In Good Times and Bad, Unions offer Women Hope and Equality

Beth Myers, Executive Director, STITCH

Now more than ever, women are facing uncertain times as our economy continues to weaken, not only in the United States but around the world. I know you are all thinking, “what about men? Why do you feminist never pay attention to men?"  But the reality is, when it comes to economic bad times women often have it harder and face more difficulties at home and at work.

According to an article in an Ottowa, Canada Newspaper:
Women, especially in poor countries, are likely to bear a disproportionate burden during the current economic crisis, a leading British expert on development warned Thursday.

Diane Elson, a sociologist at the University of Essex, said "male breadwinning bias" - the "erroneous assumption" that men's earnings are the mainstay of household finances - shaped policy responses during past economic crises. 

And, as we continue to see the financial systems and banking giants saved, most remedies are designed without women in mind and are ignoring the real impact, especially on women of color in the United States. Recently, women and poverty advocates organized “A Day of Voices: Women's Tribunal on Poverty” in New York. At that meeting, the disparate impact of the downturn was highlighted:

Oliveira estimated that for every Wall Street job that will be lost in coming weeks and months, three service-level employees are fired. "There's an incredible ripple effect way beyond the specific jobs that are counted in the financial sector," she said.

"The service industry is heavily dominated by low-paying jobs by women," Oliveira said. "As there's shrinkage in that economy, there's a loss of jobs for low-paying workers and that impacts women incredibly."

The conference pointed out that real economic rescue packages should include increased job training, increased access to Medicaid for working mothers, and increasing the earned income credit for the poor.

But it’s not only during hard times, as we all know, even during the best of times women, especially women of color, make less money than men. BUT, there is a solution.

Unions!

Today, a new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) was released that documents a large wage and benefit advantage for women workers in unions relative to their non-union counterparts. According to the report:

The data suggest that even after controlling for systematic differences between union and non-union workers, union representation substantially improves the pay and benefits that women receive. On average, unionization raised women’s wages by 11.2 percent – about $2.00 per hour – compared to non-union women with similar characteristics. Among women workers, those in unions were about 19 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and about 25 percentage points more likely to have an employer-provided pension.

In fact the report highlights that in some circumstances that joining a union is more likely to help women than getting a four-year degree.

For the average woman, joining a union has a much larger effect on her probability of having health insurance (an 18.8 percentage-point increase) than finishing a four-year college degree would (an 8.4 percentage-point increase, compared to a woman with similar characteristics who has only a high school diploma).

As a life-long feminist who has been working in the women’s rights movement for the past 16 years, I have been arguing for years that the best path for women’s empowerment is through her union. We can not be equal without a voice on the job and a guarantee that we will be treated fairly at work.  Finally, we have the statistical proof to what so many of us have always known: A women’s place is in her union!

 

OttawaCitizen.com - Job support for women fades during fiscal crisis
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/story.html?id=e1637147-d3e5-4430-b892-da1f01cd6e94

Women’s ENews- Crisis Likely to Deepen Women's Poverty in New York
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3753/context/archive

Unions and Upward Mobility for Women Workers

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/unions_and_upward_mobility_for_women_workers_2008_12.pdf

Comments

[Lillian Walker Shelton]

This is what keeps me going!