| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mrs. Gorman: I take the hon. Lady's point. There is an element of good sense in that. If people are being physically maltreated, the law should take its course. People who work in a foreign country and do not speak the language are vulnerable. The sooner such women find
their way to the many refuges, which are often run voluntarily and not by the state, that will help them, the better.
Although I have never employed someone in such a capacity--and except those who do not get out of the house--such people usually know others in Britain who come from their countries. Filipinos often come in such capacities. They soon learn the ropes. Many such people end up taking their employers to industrial tribunals. Not all are put upon, although I agree that the situation the hon. Lady described is a disgrace. They should, and I am sure do, make use of the opportunities that exist to protect themselves physically.
Last but not least, the women who serve on the Front Benches are the gatekeepers. Having got there, they have the opportunity to choose from among their colleagues. They can do what women in the past have done for those of us who are here today. They will create equal opportunities among their staff, their parliamentary private secretaries and in their general circle. When the Minister replies, I should like to know how many opportunities my colleagues in the Cabinet, or those who are on their way to it--and I congratulate them--are creating.
Ms Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Highgate):
It is always a pleasure to listen to the hon. Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman), not least for the frisson of disagreement that one always experiences.
I question some of the facts that she presented. Her opening remarks suggested that there is equal pay for work of equal value, and that the Opposition were making a great fuss about nothing. I refer to the Fawcett Society breakdown of wages for two jobs that would automatically still be regarded as the particular domain of women. A woman working in a laundry earns, on average, £140; a man £160. Among cleaners and domestics, another career for which we as women are expected to have a natural inborn talent, women earn £140 on average; men earn £200. Other speeches, and not exclusively from the Opposition, have underlined the fact that women are still undervalued and underpaid.
The hon. Member for Billericay argued that we should not denigrate people who accept a wage of £2 an hour.I would not denigrate anyone who was forced to accept£2 an hour for the only work they could obtain. I am very critical of, and would be delighted to be given the opportunity to denigrate to their faces, employers who offer that and have the audacity to call it a wage. Everyone in the Chamber knows of situations where £2 would be regarded as a less than adequate tip.
Very low rates of pay often exist for jobs that are important but are viewed as unimportant by those who pay the wages. The Fawcett Society briefing shows that
care assistants often receive very little because their work is deemed unimportant by people who define the value of work almost exclusively in terms of the wages that it can command. That is central to why women are not equal in Britain and in every other country. Such work is deemed not to require any skills, training, energy, application or imagination.
The hon. Member for Billericay will agree about, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, East (Ms Corston) has mentioned, the skills that women develop in life simply by virtue of being women, from having responsibility for running houses, raising children, looking after elderly parents, and from a whole range of other matters to which women have to bring their life skills. If those skills were translated into a commercial enterprise, business, or industry and were given high-sounding titles such as management skills or crisis management, they would command a high salary.
However, such job descriptions do not exist for those essential jobs. Think of the sort of work done by a care assistant in caring for people who are often elderly, frail and confused. It is outrageous that that quality of care should be deemed to be worth only £2 an hour.
Mrs. Gorman:
I guess that the great majority of care workers are employed by the state. I said that the state was one of the worst employers in respect of wages. I do not know what the figures are. Nobody makes people work for that sort of money. If they need it badly enough to take it, it is wrong for us to say that those jobs are not valid because they only get paid that amount.
Ms Jackson:
To start where the hon. Lady ended,I repeat my point. I do not say that those jobs are not valid; they are vital. My point is that it is a scandal and a disgrace that they are deemed by the people who define wage scales to be worth only £2 an hour. The hon. Lady is wrong to say that most care assistants work in the state sector. As she well knows in respect of care in the community, the Government have decided that 85 per cent. of all they hand to local authorities must be spent in the private sector.
Most residential and nursing homes are outside urban areas. To pick up the hon. Lady's point about why people take such jobs, I know of a residential nursing home in a rural area. It provided the only employment opportunities for 16 to 18-year-olds because they could get to and from it. There was no public transport, and they could not get to the nearest large town. They did not have such facilities. The home offered the only employment opportunities in their area.
I am sorry to bore the House, but I repeat that it is a scandal and disgrace that the care of the elderly and frail at one end of life's time scale, and the very young at the other, should be deemed work of such little value that the people who do it are paid slave wages.
I revert to my main theme. One especially interesting theme of this debate recurs whenever we have such debates, whether they are dubbed debates about women or, as tonight, equal opportunities for women, and when the state of women is the focus of attention for one day in the year. I hope that we manage to make these debates an annual event, and that the hon. Member for Billericay does not fail to participate in them. It is that from Conservative Members we hear that things are infinitely better for women, and that, although things may be moving slowly, they are moving inevitably forward.
I argue, as do my hon. Friends, that that is not the case. Every time we have such debates, what is most grievous about the Government's argument is that they imply that it is, and always has been, an accepted state--indeed, that there is something unusual and unwarranted in saying that it is grossly unfair--that women's place in our society and in every society throughout the world is still one of marked inequity.
The hon. Member for Billericay said that capitalism was one of the motivating and advancing forces for women in the world. All I can say to that is that capitalism has done nothing to advance opportunities for women in, say, Mexico, where they may work growing flowers, and pesticides that would be banned in America, in this country and in the rest of Europe, are flooded over the fields, with all the concomitant health risks.
Capitalism has done virtually nothing for people in countries where tea or coffee, for example, offer the basic economic opportunities. Industrialised nations can dictate a guaranteed price for the crop, and if the market falls, the producer carries the burden. Capitalism has done nothing for the developing nations of the world.
However, there is one area in which women seem to be over-present--an area in which one would like to see them a little less heavily represented--in as much as it is women and their children who suffer most grievously from violence, both in domestic situations and in nation states, because of civil war or warring nation states. Most refugees and displaced people are women and children, and sometimes elderly men and women.
The United Nations report on the world's children, which I believe was published towards the end of last year, said, for the first time in any UN publication, that 75 per cent. of the world's women live on or below the poverty line--not the decency threshold, but the poverty line. The statement is somewhat cloudy and guarded; none the less, the political message is there. That means that 75 per cent. of the world's women--and, of course, their children--live in physical conditions of the most abject and degrading poverty. They have no access to education, to primary health care or even to clean water.
For the first time in any of its publications, to my knowledge, the United Nations said in the report that the world's failure to advance the cause of women could perhaps--I admit that I am paraphrasing here--be traced back to the fact that, in the legislative assemblies of the world, too few women are sitting on Benches such as these.
It has been established that the women of the world do two thirds of the world's work, while earning less than one tenth of the world's income. We also own less than 1 per cent. of the world's property. We, as a gender, make the world go round, and we have far too little voice in the direction that our world should take.
The only way in which that voice can justifiably be heard, and make a real difference, will be when those who come from half the population of the country--the female half--account for half the places on these green Benches. I hope that that day will dawn in this country. There must be more female representation in the legislative assemblies of the world. We are discussing a shift in power.
That shift would bring about genuine equality for women. It would mean that they were not burdened by the idea that they had to have a child every nine months,
so that, with its ability to work, each child would represent the family's insurance policy for the future. We can remove such burdens from women and create real equality, which would benefit not only women and their children but their menfolk too, and the world as a whole, only if we ensure that the legislative assemblies of the world reflect a genuine female perspective.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |