First Published: Class Struggle, No. 12, Summer 1979.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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We women have a lot of demands to fight for in our 1979 contract. Besides a big raise and an end to forced overtime, there are plenty of needs that women have which are totally missing from our contract. We need paid maternity leave, improvements in medical care, consideration for childcare problems and much more.
This statement from an auto worker sums up discussions about demands for the upcoming contract struggle that are now taking place at the GM assembly plant in Fremont, California. Women in the plant and the local women’s committee are playing an active role in preparing to strike the biggest of the auto giants. Their consciousness and involvement in union activities has heightened a great deal over the past seven years, when women first started working in large numbers in the plant. In part, this change has been a result of the work of communists in actively taking up the woman question.
What does “taking up the woman question” mean? Over the past five years, we learned some lessons about this. Much of the discussion in this article will center on the organizing done around a sex discrimination lawsuit. Although our work was not limited to the suit, it was the center of a lot of struggle and we learned a lot of lessons.
We learned that women’s special needs and demands must be taken up and fought for militantly and consistently, but always in a way that is in accord with the needs of the overall class struggle.
We learned that we can make use of legal tactics like lawsuits, but that the main struggle has to go on inside the plant and against the union bureaucrats who actively promote male chauvinism and try to divide women and men. In this way, we direct our fire at the main representatives of the capitalist class within the workers’ movement.
We learned these and many other lessons the hard way! Mistakes were bound to occur in the process, especially because we were relatively inexperienced in the plant. But overall the work is a positive example of fighting for women’s equality. The class struggle was advanced and concrete gains were won by the women and men in the plant. Besides this, workers were trained in Marxism-Leninism and some were recruited into the October League (OL), a predecessor to the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist).
Communists in the OL began to work at GM-Fremont in 1972, when women were just beginning to get hired in large numbers. Women had been denied employment there until 1968.
In 1974, women still constituted only 10% of the workforce. The overloaded jobs and speed-up which affected all the workers weighed heavily on the women, most of whom had never worked in heavy industry before. Unhealthy and dangerous conditions throughout the plant were aggravated for the women by lack of protective clothing and restroom facilities. The Medical Department, notorious for its rotten treatment of all workers, gave no consideration at all to women’s medical problems and treated women with contempt.
Besides the normal nine hours on the job, women also had the responsibility for childcare, housework and other “full time” tasks. But because of their low seniority, most women were stuck on the night shift. Working from about 4 P.M. to 2 A.M. meant little time to be with their children and very few hours of sleep for most women.
For most of the Black and Chicana women, this was compounded by the extra hours they had to spend on the road to and from work. Because of racist housing patterns in the Bay Area, most minority workers had to live 30 or 40 miles from Fremont. Add to this the racist harassment practiced by the GM foremen and GM’s policy of putting minority workers on the worst jobs, the minority women were truly working under the “triple burden” of class, national and sexual oppression.
These were the general conditions faced by the roughly 500 women employees in early 1974. At that point, GM cut back their operations to one shift, laying off all the women and 2,000 men. Some women began to ask, “Wasn’t GM violating the Civil Rights Act by not hiring women and won’t it be illegal not to have any women working there now?”
According to the union leaders, there was nothing they could do to prevent all the women from losing their jobs. This was because the layoff had to proceed by seniority. The bureaucrats went all out to paint themselves as the great “defenders” of the seniority system. But there were three important facts that they were trying to cover up.
First of all, the UAW International or local leaders had never pushed the auto companies to hire women. Nationwide, women still constituted a small percentage of the total UAW membership, overwhelmingly concentrated in the lower-paying Parts Division and other small shops. The bureaucrats’ own collaboration with the companies was responsible for the women being at the bottom of the seniority list.
Secondly, their own record as “defenders” of seniority in the plant was rotten. The seniority system was a hard-won gain in the union’s organizing drives. In the face of the bosses’ favoritism and divisive tactics, it is a reform against arbitrariness in organizing promotions, vacations, etc. It needs to be strengthened to ensure that discrimination in hiring is not perpetuated.
