Women's Views on News |
| Posted: 05 Sep 2014 05:25 AM PDT
Women of NATO member states and others, gathering for a demonstration against the Summit in Newport this weekend, are saying 'No to NATO' for many reasons. Military expenditure squanders money needed for the education, health and housing services badly needed by women, who carry the main burden of domestic life. Women suffer displacement, rape, loss, injury and increased burdens due to war. NATO's military bases in many neighbourhoods are a source of social stress, toxic pollution, sexual exploitation and violence. Women call for human security not military security. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a military alliance of the USA, Canada, the UK and other states, set up after the Second World War to oppose the USSR. The 'Communist Bloc' disintegrated twenty years ago, but NATO lives on, a dangerous Cold War dinosaur. It accounts for 75 per cent of global military spending. Pursuing the ‘Cold War’ into the 21st Century: NATO has responded to the conflict in Ukraine by an aggressive stance towards Russia, instead of the creative diplomacy that is needed. Recently it has announced new bases in northern Europe specifically to threaten Russia. Finland and Sweden are being courted as new members, to deprive Russia of oil resources opening up in the melting Arctic. War-prone and worldwide: NATO seeks an increasingly militarized European Union as its 'strategic partner'. Predicting 'cyber wars', it foresees greater 'military-civilian co-operation' in the name of 'counter-insurgency', further threatening our civil liberties. Nuclear weapons: Under NATO's 'nuclear sharing' agreement, US nuclear warheads are stationed in European member states. It is NATO policy that strategic nuclear weapons, including the UK's Trident system, be retained and modernized. On the occasion of NATO's Summit Meeting in Wales this week, Women in Black against War; Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and Women of No to War, No to NATO call for the disbanding of this aggressive alliance. Dear Prime Minister, At the time of the NATO meeting of Heads of State in Newport, Wales, on September 4-5, 2014, I urge you to press for the following policies: Work with Russia through creative diplomacy to resolve the crisis in the Ukraine. Halt NATO expansion, curb NATO's 'out-of-area' operations, and ensure its observance of international law. Reverse militarization of the European Union – the EU is for social and economic co-operation. No more erosion of our civil liberties in the name of 'counter-insurgency'. Rid Europe of both tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. Work for a binding international Convention to abolish nuclear weapons. Work towards replacing NATO with non-military co-operation for peace and justice. To email this letter to the Prime Minister, click here. If you don’t (want to) use this form, don’t forget to add your name and address to the email.  |
| Women are stuck and stigmatised Posted: 05 Sep 2014 04:00 AM PDT
The number of people in England not in education, employment or training (NEET) is high. However, despite common assumptions about who is not in education, employment or training, there are many more women than men not in education, employment or training, and this has been the case for more than a decade. The first report of the ‘Scarred for Life?’ inquiry, released with the title 'Totally Wasted? The Crisis of Young Women’s Worklessness', highlights the stark reality for women who are not in education, employment or training. It shows how hundreds of thousands of young women who want to work cannot do so because the advice, training and support they receive has them competing for a limited number of poorly paid jobs. Women are NEET for longer and the impact is deeper, with the effects sometimes lasting for a lifetime. But young women want to work. They often cannot because the advice, training and support they receive does not lead to any employment or leads to highly competitive, poorly paid jobs in a limited range of occupations. Contrary to popular assumptions, only a quarter of women who are not in education, employment or training are mothers, but those who are, face even more barriers to working. And young women who are NEET can be exploited, just as men can. But a zero-hours contract or a job paying under the minimum wage is harder to avoid or escape when you have fewer choices in the first place, and harder to cope with if you have children to provide for and look after. Women are stuck and they are stigmatised. We shouldn't be willing to accept this. Economically too, it makes no sense to deny women who want to work the opportunity to do so. For too long, this issue has been denied the attention it deserves. But research by the Young Women's Trust means we can hear first-hand from hundreds of women who are NEET about what they think needs to change A young woman may have ambition, want to find work or study, but cannot figure out a way to do so. 95 per cent of those asked said getting a paid job is important to them. 43 per cent said they would take almost any job offered to them that paid more than they would receive in benefits. "I don't have the skills I need to do the job I want." (18, Plymouth) "I have done training before, but it hasn't helped me get a job." (24, Birmingham) A young woman may have limited understanding and knowledge of the possibilities for education and employment, coupled with inadequate support or advice. 