Feminism and the unions
WEST GERMANY demanded the abolition of Paragraph 218 without any sort of replacement for it.
Today, the leadership of the public services union (OTV) supports the demand of the feminists. And the motion of the IG Metall women's conference took a clear stand on this. It said that after ten years experience with the system of "indications, (that is, everything that restriets the right to abortion), the women members of this union have come to
IN WEST GERMANY, of course, the unions in general are male-dominated organizations, and they follow a policy that is very far from offering a consistent defense of women's interests. Likewise, the need for waging an offensive struggle against the specific oppression of women in their own ranks is the least of their concerns.
This, however, has not kept active women trade unionists from becoming radicalized today and for years earlier around all aspects of their lives, as women and trade unionists. Nor has it kept them from gaining, slowly but surely, a voice in their organizations. STEFFIE ENGERT unions' or in certain cases within pregnancy, the conclusion that the only possible answer is the right of women, and women alone, to choose in full independence and freedoin.
For women trade unionists, demands for equality concretely mean plans for promoting women and job quotas, which they see as representing a step forward on the road to self-determination.
In relation to the problems existing in their own ranks, the Greens asked Sybille Plogstedt and Kathleen Bode to make a study of sexual harassment on the job. Its contents have proved explosive, including in the unions. This theme is at present a key axis
Leafing through the women's publications, as well as through congress documents, you see a real influence of feminist ideas. This is beginning to be reflected in Women workers participate in the 35-hour struggle (DR) the application of some concepts. For example, in a contribution to the most recent women's conference of Solidarital wit den IG Metall, the union women's commission correctly wrote the following about the dismantling of social gains:
"This policy is obstructing the emancipation of women. If the welfare state is dismantled and the responsibilities linked to human reproduction again fall on individuals alone, this would mean the going back on a large scale to the patriarchal capitalist structures of domination."
Hans Mayr himself, a member of the IG Metall leadership, felt obliged to use the term "patriarchal" in his report to the congress. This could not, however, conceal the fact that had no serious proposal to make for taking up the fight against such things.
Concepts, of course, have their importance for developing consciousness of a problem. But, as the example of Mayr well shows, they can also serve as decorations and distractions. The concrete content of advanced demands is far more important. Union supports feminist demands on abortion law
One of the events that will go down in the history of women's work by the unions is the turn that we saw with respect to Paragraph 218 of the penal code, which permits abortion oniy in the first 12 weeks of
International Viewpoint 10 March 1986
22 weeks.
The traditional position of the unions was to support such restrictions, while the women's movement of the work of many of the IG Metall women's cominissions, along with the still acute question of equal rights and
19