Women s Fightback Trade union conterence

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Time and again women trade unionists have come forward to fight the Tory onslaught on their rights and living standards. And each time they have run up against the limitations or outright treachery of the existing bureaucratic And they nave found a movement which has for decades ignored the issues and problems faced by women.

The March 27 Trade Union conference called by Women's Fightback is designed as a tocus for a movement to change the unions and challenge their present leadership.

The conference is open to women either as individuals or as delegates from any group, workplaie organisation, branch or women's group at local, regional or national There will be an all-day creche. Workshops on various topics under main groups: Pay: public sector and the cuts; jobs; fighting sexism; racism and the Third World.

The conference fee ir £3.50 (£2 for low-waged or unwaged non-deleg-tes). Credentials from 41 Ellington MARCH 27 leaders. level.

Street, London N7. were no medical reasons On the old form there was a separate section for recording non-medical reasons where relevant.

For 12 years, in the case of unwanted pregnancy, I have filled in such reasons and nobody has ever returned the form.

I couldn't believe I should be accused of breaking the law just because the DHSS has changed the form.

Since 1970 I have declared that I think that under the Abortion Act every woman is entitled to get an abortion up to 14 weeks. A new form shouln't make me change what I'd been saying publicly and openly for years. I've had a considerable number of letters supporting me. I've not had any from other doctors who do abortions, not that there's many of them.

When the new forms were issued, there was no guidance as to how to fill them in. They had been drawn up without consultation with gynaecologists.

There was a rather strange incident. I had been filling in the space for 'medical condition' on the new forms with 'none' for quite a while before I got a warning. I found this rather puzzling.

Since, I've discovered that some of my forms have been changed without my permission or consultation. And whatever was written instead was acceptable to the DHSS.

A principle is at stake.

This is just the thin end of the wedge. It enables restrictions in the AborIf they don't charge me then we've won a resounding victory. If nothing happens, then it is a statement de facto that abortion on demand up to 14 weeks is allowed. That would be tremendous.

If it goes to court, then it'll be a test case. But I'd rather go to court than fill in a form which I think denies women their rights.

ABOUT 250 people, nearly all women, met last Saturday at the organising conference for the Women's Right to Work Demonstration.

It was obvious from all the discussions, both in wirkshops and plenary sessions, that the vast majurity of the delegates were actively campaigning in local groups against women's unemployment.

Although the conference was• billed as organising for the demonstration, it was much more wide-ranging than this.

One particular discussion wa around the slogans of the campaign - Scottish unemployment last week a perennial issue that has been raised on the Action Committee since its inception last year.

The objection to the central slogan "For a Woman's Right to Work" is that it denies the importance of the real, unrecognised work that women do in the home.

Ai ditional slogans have been added to try to get round this problem, but no doubi the dispute' will continue. The most encouraging aspect of the day was the number of ideas for campaigning that were suggested.

Every delegate was issued with an "Action Kit' which contained factsheets and information from various. campaigns One proposal was for a "Stand up and be Counted" campaign, to get women who are not at work and not on the unemployment register to sign an alternative register.

This could then be used to publicise the large numbers of women who aren't employed and don't show up on the statistics.

The morning workshops •centred on various aspects of women's employment, including Women's Right to Work, sexual harassment, fighting for jobs, positive action. Many experiences were brought in both of general campaigns and of disputes like the Liverpool typists' strike.

In the afternoon, regional workshops discussed how the policies of the campaign could be acted on in the local arens.

Finally, a resolution was passed that if by April 3 the Labour Party and/or TUC have not officially backed a demonstration to complement the "Festival" on June 5, then the Action Committee will call the demonstration themselves.

We must not let up the pressure on the Labour Party and TUC. The next month is the most vital time to flood them with resolutions demanding that they take women's unemployment seriously and pull their members out for a demonstration in June. CONTACT: Action Committee for a Woman's Right to Work, 181 Richmond Road, London E8.

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Socialist Organiser, Thursday February 25. 1982 Paze 11 ath of the 'tin king Books and pamphlets that you should read Newsline attempt to refute SO comes out De by Santiago Fortin artin Bolivian miners VERY FEW people indeed will mourn the belated demise of Don Antenor Patino, 84, two weeks ago La New York clinic. Patino was the son of one of the twentieth century's leading entrepreneurs, Simon Patino, who became known as the 'tin king' and amassed a fabulous fortune on the world market at the expense of generations of Bolivian miners- whose average life expectancy is 35.

