Three Decades After the Height of the Feminist Movement

Women Still Working for Pennies

By Felicia Mello


In her latest book, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich describes Gail, one of a myriad of women Ehrenreich met during her stint as a low-wage worker in several US cities. Gail works at a diner in Key West, Florida, living alternately in her truck and in a shared $250 per week motel room with a male roommate who sexually harasses her. At $2.43 per hour plus tips, she cannot save enough for the deposit and first month's rent needed to move into even the most modest apartment.

Gail is one member of the army of low-wage workers that fuel the US's dominant economy. Over 42% of all US jobs pay less than 125% of the poverty level, up from 36% in 1973.

Women workers, who make up 55% of temporary workers and 70% of part-time workers, bear the brunt of this economic insecurity. Women, especially women of color, are overwhelmingly concentrated in sales, clerical, service, and factory jobs, where the pay is low, the benefits meager, and the atmosphere rife with intimidation and harassment.

A textbook case is the garment industry. Not only abroad do workers slave around the clock in dingy rooms to produce the latest designer creations. Roughly 160,000 workers in the Los Angeles area are employed in garment shops, a majority of which the Department of Labor has officially labeled sweatshops. In Chinatown, Brooklyn, and Queens in New York City, young workers, mostly women of color, work up to 16 hours per day to produce 25% of all dresses sold in the US.

While not all US women work in sweatshops, the pay and conditions of the modern low-wage workplace are a far cry from what feminists envisioned when they began the fight for equal pay decades ago.

A look at the "post-feminist" landscape reveals remarkably uneven ground. The lucky 2% of women who now make over $75,000 per year are dwarfed by the 70% who make under $25,000. The pay gap between women and men still very much exists, with women earning roughly 73 cents for every dollar men earn, and widens into a chasm for African-American and Latina women, who earn only 65 and 53 cents respectively.

The explanation is clear. The powerful women's movement in the '60s and '70s involved millions at its height. But it left capitalism intact, a system in which the ruling class has a strong interest in maintaining the undervalued labor of women, both in the home and in the workplace. Politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, reinforce this by emphasizing women's role in the family while obscuring the key role women play in workplaces, even though 99 of 100 women will work for pay at some time in their lives.

Bush's welfare policy promotes marriage as a "solution" for single women in poverty. A recent TV documentary on one of the state pilot programs that Bush has hailed as a success shows a bemused former welfare recipient attending one of her required workfare classes on "successful relationships." "I'm not sure how this applies to me," she asks the chipper, attractive, young white instructor. "I'm single and not looking for a relationship. I just want a job that pays enough to support myself."

Socialist demands for a $12.50/hour minimum wage and a 30 hour work week without loss of pay are more relevant now than ever. Also needed are benefits that ease the specific problems that women face at work, such as free universal child care, and a concerted drive to organize women workers into unions to improve wages and working conditions.

Working class men are women's natural allies in this struggle. A recent AFL-CIO report, for example, predicts that if women received equal pay for their work, their family income would rise on average by $4000, cutting poverty rates in half and providing working families with an extra $200 billion in annual income.

The situation begs for a new women's movement. But the leaders of traditional women's organizations don't seem to be stepping up to the plate. Organizations like the Feminist Majority moved closer to Bush after 9/11, to the point of participating in strategy sessions for the war on Afghanistan. This leadership vacuum is reflected in the consciousness of women. Only 32% of women in a recent Gallup poll identified themselves as feminists... yet a majority of working women say that equal pay is an important issue for them.

But out of the growing movement against corporate globalization, war, and Bush's right-wing agenda, a new generation of women fighters is emerging. These women, along with millions of low-wage women workers around the globe, will form the backbone of a new women's movement.

Justice #31 September 2002