Women and Work

introduction

Women and work is an immense and complex field. In preparing this issue of the ISIS Bulletin, therefore, we had to set ourselves some limits and focus on a particular aspect of that field. We chose, loosely, that of women organizing in their place of work. We have also concentrated particularly on those areas of work which traditionally employ large numbers of women, such as textiles, electronics and domestic work.

In doing our research for this Bulletin, we have become increasingly aware of the international interrelatedness of working women's attempts to organize, and we feel it is  extremely important to emphasize this international perspective. First of all, there are the shared ideas and experiences of working women which may be helpful to women organizing in other parts of the world. More subtly, but very significantly, there are the interactions of international capital and labor: multinational American industries exploiting Asian women workers; these same industries simultaneously squeezing American and Third World women in the US; migrant workers in foreign industries all over the world. It is essential that women see this issue as a whole to resist attempts by business to pit them against one another (for example, by promoting the myth that poorly paid Third  World women are taking jobs away from working class women in industrialized countries).

We have therefore tried to give a cross-section of materials from around the world: stories of women's strikes from the Redstockings in Denmark, appeals from Korean textile  workers, reports on electronics workers in California and Asia, chronicles of Filipina migrant workers, US women organizing at the J .P. Stevens textile plants, as well as many short articles on women and work in Africa, Latin America and Europe; and many more resources in these and other areas. We have tried to cover a wide range of countries in the limited time and space available to us.

We'd like to emphasize that, in limiting ourselves to one aspect of women and work, we do not mean to imply that other areas of women's work (in particular women's unpaid labor in the home) are any less important. Occupational health and safety, non-traditional employment, work-force participation, entry into trades, vocational education, day care, work in the home, unemployment ... the list and the debates go on and on. We hope it will be possible for us to cover some of these subjects in future bulletins, and we welcome your comments and suggestions as well. 

Marilee Karl
Joan Ruttenberg