"We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. 'Necessitous men are not free men.'"
- FDR, 1944
In conjunction with International Women's Day, it's worth remembering that in addition to being slightly more than half the world's population, one characteristic more common to women than men is poverty.
This is true both worldwide and in the United States.
Women everywhere get paid less for equal work, get regularly targeted for violence and abuse that goes unpunished, get shifted into lower paid professions and are often discriminated against for being older or considered less attractive than their employer wishes. Women are regularly failed by a social safety net that devalues both the common events of their lives and the important work they often do as unpaid caregivers.
The world's women take on 2/3 of the global workload for 10 percent of global income.
Too many women, for too much of their lives, are too necessitous to be truly free.
Others can speak more pointedly to the effects of poverty and discrimination on women around the world. And there is no lack, today at least, of people to lift up the accomplishments of women in spite of the odds against us.
But this seems like a good place and time to talk about the way unions can act to create a measurable improvement in women's economic freedom.
For women, belonging to a union can mean a 34 percent advantage in pay, which goes a long way towards closing the persistent wage gap between men and women, and the even larger wage gap faced by women of color.
Though to speak of women's wages, we must speak of family wages and household incomes, because whether everyone's happy about it or not, most American families depend significantly on women's incomes. Of the one in four American children who go hungry, many of them do so because their mothers' work is neither respected nor fairly rewarded.
To discriminate against women in the workplace is to take food out of the mouths of their families. When it comes to this basic measure of human dignity, unions make a difference.
So while it's fair to say that unions have not always been at the forefront of social justice movements, nor even gender equality, institutions can grow and change. So it is, for example, that this is true:
In unionized casinos, a rich high-roller can buy himself the fanciest penthouse in the hotel. He can buy the fanciest food. He can buy almost anything.
But when he sits at the craps table, the one thing he can't buy is that the woman serving his drinks be replaced by the youngest girl in the house.
'Cause in a union shop, human dignity is not for sale.
It's also come to be true that unions are the
last major, independent political powers outside the parties that stand against a complete buyout of the United States political system.
Unions are now under attack by the same group of CEO-beholden politicians who are going after women's healthcare in their budgets. And it might be a total coincidence that the spearhead of that attack is against teachers' unions, with their 80 percent female membership, but it probably isn't.
Indeed, it seems like conservatives have been aided in their attacks on unions specifically because they went after teachers. Because it's still all right to say that a job that's mostly done by women isn't real work and doesn't deserve a decent wage.
Which is why it was good to see our union brothers, and they were mostly brothers, in the firefighters, police and SMWIA unions, show up at the Capitol in Madison to stand against Gov. Scott Walker's budget bill attacks that fell hardest on the mostly female teachers, nurses and home care workers.
Women have been exploited for as long as anyone can remember because, well, we could be. Gender discrimination is one of the oldest tools that the powerful have used to divide and conquer, keeping exploited working class men acting from the truth that they have more in common with the women in their lives than with the wealthy and powerful. The trick still usually works, both in the workplace, and in politics.
It doesn't have to work.
If we're going to have a more equitable world, many people and organizations will have to work to make it so. But it is possible, and I can see the beginning of that possibility in the labor movement.
Women and men standing together to say that no one should be degraded, no one should be trapped by need and no one should face that fight alone.
By Natasha Chart. Cross-posted from SEIU.org