latin america
mujer y trabajo
BOLIVIA
UN DIA DE LA MUJER MINE RA ("One Day of the Mining Woman")
My day begins at 4 in the morning, especially when my companero is on the first shift. So I prepare him his breakfast. Then the saltenas (a typical Bolivian 'empanada'. filled with meat, potatoes, peppers and other spices) must be prepared because I make about one hundred saltenas each day and sell them in the street. I do this work to make up what is lacking from my companero's salary to take care of the household necessities ... Generally, we can't count on anyone else's help for the house. What my companero earns as a salary is too little and instead we have to help ourselves, like me, who makes saltenas. Other companeras help themselves weaving, others sewing clothes, others making small rugs, others selling in the street. Others can't help out and then the situation is really difficult ... (she then describes how she spends her day, almost 20 hours nonstop cooking, cleaning, selling and raising the children) . So, that's how we live. That's how our day goes. I usually go to bed at midnight. So I sleep 4 to 5 hours. We're already used to it.
O.K., I think all this shows very clearly how the miner is doubly exploited, no? Because, giving him so little pay, the wife has to do many more things in the house. And this is free labor we're doing for the boss, in the end, no? That is to say, they try to give the worker not a single convenience. He's supposed to take care of things however he can. And quick. In my case, for example, my husband works, I work, I make my children work, so that there are many of us working to maintain the household. And the bosses go on getting richer and richer and the condition of the workers gets worse and worse. But, in spite of all we do, there is still the idea that the women don't work at all, because they don't support the household economically; that only the husband works because he does receive a salary. We women have come across this difficulty plenty. One day the idea occurred to me to make a chart. We put as an example the price of washing clothes by the dozen and found out how many dozens of clothes we wash per month. Then the pay of a cook, of a babysitter, of a servant. All that we wives of the workers do every day, we found out. Total, the pay of a cook, laundress, babysitter, servant, was much higher than what a companero earns in the mines per month. So in this way we made our companeros understand that we do work, and what's more, within the home with what we save. So that, despite the fact that the state doesn't recognize the work we do in the home, the country benefits from it and the government officials profit by it because for this work we receive no pay ...
... It is so necessary that we have clear ideas of how the whole situation is and cast aside forever this bourgeois idea that the woman must stay in the home and not get herself involved in other things, in union and political affairs, for example. Because, even if she is only in the house, in any case she is part of the entire system of exploitation, the same one in which her companero lives whether he works in the mines or the factories or whatever it may be, right?
From: "Si me permiten hablar ... " Testimonio de Domitila, Una Mujer de las Minas de Bolivia CUBA
Moema Viezzer
Siglo Veintiuno Editores, Sa, 1977
Cerro del Agua 248
Mexico 20, D.F., Mexico
(ISIS translation)
CUBA
EMERGING FROM UNDERDEVELOPMENT: WOMEN AND WORK IN CUBA
Carollee Bengelsdorf and Alice Hageman in: Race and Class, vol. XIX, n. 4, Spring 1978; 18 pages
" That the coming of the Revolution and the systematic destruction of neocolonial economic and political structures have meant a profound change in the lives of women in Cuba is beyond doubt. One has only to look at the statistics and to think what free health care, free education, free housing and a legal system growing out of the people's specific needs and shaped by them would mean in our own lives ... That oppression still exists is also beyond doubt; it is obvious in almost every aspect of a Cuban woman's life".
Within this framework, Bengelsdorf and Hageman have attempted to describe and criticize, both historically and in present terms, women's participation in the labor force of Cuba. They examine education, and find that substantial improvements have occurred in both literacy and school attendance at all levels for women. Women's entry into the labor force has grown substantially as well, but the drop out rate for working women is large too, and entry itself is hampered by a number of factors.
