UE Convention Resolutions
Advance Women’s Rights
Women make up 45 percent of the world’s workforce. Yet women account for 70 percent of the world’s population living in poverty. Women in developing countries work an average of 60 to 90 hours per week. World wide, women earn an average of 75 percent of men’s pay in nonagricultural work. In the U.S. women are working longer hours to make ends meet. Inequality has reached levels not seen since the 1920s. To cut their labor costs and increase their profits, companies intensify their exploitation of women. In 10 years, 80 percent of all women in industrialized countries and 70 percent of all women globally will work outside of the home. We need rules of the global economy that work for working families.
All trade agreements negotiated by the Bush administration have ignored the internationally recognized right to nondiscrimination in the workplace, and none has included adequate labor rights protections. Internal political will and external pressure to provide a "beneficial investment climate" are often so strong that countries decide to ignore the labor rights violations committed by export companies. Women enter the workplace in greater numbers, but at the high cost of discrimination in the workplace. This is unacceptable.
The right to be free from sex discrimination in the workplace is one of the five labor rights considered essential by the International Labor Organization (ILO). When we fight for women’s rights in the work place, we fight for the rights of all. This was a lesson UE learned in its earliest days. Few working women have paid sick leave although 72 percent of women with children under the age of 18 are in the labor force. The U.S. lags far behind other industrialized countries in providing childcare. Women rely on Social Security more than men because they disproportionately work in lifetime low-wage jobs with few benefits and live an average of seven years longer. Unions are an effective weapon against discrimination and poverty. Women in unions typically earn much more then women in unorganized workplaces. Unions close the wage gap based on gender and minority status for their members.
Across the U.S. research has shown that women in service work are in the lowest paying jobs, have fewer opportunities for advancement, and that institutional change is needed to address this. African American and Latino women workers in particular face triple oppression as workers, women, and people of color.
Since the affiliation of the Connecticut Independent Labor Union / Connecticut Independent Police Union as UE Local 222, the union has embarked on a campaign to raise the miserably low pay of school paraprofessionals, 95 percent of whom are women and earn substantially less than any other public employees in the state of Connecticut. This is from decades of discrimination against paraprofessionals, who are viewed by those in power, predominantly men, as nothing more than glorified "baby sitters" – not as the front-line educators they really are. It is a travesty that those unions who have historically claimed to be the "public employee unions" have not taken up the fight of pay equity for paraprofessionals. In the short time UE has represented paraprofessionals in Connecticut, the union has been successful in making pay equity a key part of the work at the bargaining table, in the legislature, and bringing paraprofessionals together to support each other and their work.
Women workers experience the denial of family medical leave and shared leave, and the refusal of a reasonable request for a different shift so they can better care for themselves and their families. While these are problems that can impact all workers, they are particularly heavy on women given their generally greater responsibility and burden of family care in the current society.
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 70th UE CONVENTION:
- Calls on UE locals and regions to educate their members to bargain for women’s equality and to fight women’s oppression in all aspects at their workplace;
- Calls for a high-quality federal day care program and calls upon UE locals to renew the fight for employer-funded childcare in their respective contracts;
- Calls on the union at all levels to demand pay equity for women recognizing that organization and collective bargaining are the best and most lasting ways to achieve this goal;
- Calls on all UE locals and regions to educate their members and women’s organizations to support workers’ rights by demanding that companies, the U.S. government and international financial institutions adopt and enforce core workers’ rights;
- Supports legislation to create a welfare system which does not penalize women for staying home to take care of children and offers genuine job assistance with a living wage and quality child care;
- Supports the right of all women, regardless of economic status, to choose whether to continue or terminate a pregnancy, to have access to free, confidential, and effective birth control and family planning services, and to be protected against forced sterilization;
- Calls on UE at all levels to educate the members on the workplace menace that is sexual harassment, and to combat harassment, intimidation and sexist attitudes wherever found; and supports strengthening workers’ compensation laws in all states with improved provisions on injuries sustained from physical attacks in the workplace;
- Calls on UE locals to press for company-paid training programs for all workers, allowing women to upgrade their skills, and calls upon UE locals to fight for the rights of women to enter those jobs that have been traditionally reserved for men;
- Calls on UE at all levels of the union to actively provide training, encouragement and support for women to become active at all levels of the union, including leadership, and fight any aspect of women’s oppression inside the union;
- Calls UE to include in its 2009 convention a workshop track for women in leadership positions or those who are interested in leadership positions.