But the UAW International gives GM a giant loophole in the contract–the secondary openings clause which allows promotions out of the line of seniority. Besides this, the foremen’s gross violations of workers’ seniority rights were routinely dismissed by UAW reps at GM-Fremont with the excuse that “they have the right to do it.”
Finally, and most importantly, the union leaders were doing nothing to organize the rank and file to fight the massive layoffs which hit the auto industry in 1974-1975. They were willing to sacrifice not only the jobs of the recently hired women and minority men, but as many people as GM chose to throw out on the street–at Fremont, 2,500. “Seniority” was used to make the layoffs supposedly “fair.”
At this time, we began to meet with a group of workers, including some of the most militant women in the plant, to discuss what to do about the layoff. We decided on a class-action sex discrimination suit as a tactic. “We saw the suit as a vehicle to unite and mobilize the women in the plant to fight for better conditions along with the men, and in particular to fight to keep our jobs,” summed up one of the active participants.
At this time, the OL was working to build the Stand Up Caucus, which was organized around the demand for a short work week with no cut in pay. This also became the number one demand of the lawsuit: GM should keep everyone working by cutting hours, not our Pay-In formulating other demands for the lawsuit, we recognized, correctly, that the issue of women in production is a strategic question. Not only do women have to work to survive, but the revolution cannot succeed without women actively participating in the workers’ movement. Based on this understanding, we included in the suit a demand for “compensative seniority”–that women should still constitute the same percentage of the workforce as they had before the layoff. This would have meant keeping 10% (or 50) working during the layoff. We stressed that no men should be laid off or bumped out of their jobs as a result. But there were tactical errors in the way the demand was raised.
At a time when the overall work of fighting the layoffs was relatively weak, we allowed the fight to keep women’s jobs to become the main focus. Instead of recognizing that much more education needed to be done on the demand for compensative seniority before the majority of workers could support it, we incorporated it into the suit. While it would have been correct to do education and agitate for the need to keep women in the plant, we should have been more flexible in how we raised this point. The exact formulation and timing of such demands must be based on a correct evaluation of what the people can unite with and what will move forward the work as a whole.
We never filed charges against the union, nor had it been done previously. Before the suit was even filed, a lot of work was done in approaching the various union committees for their support. The local Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) voted to support the suit. The local leaders seemed to be “sympathetic.” But William Oliver, head of the U AW International FEPC and several of the International’s top lawyers soon arrived at the Fremont local and called a secret meeting with the top officers. From that time on, the local leaders did everything possible to sabotage the suit, including slandering everyone involved as “anti-men” and “anti-union.”
Under their cover of “defenders of seniority,” the International and local leaders finally came out openly on GM’s side against the women. When the suit went to court for the first time in January, 1975 on the eve of another big layoff, the union lawyers argued in court that GM could proceed with the layoff because it would be “like a paid vacation” for the 500 workers affected.
In fact, the Supplementary Unemployment Benefits (SUB) fund ran out after a few months and the layoffs lasted one year. The many workers who faced extreme financial hardship, losing their cars and homes, began to see through the union leaders’ “concern” for their seniority.
The fact that we were fighting the International union leaders and their puppets in the local, as well as GM, was a plus in the long struggle to win over the majority of the workers. We tried to show that by abandoning the women, the bureaucrats were also directly abandoning the minority men, most of whom had relatively low seniority, and the younger workers in general. The layoff also meant speed-up and more difficult jobs for the men who were left in the plant, thus proving to be an attack on the entire workforce.
Despite the overall correct political orientation of the work, reformism became a strong tendency during the early stages after the struggle began. Reformism on the woman question is the political line which says that women’s oppression can be resolved without overthrowing the system which causes it.
Communists fight for reforms, not as an end in themselves, but in order to strengthen the independence, unity, and fighting capacity of the working class. They also show that the capitalist system, not the lack of a certain right, is at the root of our problems. But an incorrect view of the fight for reforms subtly influenced our work in several ways.
