Women workers fight for jobs and communities
By
Heather Cottin
Published Mar 16, 2005 1:41 PM
Brenda Stokely is president of AFSMCE District
Council 1707 in New York, which represents 23,000 day-care and home-care
workers. Her fierce pride in the rank and file of her union is embodied in the
South African saying, “When you have struck a woman, you have struck a
rock.”
Brenda Stokely in zero degrees in New York City speaks at news conference for Troops Out Now rally.
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“Our union represents the lowest-paid public-service
workers in the service indus try, the day-care workers and home health
aides,” she told Workers World. “The major source of funding for
their work is the federal government. The majority of the workers in these jobs
are women, women of color and immigrant women.”
Now these workers
face a vicious campaign of privatization and union busting.
Democrats
and Republicans attack services
Stokely began organizing in the 1960s
when working women and the civil-rights movement demanded day care for children.
Organized protests forced the federal government to respond with programs such
as Head Start, while public agencies had to open public child-care
facilities.
Until the Carter years, said Stokely, day care was expanding.
Then, under Democratic President Jimmy Carter, cutbacks to Section 8 housing and
food stamps began the attack on the poor and ended the expansion of social
services.
Cutbacks under Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George
H.W. Bush were serious, she said, but it was Demo cratic President Bill Clinton
who in 1996 “ended welfare as we know it.”
Clinton signed the
law that created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, to replace Aid to
Families with Dependent Children. TANF is a monthly cash assistance program for
poor families with children under age 18. TANF demolished most of the welfare
net” provisions won 60 years before through the struggles of the
1930s.
TANF includes a four-year lifetime limit on assistance. Many
families reached that limit by 2000.(state.ga.us)
Now, President George W.
Bush is mounting a full-court press to scale back or eliminate public programs
such as day care, health care and even what’s left of welfare. The
government works in tandem with capitalists devouring the public sector in the
mad rush toward privatization and profit.
Brenda Stokely notes that the
“move toward privatization of home health care began with the
privatization of the agencies, making this a profit-making sector. The same
thing has happened with prisons. And now Lockheed is bidding for the food stamp
program.”
Labor unions under siege
To guarantee that
they can make profits from previously public services, the capitalist
privatizers are simultaneously attacking the unions that represent
public-service workers.
37.5 percent of public-sector workers are union
members. That’s compared to 9.5 percent of private-sector workers.
(migrationint.com)
Unionized public-service workers get higher wages and
better benefits. So big business has taken aim at public-employee unions and
benefits.
Stokely pointed out that three states—Indiana, Kentucky
and Missouri—have recently abolished collective bargaining for
public-service employees. She added that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzen egger
has called for a state constitutional amendment abolishing union dues collection
and ending the pension system for California public workers.
Reactionaries
claim that the benefits to these unionized workers are “too rich.”
(www.acera.org)
Stokely sees these attacks on labor as an “assault
on the right to organize, the right to collective bargaining, the right to
pensions.” The state and the capitalist class are coordinating a violent
campaign against workers that “allows for a rampage of layoffs. Collective
bargaining narrows the arbitrary and capricious behavior of the bosses, and
allows more equitable pay and workers’ right to due process. That is why
the states are going after unions.”
In New York City, Mayor Michael
Bloomberg has refused to negotiate with public-sector workers, ignoring
collective-bargaining agreements.
In a contract yet to be formally
ratified with District Council 1707, the mayor has frozen wages for day-care
workers. These women make $10,000 to $30,000 less per year than other public
employees. They live below the poverty line.
Stokely points out:
“The average day-care worker makes $26,000 a year or less. They make about
$6.48 an hour compared to the $12 million spent an hour for war. If this same
day-care worker is asking for only a 4-percent raise on their $26,000 annual
salary, they would get only 25 cents more added to their hourly
wage.”
New York City has simultaneously set up a two-tiered wage
system for day-care teachers, with new hires to receive 11 percent less than the
current workers. The city made a 2-percent wage increase after April 1,
contingent upon worker givebacks. The city is offering nothing to retirees
except denial of health care.
Dangerous cutbacks
Stokely said
that New York City is closing 67 of 90 day-care centers. The city is not
enforcing the teacher-child ratio because of cutbacks. And after-school programs
for school-age children have been cut.
The city refuses to pay for the
building leases of after-school programs. Bloom berg is putting all these
programs out to bid to private companies.
Stokely warns that these
policies will cost a lot. Understaffed facilities are dangerous to workers and
deprive children of proper care. She noted that some of the women in her union
work with children who have serious emotional problems. A troubled teenaged girl
severely burned one worker, who was unable to get help in a crisis
situation.
“When TANF was cut, mothers receiving public assistance
were forced to go to work. Now, if they get wage increases of as little as $2 a
month, they are denied day care. What are they to do?”
Stokely
continued, “These cutbacks represent tremendous losses for the
communities.”
A day-care teacher on Long Island told Workers World
that 30 children have been cut from a school that services over 200 children.
The teacher said that “the parents and children were in tears when they
learned they were no longer eligible for day care.”An assistant teacher
who makes $7 an hour added, “Many of our classrooms are understaffed since
we can’t find qualified people to work for these wages.”
Child
care can cost parents $4,000 to $12,000 a year—more than public college
tuition. The co-payments poor families have to pay are over $400 a month in most
states. (tompaine.com)
Stokely concluded: “1707 workers believe day
care is a right, as do the parents of their students. The activists in the
communities are forming groups. There is a groundswell calling for day care to
be expanded, not destroyed.
“When the bosses try to separate us by
race or nationality, workers see how the two-tier system hurts them, how they
are divided so that the bosses can take away pension rights and health care.
They understand that they have to be unified and make alliances with the
communities they work in.”
Last June in New York it was the women of
District Council 1707, the only public employees working without a contract at
the time, who struck. Their three-day work stoppage demonstrated their
militancy. And when 1707 walked, the children, parents and grandparents did
too-walking the picket lines alongside their day-care teachers and
staffers.
Stokely criticized union leaders who call for “class
peace” when conditions facing pub lic workers call for militancy and
struggle.
A leading organizer for the Million Worker March, which ties the
U.S. war on Iraq to the cutbacks in social spending, Stokely says: “While
this government doesn’t blink an eye as it spends $300 million a day in
its quest to subjugate another people and their resources, it turns a deaf ear
to the cries of the day-care workers and other working families in need of a
livable wage.
“It is therefore necessary for working people to
connect the attacks on their right to just wages and to organize with the
cutbacks in government spending for education, health care, and safe and
affordable housing.”
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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