SWP silences its

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Women's Festival: 'the idea of women's organisation is spreading TOWER HAMLETS' 80 nursery workers have won their dispute with the local Labour council, which has backed down and agreed to pay up!

Better rates of pay than their union, NUPE, was seeking have finally been negotiated as a result of their determined stand.

As well as working to rule for several months, they have lobbied the pay talks, stormed the council chamber, and were threatening total non-cooperation with management ]this would have involved a 'fees strike'].

Pressure from parents in the nursery campaign and other trade unionists, and prominent Labour l Party members [including councillors], who signed an open letter of protest published in the local press, also helped win the day. This was At its recent conference the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) decided to shut down the associated Women's Voice groups. Rachel Lever, secretary of Women's Fightback, writes:

WOMEN'S VOICE has been packed up-on the assurance that the SWP will itself campaign against women's oppression just as energetically.

That assumption is one that has been increasingly challenged by the women's movement. The spread into the broad labour movement of the idea of separate women's commition, st commiteer trades councils and union branches, is witness to the continuing, and indeed growing, need for women to organise themselves around their own oppression.

With the end of Women's Voice, there is now only one national women's newspaper with a socialist perspective and an orientation to working class struggles-and a commitment at the same time to the women's liberation movement.

Women's Fightback started out in January 1980. Some of us had been in Women's Voice, but not being in agreement with the SWP on many issues, had found ourselves unable to stay with WV after it had drawn closer to the SWP in September 1979.

We've concentrated. on trying to focus a national opposition by women to the Tory attacks; and on strengthening women in the Labour and trade union movement and demanding that this movement take seriously fightback on behalf of its women members.

Emphasis

We worked in Festival Planning Grot the May 9 Festival : the Tories) for this : emphasis, and the (for ainst it of gued successfully for the continuation of that group as an Action Committee for a Woman's Right to Work, to broaden the campaign we had begun for a national demonstration for a woman's right to work. We will now be encouraging our local groups and our supporters in the trade unions to take the lead in mobilising for this demonstration.

In February we Running work is a organising a national dayschool on New Technology and women's jobs and working conditions; and in March we will be holding a major conference for rank and file women trade unionists, with the aim of developing a framework for action Commitment through Our commitment to supporting the struggler women for jobs, for t rights at work, for defi of services and health‹ and against the ideolo! offensive of the Tory gov ment. In particular we l worked to support the R Pride strike in Manche: Lee Jeans, the Longw. and St. Mary's Hos] occupations and the Bri Leyland strike.

Similar courses With the. exception two things, the work Women's Fightback followed very sin courses. The exceptions the ties of Women's V to the SWP; and, on our : the development of struggle for women's ri in the Labour Party, wi many-but not all-of members and suppo have been engaged in.

There seems no res why the work of Wom Voice should come to abrupt end, rather than j ing with Women's Fightt to continue to build a f that both our forces engaged in. (In 1 Women's Voice mem have already been activ some of the Women's Fi back groups, such as i chester and i Medway, ra than try to keep two se ate groups going).

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