First and principally, the work to gather support for the women’s demands was to a large extent separated from the fight against all the layoffs. Even though the demand for a short work week was the “number one demand” in the suit, not enough attention was paid, in meetings and leaflets, to showing how the fight to keep the women’s jobs had to be linked with the fight of all workers against the system which causes layoffs.
How this came out in relation to the demand for compensative seniority has already been discussed. But the separation of women’s struggle from the whole working class struggle also came out in having two different groups meeting during the layoffs: one for women who supported the suit, and another, the beginnings of a caucus to support the short work week demand. While it is sometimes necessary to have separate meetings with women, we didn’t make every effort to unite the groups.
At times the women’s struggle was also counterposed to the fight against the oppression of national minorities. Although half the plaintiffs were minority women, their charges against GM were limited to sex discrimination. This fed into the union bureaucrats’ slanders that we were just out to win something for women, thus trying to set us in opposition to the minority men. We did not at first use every opportunity to expose the triple oppression–as workers, minorities and women–faced by the Black, Latino and other minority women in the plant.
Another reformist tendency sprang from unclarity on the role of the state, a tendency to think that justice could be obtained through the courts. By filing charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), hiring lawyers and filing a court suit, we were committed to the legal battle with everything that entails. It took thousands of hours of legal work over the course of four years before the case was resolved. It also involved negotiations and compromises among the different parties and subjected all the plaintiffs and witnesses to GM’s harassment in the forms of subpoenas and depositions.
The EEOC intervened in the suit, allegedly on the side of the women, and ultimately sold it out to GM for the sum of $187,500 to be divided among 500 women. In a strictly legal sense, this is what was “won” after years of struggle.
Before filing the suit, we emphasized to the women involved that we could not rely on the courts but had to take our struggle inside the plant and the union. But at times the court appearances and legal battles tended to command the work, and the mass struggle was downplayed. That is, we paid more attention to hammering out demands that would be “legally feasible” than to gathering support in the plant for the demand “No layoffs–Short work week with no cut in pay.”
Also, we tended to underestimate the treacherous role that the EEOC was playing. As a part of the state apparatus, the EEOC was set up to funnel people’s anger about discrimination into legal channels and to protect the interests of the monopoly corporations. Given the EEOC’s sell-out of the steelworkers through the Consent Decree and numerous other sell-outs, we should have expected that our case would never make it to trial.
The EEOC lawyers in San Francisco, who had never taken a single case of discrimination to trial, proved themselves to be loyal allies of GM. Our two private lawyers were donating their time in hopes of getting paid by GM if we won the case. But we had allowed the EEOC lawyers to do a lot of the legal work because we were unable to pay out the thousands of dollars it would have cost in legal expenses for trial preparations. Days before the trial was to begin, they made a settlement offer and told the plaintiffs that even if we did not like the settlement, we would have to go it alone because they were pulling out all their lawyers, funds and resources, leaving us unprepared to go to trial.
We began with a relatively small but dedicated group of supporters. We put out leaflets, organized people to come to court and support for the suit gradually grew in the plant. But we never had tried to get financial backing from our fellow workers.
We learned very graphically about the class nature of the courts–it would have taken tens of thousands of dollars to take the case to court without the EEOC. Even then, they have the jurisdiction to intervene and sell out a case.
The lesson we learned about the lawsuit as a tactic is that the mass movement has to be at a fairly high level in order to support the legal struggle. The amount of time and money involved in such class action suits is immense.
A strong core of people as plaintiffs and witnesses has to clearly understand what they are getting committed to and what the legal hassles will be. The concrete demands of the suit must reflect the desires of the people who are represented by the “class.” And many hundreds of people have to be committed to supporting the suit financially and helping to make the legal decisions.
These errors of separating the women’s struggle off by itself and tending to rely on the courts to resolve it were bound to keep the suit from winning as much support as it needed. More importantly, the largest possible numbers of workers in the plant were not being educated about the source of women’s oppression and how it could be fought.
Although the trend toward reformism was strong, there also existed a counter struggle to orient the work correctly. Even during the first couple of years, workers were recruited into the OL, articles were written for The Call about the suit and education in Marxism-Leninism was carried out with a number of workers.
