SPANISH STATE / WOMEN AND NIGHTWORK Towards equal misery THE 54 signatory countries to Convention 89 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), which forbids women from working at night in industry, had until February 27, 1992 to terminate this agreement or to sign up for another ten years. France and Switzerland have just taken, almost simultaneously, the same decision: not to renew Convention 89, which they claim is obsolete. MARIANNE EBEL
MARIANNE EBEL B OTH governments waited until the last minute to announce their decision, the French government using the pretext of a decision made on July 25, 1991 by the European Community's Court of Justice -following a submission by an Alsatian manufacturer - which ruled that French legislation was in contradiction with a European directive of 1976 on equality between men and women.
There was nothing, apart from the pressure of the employers and its willingness to submit to them, to stop France's Socialist government from resolving the contradiction by extending the ban on night work to men, thus permitting it to renew its signature to Convention 89.
Switzerland, for its part, advanced a pseudo-argument about Euro-compatibility and bravely hid behind Germany, which has never adhered to Convention 89, but which has just declared unconstitutional a law banning night work for women.
These decisions will worsen the situation of women everywhere in the world without in any way improving that of men. Given that Europe has abandoned Convention 89, the industrialized countries of the Third World (which remain almost the sole signatories of this accord, already renounced by Ireland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg and never recognized by Britain and Germany will feel themselves no longer bound by an article which has been emptied of all content. This will leave the field free to the multinationals to increase the superexploitation of labour in these countries. In Europe trade union mobilizations might allow the introduction of protective legislation, but the women of the Third World can hope for no such alleviation.
WOMEN AND NIGHTWORK
Workers now have an equal right to destroy their health through night work. Rather than prohibiting night work for all unless it is not socially indispensable, it is now authorized in a general fashion, in the full knowledge that it does violence to our interior clock and that it leads to irreversible damage.
The health, the lives of those who produce the wealth, the equilibrium of families, the everyday life of children, none of this counts for anything. The governments have many other concerns... and in the first place that of pleasing the bosses by lifting the obstacles to international competition, as has been frankly admitted by the Swiss federal councillor Jean-Pascal Delamuraz, responsible for the public economy: "To renew our signature to the Convention would go against the efforts undertaken to improve the framing conditions of our economy and the attraction of the Swiss economic area... To maintain this old instrument was dangerous. It was to run the risk of being badly paced in the face of competition" (24 Heures, February 20, 1992). This is also an argument, of course, in favour of legalizing child labour.
In France the Minister of Labour, Mme. Martine Aubry, has preferred to emphasize professional equality, promising that a draft law will be introduced in the spring session envisaging compensation in the form of reduced hours or wage increases. In reality, far from guaranteeing equality, this step backwards will cement inequalities.
• What kind of night work will be offered to women?
The same repetitive, monotonous and unqualified work that women have to do during the day, with all the added inconvenience. Far from marking any real step towards equality, night work will mean growing social isolation with no chance of promotion.
• Night work will not be voluntary.
By suppressing the protection previously enjoyed by women, the state exposes everyone - and in particular those who are threatened with being marginalized - to the arbitrary whim of the logic of the profits of the employers.
That much is obvious if one looks at who mala ninte in thnce captors which already works nights in those sectors which already today allow night work for all: it is overwhelmingly those who really have no other choice, refugees or immigrants, single mothers, those on low wages, those who can find no other work or those whose qualifications are judged insuffi8 cient. International Viewpoint # 225 • March 30,
• Women and men are not equal on the labour market.
More likely to be without qualifications and to be dependent on work which is not too far from their home, women are less mobile than men and have less alternatives than men to refuse whatever work is offered to them - such as night work. Sleep — a right or a privilege?
The suppression of Convention 89 of the ILO aggravates the situation of women without any compensation: they will continue in fact to do two days of consecutive work, one in the factory at night, the other in the house during the day, this time with the privilege of no longer sleeping at night.
Certainly, only motherhood in the biological sense of the term (pregnancy/childbirth) distinguishes a woman from a man. Outside of these exceptional periods, men and women should be treated the same.
There would be no problem with this conception of equality if health protection was guaranteed for all rather than being increasingly challenged and if one forgets that after childbirth there is the child, that after the office or the factory, there are the children, the shopping, the meals, the housework, another day of work. In short, for real equality of rights and opportunities, it is necessary to begin by recognizing the social dimension of maternity/paternity and remembering that there is inevitably a friction between waged work and educational/household work.
With a concern for equality that is absent when it comes to guaranteeing equal wages, the employers have been quick to denounce the ban on night work for women as discriminatory.
In France, moreover, they have not waited for the government to renounce Convention 89 before imposing enterprise agreements introducing night work for women in two sectors directly covered by Convention 89 - electronics and the metallurgical industry.
Between 1988 and 1989, 106 enterprise agreements have thus been concluded without the trade unions, apart from the CGT (France's biggest trade union confederation, aligned with the Communist Party), protesting against such abuses. In Switzerland trade union resistance has been 1992 more firm: basing themselves on Convention 89, the unions have succeeded in imposing respect for this agreement, in particular preventing the micro-electronics sector from introducing night work for women.
The fact that in Switzerland (a country not renowned for its workers mobilizations!) the bosses must wait until 1993 before exploiting women workers at night demonstrates that a more determined struggle on the political and trade union fronts would have allowed a more favourable balance of forces to be built in Europe.
The EC Court of Justice and the Karlsruhe Tribunal would not have been able to conclude so easily that the ban on night work for women was discriminatory if women, aided by the workers organizations, had been able to defend a fundamental idea: in the context of the social inequalities which they suffer from, the suppression of a specific protection for women discriminates against them.
A genuine commitment to sexual equality would mean examining how to extend the ban on unnatural working hours to men, how to limit the inevitable health risks linked to night work and how to advance concretely towards a more equitable sharing of educational and domestic tasks. But this would imply priorities other than those followed today in the countries of the European Community, which essentially involve satisfying the demands of the employers for increased flexibility.
Slaves of the machine
At the end of a 20th century which has seen astounding technical and scientific progress, we are becoming more than ever the slaves of the machine. What future do we want for ourselves and our children? A society which works 24 hours a day to line the pockets of the few?
Are our lives to be dictated by the sole priority of productivity? This is the challenge to be met. Women, the trade unions and the workers organizations have just suffered a defeat - a defeat which should be recognized and learnt from. *
HAITI