47 per cent of women did not find careers advice, provided at school or a Jobcentre, useful. "I don't know what I want to do." (18, Sunderland) "I am uncertain about how to use my education to get into a career, particularly in the current economic climate." (19, Manchester) A young woman may well have significant caring responsibilities, including caring for family members who are not her children – and she wants to work. 44 per cent said having a job that allowed them to combine working with caring for family members other than their own children was important to them. Young females are almost twice as likely as male NEETs to have been prevented from either applying for or accepting a job because of caring responsibilities for their own child. "I have other caring responsibilities and duties that have impacted my ability to access education, employment and training." (19, Birmingham) "There are no jobs available which fit with my other responsibilities." (22, Norwich) Giving careers advice only at 16-17 is not enough. 41 per cent of young women said that careers advice would be most useful between the ages of 18-21. Female NEETs are three times more likely than male NEETs to have been told to think about becoming care workers, nannies, nurses or hairdressers. Meanwhile men are six times more likely to be told to think about becoming IT technicians, construction workers or electricians and plumbers. The training and work experience she receives, or is required to undertake, does not lead to a job. 63 per cent have either been prevented from applying for or accepting a job because they did not have the right qualifications. 65 per cent of all NEETs with children feel that the training provided by the Jobcentre Plus and Work Programme only led to more training and not to employment. All female NEETs with children (40 per cent) are more likely than those without (27 per cent) to say the level of respect they receive from staff at the Jobcentre Plus is bad. Jobs that are on offer to her are often insecure, pay badly and have no prospects of improvement. Hours of work are unpredictable or excessively rigid, meaning she cannot budget, plan for caring responsibilities or work flexibly. One in five have been offered a job that paid less than the minimum wage. 18 per cent said they were prevented from applying for a job because their family wanted them to do something different. A young woman may be unable to move away from home for low-paid work with no prospects and is dependent on the local labour market. And women who have been NEETs are at risk of ending up in jobs with no career prospects and reduced earnings. This needs to change. Join the conversation and be part of the change young women need: visit the Young Women’s Trust website. Send a copy of this report to your MP and ask for their comments – eg what they are going to do about it – when they have read it. Send their answer to the Young Women’s Trust. Thanks. Things need to change.
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| Posted: 05 Sep 2014 02:10 AM PDT
By Felicity Ruby and Edith Ballantyne. Women peace activists meeting in Zurich in 1919 understood the capitalist system of profit and privilege as a root cause of war. Women said it then, and say it now, as they tackle the perennial question facing all peace-seekers: what policies can assure a peace that will endure? When more than a thousand women from twelve belligerent and neutral countries met in congress at The Hague in the midst of World War I, they failed in their mission to bring an end to the conflict. But they determined to come together again, whenever the war should end, to shadow the meeting of victors that would settle the terms of peace. This meeting eventually took place in June 1919, in Paris. However, because the German and Austrian women were not permitted to enter France, the men met in Versailles, while the women’s congress was relocated to Zurich, Switzerland. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles were announced while they were there, and these women were among the first in the world to react publicly to its vindictive terms. That Zurich gathering of 1919 is particularly instructive for the peace and women's movements of today. It tackled a tough, perennial question facing all peace-seekers. What forward-moving policies, beyond and after mere ‘armistice’, can assure a peace that will endure? The women were scathing of the punitive terms that issued from Versailles, convinced that they sowed the seeds of yet more war – and they would prove right. As British delegate Ethel Snowden put it, ‘Germans have to pay five thousand million of British pounds, an incomprehensible sum which they cannot and ought not to pay…The capitalists and imperialists of the conquering countries are compelling German men and women to pay for their own miserable exploits.’ And pay they did – long and heavily. The reparations payments were envisaged to end in 1983, but it was not until October 2010 that the final payment was made. Letters home from the American women at Zurich in 1919 exclaim at the scarcely recognizable faces of their friends from the defeated countries, for many of them were painfully thin and gaunt. Their hunger derived not from the privations of war but now, one year into the ‘peace’, from the food blockade imposed by the Allies. Alice Hamilton wrote from the conference, ‘Food is a subject that has never left my mind for a day since I came here.’ The 1919 Zurich gathering is where the Women’s International League for Peace and (WILPF) first took its name. You could say the League was born out of profound dismay at the unjust outcome of Versailles. A worn old volume is our one extant copy of the report of that conference. Holding it in our hands as we prepared this article, we saw anew just how central had been the women’s preoccupation with economic issues. The report summarizes the speeches and debates among the women in the several committees into which they divided, each to consider the resolutions and material before the conference from three different points of view; the first was political, the second adopted the lens of the status of women, while the third took the perspective of education, social and ethical questions. Ethel Snowden presented the draft resolution of the Political Committee, seconded by Jeanette Rankin, first-ever woman member of the US Congress. It stated, ‘By the financial and economic proposals a hundred million people of this generation