First is the 'double shift' women face of holding down a job and running a household, which often includes a 'macho' husband who refuses to help. As B. and H. state, " clearly despite the drive to increase the numbers of women in the work force, there has been no corresponding effort to get males into the kitchen". Also, the inertia of 'women's jobs'. reinforced by legislation only recently removed which reserved 500 jobs for women only and restricted women's entry into certain others, helps keep working women from spreading into less traditional areas. Finally, all these restrictions have also kept women in Cuba from becoming more active and influential in the work-related Party structure, and thus have perpetuated the cycle of women's inferior status in work.
There have been many efforts recently to lighten the working woman's load in Cuba, such as laundry services, increased day care (still, however, inadequate), priority service for working women in grocery stores, cleaners, at medical appointments, etc.; and special sales of merchandise for working women, to name a few. Still , as the authors maintain, " ... while the collectivization of household tasks in the public sector is necessary and potentially liberating, as long as it is women who continue to bear the burden of the remaining chores, the fact that if they work they may now go to the head of the grocery line hardly solves the problem. While the notion holds strong that this is work from which the state is freeing women rather than people, those tasks that remain not collectivized inevitably weigh on women.
" Further, if these old ideas about women's responsibility are not rooted out and destroyed , the people who take over those household chores which the state has assumed will inevitably be women. In this way, collectivization of tasks reinforces rather than destroys a sexual division of labor".
GUATEMALA
GUATEMALAN WORKING WOMEN IN THE LABOR MOVEMENT
Maria Amalia Ir fas de Rivera
Irma Violeta Alfara de Carpio
Scott Lubeck
in Latin American Perspectives, vol. 4, n. 1 & 2, issues
12 & 13, winter/spring 1977. 9 pages
(from Women's Work Is ... )
"The authors present an actual case of women workers in Guatemala and their efforts to organize a labor union. The case is then analyzed. Three women asked a parish social worker for assistance when a woman had been unjustly fired by the owner of a North American-based jeans and jackets factory which employed 1 50 persons, 85 percent of whom were women. Their grievances included: no acknowledgement of overtime despite long hours, piecework wages which circumvented their being paid the minimum wage, threats of death, poor treatment and insults, and arrogance and intimidation from the boss who claimed to have government connections. The social worker proposed that the women put together a fact sheet on their situation and recommended that a short training course on workers' rights be put together for interested workers. Advice for the workers was obtained from the Central Nacional de Trabajadores. A training course was held on the economic history of Guatemala, the evolution of the country's labor organizations, the Labor Code, and the fundamentals of a labor union. Efforts eventually were begun to begin a labor union, but the women found themselves confronting employer, press, government, and even fellow employee intransigence. The workers were accused of being communists and the military police were stationed at the factory to protect the boss from 'communists in the factory'. Eventually the boss began to form a company union and the social worker was dismissed from her parish position without prior notification and without receiving her full salary for time she had worked. 'A series of repressive mechanisms suffocate before birth every intent to awaken the consciousness of the rural and urban worker. The action of professionals who have developed an attitude for service to the oppressed classes is neutralized and mediated by the system .. .'".
And from the conclusion of the article itself:
"It is commonplace to speak of women as marginalized from productive life in our country. This is false. Women play a vital role in the functioning of the established socio-economic order. If the tasks that women perform within the home were transferred to the public sector, the national budgetary allowance would not be sufficient to cover the cost of maintaining the restaurants, laundries, and child care centers, etc. The unremunerative work that women perform within the home, which reconstitutes the labor power lost by the man during the production process, permit the bosses to benefit from the work of two while only paying for the work of one, in this case the man's. Working women also furnish their families with not just part but all of their income and means of support, especially when they are connected to the productive production process directly whether in agriculture, industry, or the service sector. What this means is that Women's domestic work has never been quantified in terms of productive labor and, therefore, is considered inferior in status to the work of men ... " ( p. 201) .
There are several other articles in this issue of LAP which concern or relate to women and work. Generally these are quite academically oriented and often the focus is on a Marxist class analysis of a situation rather than a feminist one per se; however, since any addition to the available materials on women in Latin America is welcome, and this is quite a good collection, we feel it is an important resource.
