The political problem is evident when you read the National NOW Times. Last month, for example, an award was given by Philadelphia NOW to the first woman to become a police detective in that city. That’s literally true. A cop! The National NOW Times also ran a several-column article, with photo, of a meeting organized by NOW to have a “dialogue” and seek “consensus” on the issue of birth control with antiabortion groups.

There is a crisis facing women in this country regarding abortion. The right to abortion—that is, economic, social, and political access—is being brutally cut back. This is not because workers are turning against abortion rights. A Gallup poll released just a few days ago showed there has been no decline whatsoever since 1975 in the percentage of people who support abortion rights. But the economic possibility of having an abortion, and the availability of facilities, have been sharply limited by federal and state legislation. This is one of the “take-backs” the ruling class has implemented since the offensive began in 1974-75.

It will take a social battle to reestablish this right in real life. The “one-sided class war” has come down especially hard on Black and Chicana women, on women of the other oppressed nationalities, and on all working women.

The fight for the Equal Rights Amendment is in crisis, too. The NOW leadership has reduced this struggle fundamentally to organizing political support for Democratic Party politicians, together with attempts to talk people out of taking their vacations in states that have not ratified the ERA.

We give the same answer to the crisis of NOW as we do to that of Black organizations such as the NAACP. There is no “independent strategy” for women that can win. There is no tricky tactic that can circumvent the crisis. There are correct tactics, tactics that can move the struggle ahead, but they must be timely expressions of a strategic vision that places the women’s liberation movement in a class perspective. That’s the only way to assemble the necessary social forces to win the abortion fight, or win the ERA.

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 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.

Jobs in industry are key to women for several reasons. One is that secretaries, teachers, and social workers simply do not have the raw power that industrial workers have when it comes to winning women’s rights or anything else.

But it’s more than that. Opening the doors to basic industry has a powerful impact on the consciousness and self-confidence of women, and on the way that men view their female co-workers. Many deeply ingrained attitudes change rapidly. The interconnections between the workers’ struggle against class exploitation and women’s struggle for economic independence and full equality come to life. Sexist prejudices begin to break down.

The women’s movement needs to make the same kind of shift that is necessary for the Black and Chicano movements. To win the ERA, abortion rights, and the other demands of women today will take a stronger, different kind of movement than a decade ago, with a different kind of leadership. But the forces exist to build such a movement.

Working women, and especially women in industry, have to lead this process, orienting the women’s movement towards a strategic axis that can push the movement forward. This includes, of course, the fight against discrimination and harassment on the job. It’s not sexual harassment only. The term is too narrow. The fight against sexual harassment is one aspect of the much broader fight of working women—the fight against the harassment of women as a sex, against discrimination, and for the right to get jobs, to hold them, and to have full rights on those jobs.

At the same time that working women need to become involved in the women’s movement, they must also take their struggles into the unions, to win support for abortion rights, pregnancy benefits, the ERA, and other needs.

This is the direction the women’s liberation movement must go. Not toward the antiabortion forces that support birth control. Not toward women cops or detectives.

This is what we have been raising and arguing in organizations like NOW for nearly two years, ever since we and women we were allied with in NOW drew up the “Defending Women’s Rights” resolution in 1977.

What faces the women’s movement is a political question and a class question, the same as with the Black movement. The leadership of the women’s movement is petty-bourgeois. But the forces coming forward in struggle are working-class women. At the same time there is a growing radicalization among other layers of the working class, including male workers.

The fact that we now have many more comrades in industry allows us to alter the way we do our women’s liberation work. Comrades in industry must play an increasing role in the various women’s organizations. We need to take another look at what we do in NOW. Instead of shaping our work in the unions to work in NOW, we need to orient our proposals in NOW to meet the changing needs and potential of women in industry. We have to fight in NOW for involving the labor movement in the battle for women’s rights.

Our work in the factories and the unions must become the axis of our women’s liberation work. We need to pay close attention to the women’s caucuses and committees in the unions and in the plants. We should even take a new look at various local units of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW). No organization of this type should be written off. Because the fighting women’s organizations that are going to emerge from the struggles beginning today will not look like anything that exists right now.

The character of NOW as a large national organization gives it a special importance. Its links with the labor movement are also important….  
 
Against bosses, foremen, politicians
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. Women in and out of industry can see the attractive power of the labor movement and the potential for support from layers of young, militant workers.

This came through clearly at a District 31 conference of United Steelworkers of America. 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. Women still have to fight to establish their right to remain in industry.

This Black steelworker predicted that with the next major downturn, women will face a concerted drive to push them out of industry.

He was absolutely right.

This is one reason we should approach women’s committees or caucuses in the unions differently today than Black or Chicano caucuses.

We favor and sometimes help initiate women’s committees or caucuses, while we don’t initiate Black or Chicano caucuses for the reasons I outlined earlier. Of course, we know that working women, like Blacks and Chicanos, will help blaze the trail toward a class-struggle left wing in the unions. They will play a vanguard role in the transformation of the labor movement.

But we have to recognize the different positions of Blacks and women in industry today, the different stage women are at in getting into industry and staying there.

Women face greater obstacles because of their small numbers and their newness in industry. They have to fight the bosses, the foremen, and the whole setup just to prevent themselves from being driven out of the plants. Often the forms don’t exist for women to work through these problems and figure out how to use their unions to defend their rights. Special women’s committees, as in District 31 of the USWA and in many auto locals, can provide such a form.

Added to this are the special obstacles women face, because of the character of women’s oppression in class society, in becoming self-confident leaders of their class and their unions in leading their male co-workers. This is a bigger problem for women than for Blacks, Chicanos, and other oppressed national minorities.

It’s another reason why women’s committees can play a very positive role.  
 
Importance of fighting ‘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.1 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.

Today, Black, Chicano, and women workers as a group comprise a significant percentage of the membership of the major industrial unions. This makes it easier for other unionists to see why, in the interests of solidarity against the bosses’ offensive, they must combat discrimination. This mounting pressure from below, in turn, has forced the majority of the labor officialdom to come out in formal opposition to Weber. It is responsible for the USWA bureaucracy’s decision to fight the case in the courts and to call the recent civil rights conference.

This is an important new development, a promising new trend in the American labor movement.

Of course, it’s just a beginning. There is still a big fight ahead to demand that the labor officialdom throw union power behind this struggle, which it has no intention of doing today. There is still a big job in educating workers, especially white workers and male workers, about their stake in the fight and mobilizing them into action around it.

But the opportunities to do this are greater than ever before. More and more workers are willing to listen and agree when opponents of discrimination explain that affirmative action is vitally and directly in the interests of the working class as a class. Affirmative action is not a charity to make up for the past. It’s not—as some argue—a morally correct position but materially disadvantageous to males and whites….

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. More powerful forces and a more conscious leadership are going to be necessary for that.

The Militant editorial noted that the civil rights laws were won without the unions really entering the fray. The editorial continued: “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.”

1. Brian Weber, a white lab technician for Kaiser Aluminum in Gramercy, Louisiana, sued to overturn a United Steelworkers of America-negotiated plan for affirmative action in 1974, claiming “reverse discrimination.” The USWA came to the defense of the program and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legality of the affirmative action program in a June 1979 ruling.  
 
 
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