A two-line struggle was going on in the OL on the woman question and the struggle was pushed forward by the experiences of the workers who joined at this time. Summing up what had attracted new people to the OL, it was the fact that the OL was very actively organizing the women and all the workers to fight the bosses and the union bureaucrats.
We studied Lenin’s writings on the woman question and learned a lot from his talk with Clara Zetkin. There, he points out that:
Our demands are no more than practical conclusions, drawn by us from the crying needs and disgraceful humiliations that weak and underprivileged woman must bear under the bourgeois system. We demonstrate thereby that we are aware of these needs and of the oppression of women, that we are conscious of the privileged position of the men, and that we hate–yes, hate– and want to remove whatever oppresses and harasses the working woman, the wife of the worker, the peasant woman, the wife of the little man, and even in many respects the woman of the propertied classes.[1]
Lenin tells Zetkin that communists should not hold back from fighting for women’s demands out of fear that mistakes will be made or that their demands will be misunderstood. We knew that we had not made the error of “contemplating our principles from a high pillar,” as Lenin put it, but had actively and openly fought for the interests of the women workers. But Lenin also cautions:
In our case it is not only a matter of what we demand, but also of how we demand. I believe I have made that sufficiently clear. It stands to reason that in our propaganda we must not make a fetish out of our demands for women. No, we must fight now for these and now for other demands, depending on the existing conditions, and naturally always in association with the general interests of the proletariat.[2]
In analyzing our errors, then, as well as the good work that had been done, we came to see that “taking up the woman question” meant much more than fighting for the special demands of women, such as compensative seniority, childcare, etc. We began to understand that our starting point had to always be the “general interests of the proletariat,” but that special efforts have to be made to integrate women fully into the class struggle. The winning of reforms like the ERA and childcare can be means to help women struggle on an equal basis with men. They can also be used to demonstrate that women are oppressed by the whole system, not by the lack of any particular democratic right.
Theoretical clarity on the woman question helped the overall work advance when the second shift was called back to work in early 1976. At that time, some concessions were won as GM tried to “clean up its act” with regard to women.
Large numbers of women were hired; a few were promoted to foremen. But GM intended to use these concessions against the workers, to cause divisions between men and women, forestall any support for the suit and the women’s demands. For example, they placed new hires in high classification jobs and blamed it on the lawsuit. In fact, they were merely taking advantage of a contract provision which allowed promotions out of line of seniority–their infamous “secondary openings” clause. But instead of going by the contract’s narrow definition of what constitutes a “secondary opening,” they applied this to every promotion that came up and were never challenged by the union leaders. The local officers, instead, joined GM’s chorus of “the women’s lawsuit is the cause of all the problems!”
But the women’s lawsuit could in no way be blamed for the worsened conditions in the plant. Speed-up and job overloading were brutal as GM tried to “break in” the newly returned and newly hired workers. Anger was building against these attacks, but the workers’ level of organization and struggle was not very high, and the union and company bosses were frantically trying to divide the workers.
Understanding these conditions, we formulated our tactics and demands. There were four different aspects of the work that we focused on in order to correct our past errors.
The first was to fight for the women’s rights inside the plant and link this up with the legal battle. GM’s attacks on the women gave us ample opportunity to do this. For example, most workers returned to their original departments after the layoff, but a number of minority women were singled out to be sent to the Body Shop, where very few women had worked before. GM’s racist excuse was that they were “bigger and stronger,” even though the group included some very small women. We quickly publicized this incident throughout the plant and circulated petitions against this blatant discrimination.
We were able to expose the triple oppression which came down on these women, linking it to the fact that the jobs in the “hell-hole” Body Shop, which had been done mainly by minority men for years, were far too heavy and difficult for all the workers, men and women of all nationalities. The main demand of the petition was to lighten up the jobs for all. The union leaders covered up for GM’s racist policy by blaming the assignment on one “racist clerk,” but they were forced to get some of the women assigned to jobs they could handle more easily.
In another department, women were consistently denied bathroom breaks. When a woman communist was given a 30-day discipline for walking off the line to go to the bathroom, her fellow workers helped draw up and distribute a leaflet. They raised so much hell with the foreman that she was quickly brought back to work and the women were given more bathroom relief.