SOUTH AFRICA
Ukubamba Amadolo
About half the workers in the Durban (South Africa) and district industrial area are migrants, many of them women. Since the strike (in 1973-74, 75,000 Black, coloured and Indian workers struck). male workers have been replaced by African women on shift work and at lower rates of pay. Though the Factories Act prohibits women working after 6 p.m., African women in the textile industry are working up to 10 p.m., and from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., under exemptions granted by the Industrial Council or the Department of Labour.
African men are unable to support their families on the produce from their small, impoverished plots in the neighboring Reserves. They seek work in the towns. The women need cash to pay taxes and to buy food and clothing. They are easily enticed by recruiters to come to town with the promise of work in mills and factories for wages and accommodation provided by the employers. When they reach their employment they discover that the wages are less than they had been promised and the accommodation consists of sharing a bed with another woman, in a room without light, water or toilets. Others, living in townships outside Durban, leave their home houses at 5:15a.m to get the bus to work, reaching home again after 7 p.m. They then have to clean their houses, make coal fires for cooking, mend the children's clothing and see to all the family affairs.
An investigation into the conditions of African women in textile mills in Durban in 1975 finds them to be exploited as workers, as Blacks and as women. They are not represented on the NIC (National Industrial Council, for the textile industries) and their wages are always approximately 20 per cent lower than those for men. They are given the lowest paid, least skilled jobs. The male workers treat them with no respect and they fear to lose their jobs through pregnancies. Those with small children have to spend a large proportion of their low wages in paying baby-minders, as there are no creches or nursery schools in the towns for Blacks. Alternatively the children have to be left in the Reserves, separated from their mothers for months at a time.
Among the many strikers were textile women workers. There were at that time in and around Durban 41 textile mills employing about 30,000 workers, of whom 4,000 were women. Eleven of these factories belonged to the heavy or woolen section of the industry, manufacturing blankets, flock, canvas and duck, etc. The workers were covered by industrial council agreements negotiated by the registered union. Thirty firms, forming the light section, or cotton section, were not covered by any wage agreements and the workers were largely unorganized. Wages in the textile industry as a whole were 20 per cent lower than those in other secondary industries.
From: Ukubamba Amadolo; Workers' Struggles in the South African Textile Industry
Bettie Du Toit
(See Resources for further information on this book)
FRANCE
FRENCH WOMEN STRIKE AT MOULINEX
This summer, thousands of French working women went on strike and, in some cases, occupied seven factories owned by .Moulinex, an electronics company. The following statements by women workers at Moulinex were printed in the July 1978 issue of Des Femmes En Mouvement, the French feminist magazine.
"At Moulinex, the worst thing is the speed-up. They invest in modern machinery, and they say people will have less work, but that's not true". The women complained of demands from their bosses for sexual favors: "If you let them do what they want to, they promise you an easy job".
The women also pointed bitterly to lack of support for their struggle from their husbands : "I was picketing and my husband came by with my kids to make a scene. He wants me at home. I told him I'd leave him if he came back like that. I'm on strike, this is my freedom".
Another striker wrote in a letter: "In our factory in the suburbs of Lyon, almost 40 women work in production, with male bosses over them ... For 40 women there are two toilets, no facilities for getting a drink, no proper locker-room, no cafeteria, and no way of arranging work-rates or vacation time with the management ... In the winter we work in the cold, in humidity like a cave. In the summer, it's the heat under the corrugated iron roof, without any way to open the windows ... Paid the SMIC (minimum wage) or hardly more, working in these conditions, each of us closed into herself. It makes you so sad ... Reading of the revolts of others, I began to dream, to see joy and hope on the faces of these other women on the move, united in struggle".
From: News & Letters, vol. 23, no. 7, Aug./Sept., 1978 1900 E. Jefferson Detroit, Michigan 48207, USA