Large numbers of women work for small firms with a high turnover of labour. Because there are always at any one time large numbers of women moving back into the labour force after a break for having children or other reasons, there is a 'reserve army of labour' keeping women's wages low. Men's weekly earnings are on average 56 per cent higher than women's, and this rises to 67 per cent in manufacturing industry. These figures include overtime and shift pay, which men get more of than women, but even women's hourly earnings are less than 75 per cent of men's, and the proportion has been going down since 1977. What all this adds up to is that while women have especially good reasons to get together and fight for themselves at work, they face special difficulties in doing so.
Women can organise and fight back at work.
Two-thirds of all new trade union members in the past twenty years have been women, and although women workers are still less fully unionised than men, union organisation is now normal in many fields of women's work where it was virtually unheard of twenty years ago, such as hospitals and offices. Women were very much part of the rise in working-class militancy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Ford's sewing machinists struck in 1968 for upgrading of their skill, and won a substantial wage increase though they are still, in 1984, fighting for the principle of upgrading. In 1970, twenty thousand clothing workers went on strike in Leeds, reinventing the flying picket shortly before miners and building workers picked up the idea. Up to 1977, there were equal pay strikes in hundreds of workplaces.