Women's quotas in brewery
DENMARK Denmark, there is a need for womenonly unions. Otherwise, women's demands would be overlooked, and women would have difficulty in being represented, as shown by the experiences in unions that have both male and female members.
The brewery workers solved this problem by adopting a quota for women - not only in the leadership of the union but at the level of the factory organization and in the election of shop stewards. At the same time, it was established that in order
FOR THE FIRST time in Denmark - perhaps even in the whole of
Western Europe - women in a trade union have managed to win a sexual quota in the election of the leadership. Likewise, they have managed to win an agreement with the employers that in future equal numbers of men and women will be hired.
The objective is to get an equal number of men and women employed and to get the concept of men's and women's work dropped, which means equal access to all jobs.
KARIN PEITERSEN
The union is the Copenhagen workers' union, and the brewery workplaces concerned are two big
Tuborg, breweries,
Carlsberg and where there are 2,700 workers, of whom 700 are women. Until January of this year, the men and women organized in separate trade unions.
In
1903, brewery the women workers organized. But since they were not accepted by the men, they had to form their own union. The reason given for not accepting women into the existing union was that they pushed down wages and took jobs away from men.
The same reason was given when factory workers wanted to women workers' union.
join the factory
So, they had to organize their own Kvindeligt Arbejderforbund (Women's Labor Union). This union still exists. It has 100,000 members, all unskilled workers who work in factories or as cleaners. Women-only union
In contrast to the women brewery workers, the leadership of the Kvindeligt Arbejderforbund is holding on to the principle of a union for women only. They defend this by saying that so long as there is not equality in to change this rule two-thirds of the women voting would have to vote for the change.
On January 1, the men's and women's workplace organizations fused. If more than a third of the members of a workplace organization are women, at least a third of the places in that organization's leadership must go to women. There is to be an equal number of male and female shop stewards. The quota for representation in the leadership also applies to men. If the number of men or women is under a third, but more than 10 per cent, then the minority is to be assured at least one place in the leadership.
All shop stewards are automatically members of the workplace organization leadership, and if the women are under-represented in accordance with the new rules, additional representatives are to be elected from the women shop stewards and deputy shop stewards.
The day-to-day leadership of the union consists of four elected officials of whom two are to be of each sex. This is in line with the objective of having an equal number of men and women workers.
The two unions had been dis-
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union
cussing fusion for more than 20 years.
But, during this time, there had been very big conflicts.
In particular, women were very bitter about the
Cahiers du féminisme fact that it was their jobs that disappeared when automation was introduced into the breweries in the celebrates tenth birthday
1950s and 1960s. And the new jobs were taken by men.
In some breweries outside Copenhagen, women disappeared altogether from the production departments. In
Aarhus,
Denmark's second big gest city, for example, there are only
THE CAHIERS du feminisme is a quarterly socialist-feminist journal
37 women workers left, brewery published by the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR .- the and they still have their own union.
Copenhagen,
French section of the Fourth International).
women managed to