Hannah is a sign painter and member of LiUNA #1058.

On November 11, in a small town in Minnesota, 20-year-old welder Amber Czech was bludgeoned to death by her 40-year-old male coworker at their job site. Amber had gone to HR (Human Resources) about her would-be killer at least five times, but they did nothing. The man reportedly told investigators he had “been planning to kill the victim for some time” and “just didn’t like her.”

Amber’s murder was followed by an outpouring on social media of women talking about the harassment and abuse they’ve faced in the workplace. They understood that their lives could have been made as brutally short as Amber’s at the hands of any number of men who saw them as less than human.

As a woman in the building trades, what happened to Amber is chilling, infuriating, but unsurprising. Many women know all too well that working in a male-dominated workplace comes with near-constant reminders that you aren’t regarded as an equal by many of your co-workers. There is a high likelihood of facing sexual harassment, assault, or worse.

When I went to HR at my job about a foreman who had been sexually harassing me, I found out that this had been a problem for years for any young women who worked there, and nothing had been done about it. Too many women reading this will have a similar story—a survey in 2018 found that 69% of women who have experienced sexual harassment say it happened in a professional or work setting.

Capitalism Breeds Misogyny

Amber’s murder is a devastating reflection of the profound misogyny embedded in capitalist society that has been normalized and exacerbated under Trump. It’s not a coincidence that this occurred while the “manosphere,” full of rhetoric against women’s rights, has exploded in popularity among young men on the internet, and while Trump popularizes the idea that domestic violence is not a crime. 

Trump is also increasingly implicated in the decades-long abuses of girls and women by financier Jeffrey Epstein. Recently-released emails show Trump, along with many of his billionaire friends, participated in and protected Epstein’s gruesome sex-trafficking operation that claimed more than 1,000 victims, many as young as 14 years old. This is the result of a sick system that elevates a few obscenely wealthy people, mostly men, to positions of unimaginable power—a privileged elite who perpetrate these kinds of horrors, largely with impunity. Fundamentally, misogyny and other forms of oppression are tools of the capitalist system used against the working class to prop up its rule.

The ruling class, in this new era of capitalism, has eagerly moved to reinforce gender divides and “traditional” gender roles, as the global superpowers ramp up militarism and prepare for bigger global conflicts. The #MeToo movement and 2017 Women’s March—which at the time was the largest single day of protest in US history—showed the explosive potential of issues of gender oppression in US society, and growing consciousness in favor of women’s rights that the ruling class desperately needed to clamp down on.

While a section of working-class men are falling down the “red-pill” rabbit hole, and this has increased the political divide between men and women, it is far from universal or permanent. Many women reasonably feel threatened by members of our own class who we should be able to struggle alongside for better wages, hours, conditions, and livelihoods. While these men can pose a real danger to the women around them, men do not benefit from this dynamic or toxic masculinity. The men I work with will refuse PPE, sunscreen, seatbelts, etc. just to look tough in front of other men. They put their bodies and minds in harm’s way, risking injuries and cancers; who really benefits from all this? Only the billionaires, who always want fewer worker protections and to drive down working conditions and the standard of living for all workers.

Fighting For Socialist Feminism In The Workers’ Movement

We need our unions to take a serious approach to fighting against sexism and any other divisions in the workplace. When I was facing harassment in my workplace, the first place I went was to my union leaders, but they told me it was something HR should deal with. As many workers are well aware, and is proof in the case of Amber Czech, these departments do not exist to protect the workers, but to protect the company. Unions should never be handing over power like this to the bosses. 

Ultimately, sexist or racist ideas are toxic to worker solidarity, and this cuts across the ability to unite across gender divides to fight for and win fair contracts and working conditions for all workers—including things like free, universal healthcare and extended paid parental leave. Unfortunately, the approach of many union leaderships, especially in the building trades, continues to be deeply inadequate to address misogynist, racist, and transphobic behavior in the workplace and beyond it. This is not merely a side issue—cutting across toxic divisions among workers is a life-or-death question for the labor movement.

A serious approach to these issues could look like unions setting up independent grievance structures related to preventing and addressing harassment, which include protections against retaliation for reporting abuse. We also need union-led education campaigns to address misogynist, racist, and all other kinds of harassment and violence. These should be nothing like corporate HR trainings that have been shown to be totally ineffective, and have nothing in common with a genuine, working-class approach. Even in non-unionized workplaces, workers can be mobilized to fight back against normalized discrimination and harassment. In 2018 the #MeToo movement inspired walkouts at Google, McDonald’s, and other workplaces—walkouts which included many men who understood the need for a united fightback.

In general, the level of feminist struggle we are seeing on our streets, in our workplaces, and on our campuses, does not meet the moment. We need a united, working-class struggle against misogyny and all oppression. We need a resurgence in the women’s movement in every community, school, and workplace, linked to the understanding that violence against women is a fundamental part of the capitalist system, which must be completely overthrown if we want to build a world where nothing like what happened to Amber ever happens again.