SWEDEN Women's conference a historic step for the union movement "DID YOU KNOW that every waitress had 60 customers to look after at the evening meal yesterday? What did you think about the kind of lighting we have on the job?" The serving staff at the Folkets Hus in Borlänge were the only women who doing their usual jobs at the women's conference of the National Labour Confederation (LO) on March 6-8. They introduced the concluding session.
When they got up on the podium in Borlänge on March 8, they highlighted the situation of women in the union movement. At the same time, this offered a sort of condensation of the whole LO women's conference. EVA NIKELL ing nearer. It is accepted for menopausal women to be sour and cross.
If doctors take this seriously, that should be another argument against low wages and bad working conditions, instead of for medication for hot and cold flushes. It would have been important to have an LO seminar on women and health under the heading of "Health — a class question."
"The union doesn"t take our problems seriously"
In the seminar on "Women in the union," people talked about the need for analyzing the obstacles to women becoming involved in the unions. Along with well-known problems, such as the lack of time and energy, meetings held after working hours when children have to be picked up from day-care centers and so on, a very interesting study was done among women municipal workers in Göteborg. Two women researchers interviewed many women in various departments at the big municipal hospital.
These women are all union members — they consider that to be a self-evident act of solidarity. They do not take part in union meetings, but discuss their work situation often with fellow workers in the department. Many of them have views about working conditions, relations with fellow workers, the content of the work and so on, and they raise demands concerning their circumstances.
When they were asked why they did not go to union meetings and take up their questions there, they all said: "No, but the union doesn't pay any attention to these problems." This study, and a serious discussion about it could have been conducted in the seminar on women's role in the unions.
Reformism has worked, Ingela Thalén said, when she presented the government's equality proposal. She continued: "this is an effective model for the future."
Reformism has worked so far for some groups and in some situations. But by no means for all. The gap became apparent in the seminar about the future of the cleaning profession.
An experiment has been carried out in Malmö, with work groups of cleaners aimed at giving greater self-confidence and greater opportunities for the workers' to control their own work situation. The idea came from a woman who had worked as a cleaner for 18 years. It was clear that the project had proved successful, and that was encouraging.
At the same time, we were in a town where a group of cleaners time after time have been forced to strike to defend their basic conditions. The last time, they lost. Now all of them have been fired.
If Inez Arnesson [leader of the Borlänge cleaners] and her fellow workers had been invited to the conference, it could have been made into a powerful demonstration
E VEN IN THE labor movement's own premises not very much thought is given to the conditions of staff workers. At the conclusion of the women's conference, this was raised and the assembled delegates learned something new. Practical solidarity is not just something for other people. We ourselves have to be able to look at the daily conditions each of us face.
LO's women's conference was a historic event. It was the first time in recent history that the largest contingent of the trade-union movement has met just to discuss "women's questions."
There has not often been such free criticism in the trade-union movement. Discussion has seldom been so down to earth and personal as it was when the women service personnel took up their problems.
A relatively large number of young women trade-union activists came to Borlänge. The conference offered good opportunities for contacts with other people in the same trade union. The metalworkers' union's idea of distributing identical scarves to its delegates facilitated making contacts.
The women's conference was an important starting point, a new step in the growth of the women's movement in our time. Of course, there were shortcomings. It is important to look at them in order to do better next time.
The debate was to a large extent one among "experts." There was little room for the conference delegates to play a real part. 6 Many of the opening speakers stressed that the real "experts" are the women who have International Viewpoint #140 • May 2, 1988 spent years cleaning, washing, looking after people or on assembly lines.
It was significant that in the report from the retail clerks' seminar on the future of the service professions, the reporter stressed that since everyone on the panel had come from the workplace they had almost immediately started a discussion, and "the audience liked that." Too many male speakers at conference
There was a lot of muttering in the corridors, both among the older and the younger people about "old men," and too many panels. One experience of the women's movement since the start of the 1960s has been the importance of organizing discussion in small groups, giving all participants the maximum opportunity to get involved.
