And, as we continue to see the financial systems and banking giants saved, most
remedies are designed without women in mind and are ignoring the real impact,
especially on women of color in the United States. Recently, women and
poverty advocates organized “A Day of Voices: Women's Tribunal on Poverty” in New York. At that
meeting, the disparate impact of the downturn was highlighted:

Oliveira estimated that for every Wall Street job that will
be lost in coming weeks and months, three service-level employees are fired.
"There's an incredible ripple effect way beyond the specific jobs that are
counted in the financial sector," she said.

"The service industry is heavily dominated by
low-paying jobs by women," Oliveira said. "As there's shrinkage in
that economy, there's a loss of jobs for low-paying workers and that impacts
women incredibly."

The conference
pointed out that real economic rescue packages should include increased job
training, increased access to Medicaid for working mothers, and increasing the
earned income credit for the poor.

But it’s not only
during hard times, as we all know, even during the best of times women,
especially women of color, make less money than men. BUT, there is a solution.

Unions!

Today, a new report
by the Center
for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) was released that documents a large
wage and benefit advantage for women workers in unions relative to their
non-union counterparts. According to the report:

The data suggest that even after controlling for systematic
differences between union and non-union workers, union representation
substantially improves the pay and benefits that women receive. On average,
unionization raised women’s wages by 11.2 percent – about $2.00 per hour –
compared to non-union women with similar characteristics. Among women workers,
those in unions were about 19 percentage points more likely to have
employer-provided health insurance and about 25 percentage points more likely
to have an employer-provided pension.

In fact the report
highlights that in some circumstances that joining a union is more likely to
help women than getting a four-year degree.

For the average woman, joining a union has a much larger effect
on her probability of having health insurance (an 18.8 percentage-point
increase) than finishing a four-year college degree would (an 8.4
percentage-point increase, compared to a woman with similar characteristics who
has only a high school diploma).

As a life-long
feminist who has been working in the women’s rights movement for the past 16
years, I have been arguing for years that the best path for women’s empowerment
is through her union. We can not be equal without a voice on the job and a
guarantee that we will be treated fairly at work.  Finally, we have the statistical proof to
what so many of us have always known: A
women’s place is in her union!

 

OttawaCitizen.com - Job support for women
fades during fiscal crisis
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/story.html?id=e1637147-d3e5-4430-b892-da1f01cd6e94

Women’s
ENews- Crisis Likely to Deepen Women's Poverty in New York
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3753/context/archive

Unions and Upward Mobility for Women
Workers

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/unions_and_upward_mobility_for_women_workers_2008_12.pdf