in the heart of Europe are condemned to poverty, disease and despair, which must result in the spread of hatred and anarchy (sic) in each nation’. So it was the practical issue of economic justice that preoccupied the women at Zurich. Jane Addams telegraphed President Wilson in Paris demanding that the food blockade be lifted. He cabled back that ‘practical difficulties’ and ‘extremely uncompromising’ attitudes in Versailles made him pessimistic. Notwithstanding, the women issued a statement on the duty of world citizenship being an end to the starvation suffered in Europe and elsewhere. They demanded that: 'all the resources of the world, food, raw materials, finance, transport, shall be organized immediately for the relief of the peoples from famine and pestilence, just in the same way that all the resources of the allied countries have been organized for the relief of the people from ‘the yoke of militarism’, so that in this way a great demonstration be given that nations can cooperate and organize to save life as efficiently as they can cooperate and organize to destroy life.' Soon after this resolution was adopted, Emmeline Pethick Lawrence explained that information about the real post-war economic conditions was unreliable, and there was no clear method to deal with returning the world to normal trade and regulations. She proposed a committee of WILPF experts on economic conditions and industrial dislocation be formed to collect information from governments, media, the Red Cross and other relief societies and actions taken by the Supreme Economic Council established by the Paris Peace Conference. The women identified capitalism as the principal source of conflict between nations. Anticapitalist thinking was far from acceptable among the social class from which most of these women came. Yet, in a congress resolution in support of a League of Nations, it was the capitalist system, along with nationalist rivalry, that the women identified as the key challenge: 'abolition of the rule of any class, and the gradual transformation in all countries of the capitalistic system, by the introduction of equal opportunity for earning and education, so that cooperation in the life of individuals and peoples may take the place of competition, and mutual help replace combat. We affirm the rights of existence, free development and self-government for individuals and nations.' They called for free trade, the removal of all customs controls, complete freedom of communications, the adoption of a universal system of coinage, weights, measures and stamps and the just regulation of labour. Economic analysis was inserted into WILPFs Constitution of 1926, with a reference to, ‘economic justice for all, without distinction of sex, race, class or creed.’ This was adapted to a set of aims and principles that included, ‘the establishment of a just economic and social order founded on meeting the needs of all peoples and not on profit and privilege.’ This was later upgraded to, ‘WILPF sees as its ultimate goal the establishment of an international economic order founded on the principles of meeting the needs of all people and not those of profit and privilege’. WILPF and other organizations working for peace have always found it relatively un-divisive to campaign against militarism and militarization. After all, it is hardly radical to do so. Ending the obscene waste of human and economic resources through military expenditure features in the UN Charter itself (see Article 26) and – even though it is seldom acted upon – is central to the brief of the Security Council. Far more controversial than challenging the profits of military corporations and states’ so-called ‘defence’ budgets, is pointing the finger at the system that produces, prioritizes and distributes economic resources towards these ends. When the USSR disintegrated and the Cold War ended, one celebrated author touted the notion of the 'end of history' – there would be no more strife over alternative modes of production. The idea was widely scoffed at, and did not take hold. Nonetheless, what has become widespread during the ensuing two and a half decades is the belief that ‘there is no alternative' to the system that won out over state communism – that we are stuck for all time with neoliberal global capitalism. The left everywhere has become disoriented. There have been encouraging surges of opposition to the policies of the IMF and World Bank, including the World Social Fora. ‘Occupy‘ has challenged the oligarchs on behalf of the 99%. But these movements are proving painfully slow to grow and cohere. This demoralizing sense of ‘no alternative’ has impacted on the thinking of the peace and women’s movements too. Yet, we are resourced today with factual evidence of the economic oppression and inequality at the root of war, data of a scope and accuracy that the women of 1919 sorely lacked. The UN's Human Development Report provides us annually with a clear picture of who profits and who lives in poverty. The recent scandal of the so-called Global Financial Crisis has brought to view hard evidence of the subsidy made available to the financial institutions and individuals responsible, while a hyper-capitalism is imposed upon populations through austerity measures that attack public services, and on labour standards and conditions hard won over decades. Today, given the palpable rivalry of corporate interests and their national backers for control of resources and markets, peace activism can scarcely afford to ignore the causality of capitalism in militarization and war. Edith Ballantyne was Secretary General of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) from 1969 – 1992, and its International President from 1992 until 1998. Felicity Ruby is the Director of Internet Policy for Thoughtworks, and a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. A version of this article appeared in OpenDemocracy on 1 September 2014.  |
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