Betrayed and enraged
SWEDISH women feel betrayed, enraged and bewildered. Will their response be to build a Women's Party? Our correspondent explains the
International Viewpoint #254 March 1994 background to this debate.
bosses organisation, and to the bourgeois parties that the SAP hopes will become governmental partners after the
September election.
Moreover, it was only part of a
EVA NIKELL* — Stockholm, 30 January 1994
R
ECENT opinion polls have shown that forty percent of those interand men — would consider voting for a Women's Party in the next parliamentary election, to be held in September of
This could, of course, be only a symbolic protest, but it demonstrates that more and more people, of both sexes, are sick and tired of politics which puts concrete before people; politics which prioritises bridges and motorways over health, schooling and the
In January of this year the Social Democratic Labour Party (SAP)! "promised" to lower the benefit level of Sweden's famous parental leave system from ninety to eighty percent of salary.
SAP Secretary, Mona Sahlin, said in explanation that: "This move hurts, but we must make it in order to preserve the welfare state." This decision was further accompanied by support being given to the Liberal Party (also known as the People's Party [Fp]) and their compulsory "daddy's month". (If the father does not take at least one month out of the twelve possible during a seven year period, he would lose his entitlement to his full twelve months leave.)
"Family packages" are hot stuff in the build up to September's election.
### Small revolution
Long parental leave in Sweden meant a small revolution occurred in ordinary people lives, and in the general attitude towards masculinity and femininity.
The system gives parents, fathers and/or mothers in any combination, the right in law to take leave of absence whilst continuing to draw ninety percent of their salary during a period of twelve months for each child, until their twelfth birthday. (With reduced net tax ninety percent salary is, for most people, similar to one-hundred percent and it gives
Today up to thirty-seven percent of men take at least some parental leave, a figure which has risen in the last four to five years from twenty-five precent. The total of parental leave used by fathers is 9.1 percent. In the main, this leave is taken following the end of breast feeding. Other men work only six hours a day, or stay at home one day a week, when the children are small, in order to reduce the number of hours spent in day
"For the first time in modern history we have created the "two-parent family" says feminist historian Ann-Sofie Ohlander. She comments further that her eighteen year-old male students — as future fathers — find it totally undemocratic that they did not have this legal provision before.
Now however, all the establishment political parties are giving in to "the crisis"
"There must be a fundamental shift in the system", argue the bourgeois economists and neo-liberal social democrats. "But we must keep our policies about gender equality". As if gender equality could be created without economic and social possibilities!
To give parents only eighty percent of the income in a situation when women's wages are stabilized at a very low level, and when the wage gap between men and women has become much wider in all professions, will crea-
A development such as this will put a halt to the real and positive changes which have taken place in Sweden during the last fifteen years. Women have been drawn out into society and men into the family, regardless of any compulsory "daddy's month".
This "promise" from the SAP to lower parental leave benefits was of course a signal to the SAF, the Swedish whole package of "family politics" designed by the Christian Democrats. Family allowances, home worker's pay, reduction of state benefits to day care centres, the introduction of "conscience clause" into the health education system with regard to the 1975 abortion law: all of these subjects and measures have created a whirl of activity between the
However, nobody believes that any of these packages will last very long after the election. But for the "Thatcherite" bourgeois government, composed of four different parties, family politics is both a melting pot and a dividing line and it is vital for the government that it can keep the peace within its own ranks before the election.
### Power
Once again, women's interests are being prostituted to keep the men - and some women - in power.
On top of this development comes the "maid-debate". Woman economist Ann-Marie Pålsson has "discovered" that there is money within the household: "This could create real new markets" she argues, and proposes substantial tax cuts for people with low and high incomes
The aim being that high income households should hire low income people (read girls) as "maids", without any one losing economically on the deal.
Her ideas are to be seriously investigated by the current government.
In the same week the new pension system, which will systematically disfavour women, was presented
* The author is a leader of the Socialist Party (SP), Swedish section of the Fourth International.