Experience has also taught that women need other women as models. It would have been possible to get more women to participate in the panels, even if these women did not necessarily come from LO. Important information has been forthcoming from independent women researchers who should have participated in the conference.
In Dagens Nyheter [Sweden's quality daily] in recent weeks there has been a debate on menopausal problems. Women doctors have argued that menopausal problems may be a well-founded protest by middle-aged women against poor social and economic conditions, prolonged fatigue and worry about old age that is draw-
of women's solidarity in a situation where of women's solidaritv in a situation where an open struggle has to be waged to defend workers' rights.
The conference was clearly reformist in the sense that what was discussed were projects and endeavors that all require the agreement of the bosses: new wage systems, new work organization, a new job evaluation system. Discussion of "systems" is interesting, but it is not sufficient. That is probably going to become all the more apparent in the period of more difficult economic conditions facing us.
Finally, the women's conference became an open social-democratic election rally. Most women in country, and especially LO women, intransigently defend the public sector and social welfare. They oppose the bourgeois parties' schemes for privatization, cutbacks and for partial payment for day care.
The social democracy is the biggest party in the LO. But the social-democratic local organization in Söderhamn is considering not doing election work this vear because not doing election work this year because the social-democratic leadership in the provincial parliament is closing the hospital.
Not everyone thinks that the social democrats' practices are the best way to combat the bourgeois parties. A lot of women active in the unions consider themselves politically independent, or belong to another section of the workers' movement. Focusing a union congress on the need for a social-democratic electoral victory amounted to contempt for their views.
### Campaign against pornography
There were many new, interesting and important elements in the conference, for example, the retail clerks' campaign against pornography. It is their members who are forced to sell trash every day; it is from them that effective boycott action has to come.
Personally, I met a lot of old friends that I had not come across for many years. A journalist on the Göteborgstidning, who was covering the conference, was involved in the Women's Tribunal in Göteborg in 1981. [This was the largest national women"s meeting held in Sweden and marked the culmination of the movement of the 1970s.] We made some comparisons.
In 1981, we brought 700 people from the entire country, depending entirely on volunteer forces. We set up work groups for various areas half a year in advance. We let women talk about what they had never talked about in public before, we let experiences and knowledge come forward that previously had barely seen the light of day. The Women's Tribunal was an overwhelming experience. It brought together the best that a long effort in women's work had produced. The LO conference had no creche — a thing that would have been unthinkable at the tribunal. Many single mothers came to it. Three young men looked after
SWEDEN • USSR the children for three days.
That was 1981. It was the last big united activity of the women's movement organized at the time. We thought that it would be easy to organize a follow-up.
A powerful force against the existing order
Now it is 1988. Consciousness of women's problems has deepened in society. The LO conference was an expression of that. There is still energy in the women's movement, even if it is no easy thing today to bring people together in a hall. And the real women's movement does not have much to do with the "Women Can" exhibitions orThe struggl
Hadamanda ganized by bank managers. [These are exhibitions by women who have made it in traditionally male jobs to show that women can succeed in these occupations. They have increasingly become affairs for female executives and the like.]
Together women active in the unions, independent women researchers, women in immigrant associations and women in the political parties of the workers' movement can become a powerful force challenging the existing order.
We must see to it that LO's women's conference in Borlänge is a beginning and not a conclusion. *
[From Internationalen, March 17, 1988, newspaper of the Socialist Party, Swedish section of the Fourth International.] e of the independent social clubs AN INSIGHT into the political struggle developing in the Soviet Union is provided by the following article. It was written by the best known leader of the independent social clubs, the first legal political organizations not controlled by the state to be permitted since the establishment of the bureaucratic dictatorship. It was published in the February 6 issue of Rinascita, the Italian Communist Party weekly. Obviously, the conflict in the Soviet Union concerns all the Communist parties, and the Italian CP— which has good contacts in Moscow - has its own bones to pick.