In these and other struggles, the men comrades took on the job of going among the men workers to discuss, often heatedly, why the women’s struggles were in their interests too. They pointed out that not only did the women’s fight weaken the same system that enslaved the men, but the immediate gains of the women directly benefitted the men as well. For example, there was a greater variety of protective clothing available because of the women’s demands for coveralls and gloves that fit. When GM had to lighten up some of the heaviest jobs, the men also benefitted. In this way, we were correcting in the heat of the struggle some of the past errors of separating the women’s struggle off by itself.
The second area we had to pay attention to was the formulation of the specific demands in the suit that were to be the basis for support in the plant. To do this, we sought out the views of a large number of workers, men and women. To combat the constant elimination of jobs and speed-up that all the workers are subjected to, the demand to “stop job elimination, open up new jobs in all classifications” became the main demand. We pointed out that this would help all the workers, and at the same time provide opportunities for women to be promoted to some of the new jobs through affirmative action.
The Bakke decision, which was being discussed widely at this time, helped us to see the importance of maintaining, in some form, the demand for affirmative action. Just as quotas are necessary to provide openings for minorities and women in universities, advancement on the job for minorities and women usually requires some type of affirmative action program.
However, even though the UAW International leaders took a position condemning the Bakke decision, they continued to attack the Fremont Suit. Even when compensative seniority was no longer a legal issue in the suit–it had been thrown out by the courts as a result of a Supreme Court decision in 1976 which upheld seniority systems regardless of past discrimination–the top union leaders continued to oppose the suit.
In the early months of 1978 before the trial was to begin, we made numerous efforts to get the local’s backing. We pointed out that the demands of the suit were ones that the bureaucrats claimed to be fighting for, such as an end to job eliminations, a doctor on second shift, and an end to the “secondary openings” loophole.
But they continued to attack the suit, now using the excuse that we were “suing the union,” neglecting to mention that the union had put itself in the position of defendant, along with GM. They tried to use the suit to make themselves look like strong fighters against GM on the issue of lead exposure jobs. After 15 years of no fuss at all, they now made a big issue of the lead danger and planned to argue in court that GM should clean up the lead areas so that women could safely work there. In response, we argued that the lead areas should be cleaned up as much as possible, but that only the complete elimination of lead from the plant could make it truly safe for women and men. This demand, the International leaders claimed, was “too expensive” to make on GM!
All of our demands were carefully aimed against GM and with the interests of all the workers in mind. This helped win the support of many men who had previously opposed the suit. At the same time, we were sharpening up the struggle within the union, the third area that we had targetted for improvement. We won the support of the women’s committee for the suit, even though many of its members had originally been active in opposing it. When four Black women were fired by one general foreman on the same night, we brought this case to the women’s committee. We organized women and men to march into GM’s Equal Employment Office and demanded an explanation for the racist firings, and that the women be given their jobs back. This action got such broad support in the plant that the women were quickly rehired. This victory helped activate the women’s committee to become involved in mobilizing for the trial, and it helped isolate the local leaders who opposed the women’s demands.
Because we were trying to pay careful attention to the views of the masses of workers, making every effort to unite the broadest number possible, the suit gradually won more support in the plant. Even though past errors still influenced some workers to view the suit as a “women’s thing,” a large number saw the court battles and the fight for women in the plant as their fight too, against both GM and the union bigshots.
The fourth area that we paid special attention to was the problems that hold women back from active participation in the struggle. Often, women couldn’t attend meetings after work or spend a lot of time away from home on weekends. So when possible, we went out to the women’s homes, had lunchtime meetings in the plant, or luncheon meetings at women’s homes which were both social events and opportunities to discuss the struggle. As friends, we shared the women’s worries about finances, children, family tensions and the countless other problems that for working women are inseparable from their problems on the job. This understanding helped us do better education about why the source of women’s oppression is the capitalist system.