Patino the elder started his career as a clerk in a silver mining office in the 1890s. It was a time of considerable crisis in the capitalist system, when the majority of the world's states were turning to the gold standard from bimetallism (measuring the value of currencies against both silver and gold).

Paid off by his employer, with a part-share in a disused silver mine, La Salvadora (now part of the huge Siglo XX complex), Patino tried his hand at exploiting the then modestly priced metal of tin, which all other mineowners cast aside as virtual waste.

Among other factors, the necessity of feeding British troops in the Boer War led to the rapid rise of the tin can, and the market for the metal expanded very quickly.

By diligent management and ruthless methods more akin to primitive accumulation than the rules of competition under monopoly capital, Patino cornered a major share in the market. By 1910 he had freed himself from dependence on the British banks in Santiago, and was even displacing British and French • mineowners with his greater local knowledge and contacts.

When European imperialism drove itself into war in 1914, Patino was set to make his own killing in an open market in which his only real competitors were in distant Malaysia and the still underdeveloped mines of the Congo.

By 1924 the family corporation made the move to Delaware; which has some of the laxest company legislation in the world, and denied the weakling Bolivian state any but the most minimal taxes. The great man himself set up camp in Paris where as ambassador he could keep an eye on young Antenor, who was flexing his business muscles after a sobering stay at an English public school, and put as much distance as possible between himself and the massacre of hundreds of his workers that was a TH ritual central to the extraction of surplus value under the most horrendous conditions.

Company requests for 'law and order' during strikes led to the deaths of hundreds in 1921, 1923, Between 1911 and 1952 only two Bolivian governments lacked the expert advice of a Patino employee in the cabinet, and together with the smaller family firms of Aramayo and Huchschild (known collectively as the 'rosca'), the Patinos ruled the country almost absolutely until the revolution in 1952 which led to the nationalis.ation of their properties.

By then the elder. Patino had been dead for five years. Antenor was in charge-conveniently. but not coincidentally well away from the country with his wife, Princess Christina de Bourbon - when mine workers took up arms, defeated the army and forced the new government led by the petty bourgeois MNR to nationalise the mines and give the workers a veto on all management decisions.

This was an undeniable blow, but Patino capital had long expanded into numerous enterprises, including the Williams Harvey smelter in Barrow, controlled by the family until its closure in the late 70s.

Antenor continued to direct the billion-dollar businesses from his chalet outside Zurich and his offices in New York, unconcerned at the terror and poverty still suffered by his compatriots as they moled out the tin he continued to control on the international market. His homeland, for all its woes, did not have its soil besmirched by his presence for 40 years. Andrew Hornung introduction to the by Marx and Engels.

THE slogan of the Marxists -to organise a Labour Party was vindicated again in the late 1870s when Labour Parties arose spontaneously in many cities to run candidates for government office. These spontaneous organisations led to the founding in 1877 of the Socialist Labour Party of North America.

But again the Lasalleans diverted the movement from the establishment of a real workers' party and led the SLP into another alliance with a moneyreforming • group, the Greenback Party.

In 1880, the year of the formation of the Greenback-Labour Party, Marx, in a letter to Friedrich Sorge in New York, turned again to the theme of the need to relate to the real movement in his comments on the situation in France: 'The economic section of ¡the election programme for France!' he wrote approvingly, "consists sulely of demands that have spontaneously risen out of the labour movement itself, except for the introductory passages where the communist goal is defined in a few words... Up to the present time only sects existed there, which naturally received their mot d'ordre (slogan) from the founder of the sect.

Lever The Socialist Law passed in Germany in concludes his two-part to Americans"

most part and treat it in a doctrinaire, and dogmatic way as something that has to be learned by heart .. To them it is a credo and not a guide to action. What is more they learn " по English on principle Engels characterised the main trade union organisation, i the Knights of organisation" a with 'con- Labour, ( as "ludicrous fused principles" Yet, opposing the abstentionists among the Marxists, Engels insisted, *it is necessary to work inside them, to form within this still quite open plastic mass a core of people who understand the movement and its aims:

the Knights of Labour of "The rottenest side Engels saw as 'their political neutrality", • Again he spelled out the importance of a Labour Party: 'The first great step of importance for eveLy country newly entering into the movement is always the constitution of the workers as an independent politica programme of this party is party That the firs still confused and extremeChedeficient, that it raises deticient banner Henry George, these are unavoidable evils but also merely transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop, and they can have the opportunity only when they have a movement of their own..

in the same letter he accuses the Socialist