Nina Power keeps the red flag flying with her article (originally published in the Guardian) about women and work over at the Monthly Review. The article is inspired by the new trade-union backed campaign 'Right to Work', which aims to "build resistance to unemployment, cuts and austerity" being imposed by the new coalition government.
Power asks the question: "In the middle of a recession in which jobs are being slashed with
alacrity, should we be clinging on to employment at any cost, or should
we instead be reconsidering what it means to work at all?"
The issue of women and our relationship to work has always been at the heart of the feminist movement, especially for socialist feminists, and I remember my own teenage shock at realising that women's unpaid (and now low paid) labour was the fundamental basis for our capitalist economy, not to mention my futile in-house campaigns against my family on how women's work should be paid work ("You'll not get any argument from me, love," my mother told me, after patiently listening to another of my diatribes whilst getting on with the ironing).
"The mass entry of women into the workforce has corresponded with an
overall stagnation or diminution of wages," argues Power. "It is as if employers have
taken the very worst aspects of women's work in the past -- poorly paid,
precarious, without benefits -- and applied it to almost everyone,
except those at the very top, who remain overwhelmingly male and
incomprehensibly rich."
In the throes of the current economic crisis, with society arguably more unequal than it has ever been, and with everyone waiting with bated breath to see just how bad the Coalition's cuts are about to make our lives, perhaps its never been more important to ask these questions about the importance of work. What's more frightening to me is that alternatives to a life dominated by work, or the quality of life controlled by the lack of it, have never seemed so remote from the public consciousness.
I posted a while back here on WVON about Claudia Medina's documentary on alternatives to growth. But how high on the agenda of the average woman on the street are debates around alternatives to work right now? And how do we expand the terms of our debate beyond the current agenda of cuts, cuts, cuts? Answers in the comments box, please.
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