1. The Social Democratic Labour Party (SAP) was in government from 1932-1976 and, following a short break, from 1982-1991 when it lost the last election.
2. The Liberal Party is one of the coalition partners in the current government.
3. The coalition government is comprised of, apart from the aforementioned Liberals, the Moderate Unity Party (the more rightwing component), Centre Party, and the Christian Democratic Community Party (KdS). The coalition is particularly unstable and often depends upon the support of either New Democracy or the SAP.
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SWEDEN
International Viewpoint #254 March 1994
The existing system, which is the result of one of the main class fights won by the workers movement during the fifties, is based on the best fifteen years out of thirty in wage work.
### Low income
This system disfavours women because women have low incomes, or no income at all in our mothers' generation. But, with nearly all women out in the official workforce, women little by little have begun to become pensioners with a decent living.
The new pension system - agreed upon by the government and the SAP — is based on the so called principles of "life income" and "direct input-output". 4 It expects the norm to be full-time waged work over a period of at least forty years. Agneta Stark, a popular and radical economist has called the agreement "a handshake between working class men and professional men". 20
Th e
SAP have tried to claim that the ne w
Sy S - tem is good for workin g class women, and that they do please careehas to be admitted that the new system have stable but low incomes, most working class women (fifty to sixty percent of women members of LO, the blue-collar union federation) work part time after the age of thirty, which obviously conflicts with the principle of "life
Moreover, the new system openly discriminates against people (read women) who may have studied for many years but still earn a low salary. The pension committee does not consider this to be a problem, because in their minds, people (read men) who study for a long time usually earn higher salaries.
In the name of gender equality, there is also to be a proposal that husband and wife should split their pension earnings between them. (It should be noted that this proposal is only for married people, in a culture with a thousand year long tradition of legal cohabiting.)
Stunningly, the proposal goes further, saying that as women generally live longer than men, a widow should only get "a fair proportion" of her husband's pension bonus after his death.
Contribution
The whole deal has been carefully constructed so that employers can reduce their contribution to the pension system, while the contribution of working people will have to increase. The gap, it is argued, "should" be evened out by bosses paying better wages. Despite the fact that in the 1950s the struggle around pensions resulted in years of conflict, a national referendum, the dissolution of parliament and fresh elections, the government intends to push through the "reforms" with no more than eight weeks debate. The proposals are scheduled to be presented to the parliament (Riksdag) in February and, if everything goes according to plan, passed by 25 April. The SAP's desire and need to unite with the bourgeois parties is leading Sweden into a veritable dictatorship.
The SAP's recent "shadow budget" is hell-bent on industrial growth. It is projected that other investment, to develop or enlarge employment in the public sector, would come as "a result of growth in the private sector"
The SAP, Sweden's reformist state party, the architect of the welfare state, has been thoroughly converted to the neo-liberal doctrine.
Their main aim is to get Sweden into the European Union, halt inflation and construct new large scale, non statefinanced industrial projects like the Oresund bridge or the new motorway system around Stockholm.
To meet these ends they openly sacrifice the interests of women.
The depth of political discontent amongst women is based on the drastic reduction in the standards of living for women in the 1980s. All talk about "golden days" and "yuppification" excluded women, both in the working class and
In fact, the biggest gap between female and male wages today can be found within the professional trades. Similarly, the wage gap between working class women and professional women has shrunk. And last year the number of women employed in the official labour market dropped for the first time in thirty years.
The cuts in social security, the degradation in the standards of public care, schooling and so forth made the lives of most women much harder, as workers and as mothers.
