Socialist Organiser

The weekly of the fused Workers Socialist League, July 1981 to April 1984

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Socialist Organiser no. 65, 9 December 1981 · scan p. 7 · about 471 words

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To make Socialist Organiser a real campaigning paper that can organise the left in the movement, it needs its own organised activist support - and money.

Local supporters' groups have been established in mos big towns to build a real base for the paper.

Supporters are asked to undertake to sell a minimum of six papers an issue and to contribute at least £1 a month (20p for unwaged). So becoming a supporter helps build our circulation and gives the paner a firmer financial base.

If you like Socialist Organiser, think it's doing a good job, but realise that it can't possibly do enough unless you help, become a card-carrying supporter.

Fill in the form below and send it to: Sociali* O ganiser It's..' a very different problem from that faced by working class men under the Tories. They may lose their jobs: - but they're still the masters in their own home. They may -indeed do - have the problem of a trade union leadership that won't fight the bosses and the government and that will sell them out if they try to fight. But when jobs are threatened and wages are squeezed, the men are marginally privileged and slightly ...Phone - better defended than the women. • As the squeeze gets tighter, the male union leaders and officials still have one element of manoeuvre on behalf of those they regard as their 'real' members: they can sell the women's jobs and the lower paid to keep the pressure off the men. Women are the reserve army of the reserve army, the ballast that's dumped first.

While books are written, resolutions passed and conferences held on Women in the Eighties' or positive action for women, nothing has changed in the trade unions' practices: women are still at the bottom of the union heap, abused ridiculed, patronised and, when their interests are at stake, ignored.

The past year has seen a series of demonstrations against unemployment. Some have emphasised regions, some have highlighted the problems of young people. But the suggestion • that there should be a demonstration for a woman's right to work - to highlight the very. special problems women are facing, and which tend not to feature on the general demonstrations, has been met with endless prevarications. Countless resolutions, petitions, letters and meetings have gone into trying to persuade the labour movement to go out on the streets for our rights. We're still fighting for it. But there at the end of the line is the unanswerable blockage: after the anti-Corrie demo, Len Murray said, 'Never again women's demonstration" And that's that!

It comes down in the end to the problems women have in even getting a hearing, against crude, prejudiced, hostile and sexist obstacles - the 'brothers' who are supposed to be so much more knowledge-

← Contents of Socialist Organiser no. 65

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