of the paid work force consisted of women. Women workers received barely more than half male rates of pay. Educational provision was minimal (in 1931 half the women aged between 25 and 49 were illiterate). Pregnant women had few rights: they could quite legally be sacked from work. thus losing any right to even the meagre social provision to which they were entitled for the period of confinement. Maternity pay was unthought of Following the establishment of the popular Polish repub-