"We are already in a situation in Stockholm where day care centres built for fifteen children have to take in twenty-four. And next year there will be another fifteen percent cut, which means
4. The principle of pensions being based on "life income", ie at least 40 years, contrasts sharply with the existing system based upon the best 15 out of 30 years of work, since while many women remained in relatively low-paid jobs they did at least have the opportunity to choose the fifteen years which would go towards their pension. Similarly the principle of "direct input-output" attacks the existing pension scheme by reducing the higher level of contributions to the general fund which were required from higher earners.
could have a realistic chance of entering parliament. Was there a real movement behind Two years ago, the Swedish media "exploded" over the proposal that a Women's Party Background...
International Viewpoint #254 March 1994 that two adults will tend to forty children. What happens if there is a fire? To me it's clear that politicians prioritise cars before children", a woman unionist and health care worker said in a typical speech during a protest meeting against the the proposal, or was it only a superficial media debate?
new motorways.
The women's movement in Sweden has not yet taken on a visible, organised form on a
Extreme national scale. But behind the curtains women are organizing on a major scale in a
During the last twenty years Sweden
• Within the unions there are specific women's networks for both blue collar and white has become a rather extreme case: The collar workers. Within the LO, the blue collar and biggest union federation, there is a rate of waged work for women is one of national network called Tejligan (the "Girls Gang") which has 10 thousand members.
the highest in the world. During the most
The level of activity of this organisation is hard to measure, but its paper, Clara, reaches active years, twenty-seven to forty-five, out to 100 thousand women members every two months.
more than ninety percent of all women
Women activists in the unions put forward many of the classic demands from the femiare active in the labour market. (For men nist movement: women's right to work, equal pay, political representation, and full social the figure is ninety-five percent.) At the security. There have also been protests against the attacks on job security and the spesame time the birth rate is the second highest in Europe (the Republic of Ire-
The Swedish workers' movement, both women and men, has traditionally seen class as land being the highest).
far more important than gender. But attitudes are changing. A recent survey showed that seventy percent of the LO-men thought that equal rights for women was the most important question for the organisation to come to grips with.
"A development such
• The self-organised shelter movement is another sector of the women's movement as this will put a which grew substantially in the 1980s.
halt to the real and
Linked together through an independent national organisation, ROKS, the movement positive changes has 9 thousand active members and 132 local shelters. The organisation has some which have taken state and local funding, but most of the work is still self-financed and self-organised place in Sweden
• In all the university towns there are Women's Forums. Many women researchers work closely with the union movement, or take part in different projects to support during the last women at their workplaces.
fifteen years."
Besides these larger groups there is a myriad of local associations, women's study projects, immigrant women's associations, women's cafés and networks for women activists of all ages.
This combination - high
This means that the Swedish women's movement, in its broadest sense, is today at activity in the labour market least 50-60 thousand strong.
alongside a high birth rate —
It was the general political discontent among these thousands of women, and indeed has been possible only amongst the majority of women in the country, which, in February 1992, set the debate through an expansion in about a Women's Party alight.
female part-time work and a welfare state.
Opinion polls at that time indicated that thirty-three percent of those interviewed would
During the 1970s and consider voting for such a party.
1980s women in Sweden
Today, potential support has risen to forty percent.
became economically
The big newspaper-editors get hysterical: "Women do not care about the really imporindependent of men, tant economic issues", their columns angrily argue, day after day.
although this was relati-
And yes, it is true, women in Sweden do not care much about big bridges, new motorve. But we have in turn ways, the European Union or how to beat inflation. Instead, they often care more about become very dependent the education of their children, the health service, public transport, a clean environment on the state, and upon
- and they demand political representation.
women-friendly politi-
Will there be a Women's Party? We do not know yet. So far a network of longterm femical decisions.
nist activists have registered a "Women's List", but they have not decided if they will nal election, in 1991, stand number
For sure, if they stand, they will get in.
women in parlia-
And then we all know the real hazards begin. © ment dropped from thirty-eight to thirty-three percent, and today's political proposals and decisions are crass in their ignorance about women's needs.
Many women are turning away from traditional politics and looking for something new — like a Women's Party. *
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number of milieus: cific repercussions of such attacks on women. 21