The trial, which large numbers of supporters and witnesses were preparing for and looking forward to, never took place. The EEOC’s settlement offer was gladly accepted by GM and the union lawyers. For the paltry sum of $187,500 GM put an end to this and any other claims against them for past sex discrimination.
By this time, even the workers in the plant who still had some misgivings about the suit itself could be united to oppose GM’s consent decree. The local union’s women’s committee had earlier switched their previous stand against the suit and voted to back it. Now the committee was serving as a focus for organizing opposition to the consent decree. Open meetings were held and leaflets went out in the plant detailing the sellout of the EEOC, GM and the UAW. Women’s committee members and others circulated letters of protest to the decree. These were signed by several hundred women and men. A large number of the men now expressed their support for our fight to overturn the settlement because they could see that we were fighting the “three-headed monster”–government, corporation and union bosses–in a very real way.
Over 50 workers came to the hearing to argue against the decree. One after another, they stood up and exposed the judge and those whose interests he served. One woman told him, “You say the decree will solve our problems, but we know GM can’t be trusted. You have your mind already made up in GM’s favor!” The truth of her statement was proven, when, after listening to the workers’ angry denunciations of GM, the judge said he “saw no reason not to approve the settlement.” The fact that the court, the EEOC and the union leaders all ended up protecting and serving General Motors was the biggest lesson impressed on the women and men workers who participated in the struggle against the settlement.
This was the main lesson we tried to sum up among the broad masses of workers in the plant. We did education on this point and on the aims of the women’s struggle on many levels: at union meetings, women’s committee meetings, and in the course of union elections, as well as in daily discussions with workers on the line.
A large variety of leaflets came out–some from rank-and-file supporters of the suit and some from the CPML. Some of these were brief and used cartoons to rally broad opposition to the consent decree and expose the maneuvers of the courts. Other leaflets went more into depth in explaining the decree and linking it to a variety of other attacks coming down in the plant.
Women workers also helped write articles for The Call, and these articles in turn helped carry out revolutionary education and build the struggle. Women and men learned from The Call that they have many allies in their struggle against the system, and some of them were drawn into Call discussion groups.
Women were trained in the day-to-day battles of the class struggle as well as in the theory of Marxism-Leninism. Some women who had been fearful of speaking out in public gradually learned to be very effective speakers and agitators. For the first time, many women were getting the opportunity to speak to the press, address outside meetings and attend demonstrations and picket lines. All this served to implement the Party’s policy on special training for women comrades.
Especially at the time of fighting against the decree, Lenin’s writings on the state and on the woman question were discussed with many workers, and a study day was later held to sum up some of the lessons that the workers had learned.
One of the gains that emerged from the fight against the consent decree was a good working relationship between two communist organizations, the CPML and the League of Revolutionary Struggle (Marxist-Leninist). Leaflets came out from both organizations exposing the sell-out, and supporters of both groups were active in bringing workers to court. These very basic efforts to carry out joint work are important in the struggle to build communist unity and served to expose the rotten line of the so-called “Revolutionary Communist Party” and other phony “leftists” in the plant, who did nothing but echo the union leaders’ cries that the women’s suit was “divisive.”
Overall, the work over the past five years helped win respect for the communists. Through the controversy which raged around the suit, many workers learned about the source of women’s oppression and the need for unity in fighting GM and the capitalist system. As communists we learned a great deal about the need to base our tactics on an objective analysis of what the bosses were up to and what the masses were willing to fight for.
But the main thing we grasped through the struggle was a deeper understanding of what it means that the woman question is a revolutionary question. Women are an essential part of the class struggle. But because of their historical oppression, unless special attention is paid to involving them, they and the whole working class cannot advance.
When women are given correct leadership and the opportunity to fight, they can advance quickly into the front ranks, alongside their brothers. The strong fighting role that women are now taking at GM Fremont and in UAW Local 1364 is a real life testimony to this truth of Marxism and is due, in some measure, to the work begun by the October League five years ago.
[1] Clara Zetkin, “My Recollections of Lenin,” appearing as appendix to V.I. Lenin, The Emancipation of Women (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 112.
[2] Zetkin, Ibid., pp. 112-13.