Women Workers, the Fight for Production and Reproduction

March 8th celebrates International Women’s Day, a day that came into being from out of the international workers’ movement in honoring women’s willful and determinative role in pushing forward the struggle of the working class in the early 20th century. The plain question to ask is why in the context of class struggle of the workers’ are women specially honored with their own day? Because women in difference to their brothers at the point of production play the most pivotal role in reproductive labor, the reproduction of the human species itself.

This double labor - as productive value creators for the capitalist class, as well as labor creators for labor markets - has historically burdened women in capitalism with a double form of oppression, alienation, and exploitation.

From the very beginning of capitalism, women’s labor was a vital import in the labor process not simply as accidental, but a sought for commodity in the valorization of goods. Traditional handicrafts such as sewing, weaving were taken out of the simple family unit and into the industrial commercial economy. The first revolutionary waves of industrial actions throughout the world were taken up by women. In Lawrence Masschusets during the 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike, garment workers, mainly women, laid down their lives and went into battle with thugs of the bosses. In Russia female garment workers on March 8th, 1917 took to the streets to topple the Tsar and his empire.

At this time, the life of women workers was short and brutal. ½ of all children born in Lawrence died by age of 6, ⅓ adults died by the age of 25. If the grinding conditions of a mill didnt kill you over the duration of a short life, it would make quicker work if you in industrial accidents. In 1911, The Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York killed 146 women garment workers - many between their teenage years, children, and young adulthood.

As time passed conditions transformed. Post-World War 2 saw the ideological construction of the “nuclear family” as the ideal. Women, mainly of the white European stock, were relegated more tightly to domestic servitude to men. This phenomenon became more a reality because of the historic compromises between unions and their employers. This enabled much of the wage acquisition of the workers of organized labor to be retained and for a creation of a middle class among workers enabling them further in becoming house owners, to move from the urban setting to the suburban setting.

In this context - the context of a suburban, strong wage to price ratio for consumption, for organized labor - the revenue of one individual could be enough to sustain the entirety of a family.

Unions for the past forty odd years have been in steady decline. This decline has meant a decline in home equity of the working class and introduction of more and more financialization to sustain housing markets, creating a bubble basis of development.

The decline of organized labor meant the decline of wage accumulation and a strong wage to price ratio necessitating a rearticulation of family structures away from the “nuclear” patriarchal family structure of the mid 20th century.

Women re-entered the industrial workplace. They were no longer thrown straight away to a dying industry in America like garment work, this was to be outsourced to the women of the Third World. No, rather they began to enter sites of production alongside men. Whereas prior women were honored by a class conscious workers’ movement as both producers and the center of reproductive life, a chauvinistic and opportunistic labor movement greeted them as a source of suspicion to the culture and regime of men’s dominance in the workplace. A culture of solidarity had long been replaced by a culture of competition and scoundrelous behavior.

Women workers- just like their male counterparts - face wage cuts, inflation, skyrocketing housing costs. Moreover the ruling state's neoreactionary power has determined that the declining birth rates of Americans is an untenable situation for long term imperialist capitalist interests. The right of women in choice over their bodies was stripped by the Supreme Court.

Women workers find themselves alienated, oppressed and exploited at the workplace as workers, but now once again in the home by patriarchal order that makes her body the site of production. She is a factory.

How can she sustain both? A workhorse for industry and for the life of the nation?

We at Building Trades for Workers’ Democracy understand the shame of this oppressive and exploitative patriarchal system. Where once nearly complete legal equality was within reach in dismantling a patriarchal state structure, where woman was a full citizen and equal legal abstract subject under the law, she must fight against the double oppression at the workplace and home. She is expected to not only work the long hours for the boss but also to make sure a child is raised properly to be added to the labor supply or as cannon fodder.

How to fight alienation at home and at the job? At the job it is still to embrace integration in the workforce, integration in production, to fight for our place there and fight alongside our brothers in class struggle against Employers, to grow an industrial workers’ movement built on solidarity and not corrupt cowardice and collaboration.

At home? Extension of the class struggle there. The conditions of equality of women under the law, the right to their self-determination over their body was established through the precariousness of the law that is still established by the dominance by a ruling class. The private character of the family can only mean in these conditions that grounds for women’s participation in the workforce is placed in jeopardy. We demand the increased socialization of family life, for reform and movement which reproduces family not as an isolated cell but as a factor in production totally. Increased access to childcare, balancing of childcare, the reappreciation of domestic labor by workforces able to pick up the load at industrial scale and subsidized by our employers.

The pilot program of Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW) heartens us. We must fight for its development and extension and build it within the fabric of our class struggle even on a noncommercial level.

To our brothers we ask that you stand with your sisters, your wives in this process. The ideology of the ruling class has deformed the minds of many to think this undermining them as “heads of the family”. This is a fantasy. Women have always been in the fields with you. We have always been at the jobsite with you. The era of the “nuclear” family was a product of a historical moment long past in the global rule of American imperialism. The nuclear family was sustained only under the discipline of the world by capitalist systems willing to use nuclear bombs.

Whatever your faith, your view on a myriad of issues, there is nothing more demonstrative of the insecurity among men than the desire for women to be slaves.

This March 8th, we call for the remembrance of all those sisters who were trailblazers not solely of abstract legal rights of women, but those who sought to merge such rights with workers’ struggle! We call for all sisters and brothers to not let a moment’s rest for a state which guts our reproductive freedoms! We call for sisters and brothers to stand together for integration in production, to fight chauvinism and harassment on the jobsite! To fight the employers who use division to sow deeper division! To fight for socialization of production and reproduction! To fight for the workers as a class taking control over their lives.

Happy March 8th! International Women’s Day!

Stand up and Fight Women Workers! We hold up half the Sky!