BY JACK BARNES  
Key to the road forward is the transformation, the revolution, that is taking place as women in the labor force push their way into industry. This transformation began as one of the repercussions of the gains of the Black struggle. When the Civil Rights Act was being debated in Congress in 1964, the southern senators tried to prevent its passage by outlawing discrimination in employment on the basis of sex as well as race. They figured that made the Title VII, as that clause of the act is known, so ridiculous, even northern liberals would have to vote against it. But it was passed.  
 
Affirmative-action drive
This provided a legal opening for the affirmative-action drive by women. It gave women a legal club to use to force their way not just into jobs, but into basic industry, with its higher wages and greater unionization. Thousands of suits were filed. One stride forward came with the 1974 consent decree in the basic steel industry which established plant-wide seniority and set hiring goals for women and apprenticeship goals for women, Blacks, and Latinos. From 1975 to 1979, women made a big push into auto, mining, and steel.  
 
Against the employers
The axis of women’s fight is against the employers, their foremen, their courts, and their politicians--not against fellow workers. To the contrary, women should aggressively appeal to all the class struggle-minded workers on the job, seeking support for women’s rights. From our initial experience, we know there is usually a positive response when women fight along these lines.

This came through clearly at a District 31 conference of the USWA. An older Black, male worker got up at this conference and explained: We have to support the women. The bosses are doing to them just what they did to us when we first came in the mill. They’re trying to drive them out. This Black steelworker predicted that with the next downturn, women will face a concerted drive to push them out of industry.

He was absolutely right.  
 
Importance of fight Weber
The fight by women to get into industry and hang on there also underscores the centrality of the affirmative-action question and the Weber case. The importance we have given this fight has been proven correct by one simple thing: the growing number of workers, including male workers and white workers, who are beginning to understand that affirmative action is a class question, a question that involves the effectiveness of their unions. The ability to explain this through the Weber case is made easier by the fact that the suit also challenges union collective bargaining rights around the issue of job discrimination and upgrading.

Workers are better able today to grasp aspects of the political economy of discrimination--that discrimination does not mean an extra buck for some workers at the expense of women or of Blacks, Chicanos, or Puerto Ricans; instead, it drags the whole class down in terms of real wages and job conditions, and saps the collective ability to fight back against the bosses.

But we must add the point we made in the March 30, 1979, Militant editorial: The kinds of struggles that established the principle of affirmative action will not be sufficient to defend or extend it.

‘This is a new period, in which the capitalist economy is wracked by crisis; in which the employers are driven to harsher and harsher antilabor attacks in order to defend their profits. This is a period of polarization of class forces.

The only class that has an interest in defending affirmative action is the working class. And the fight to defend affirmative action must be taken right to the center of the only mass organizations of the working class--the unions.
 
 
Related articles:
Defend affirmative action
White House backs legal attack on affirmative action  
 
 
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