Carol Phillips presentation to the 2006 Womens Conference
August 27, 2006
Remarks to the CAW women's conference, Port Elgin
August 27th, 2006 - Carol Phillips, Assistant to the President, CAW
You've got a very serious agenda ahead of you over the next few days and while we will naturally find time to also have fun, because as we sing in that feminist anthem bread and roses - we fight for roses, the good things in life, too...the issues you will be looking at are committed to ending violence against women through equality and those issues are tough.
But one thing that we have never shied away from as CAW women activists is confronting the tough issues and I wish you well in your deliberations over the next few days.
One of the things I learned very early on as a peace activist is that 'Peace is not just the absence of war'. Peace means different things depending on your situation - if the bombing stops and your children are still stepping on land-mines there is no peace, just ask the families in south Lebanon who have to endure their children being blown up by cluster bombs even after the Israeli bombing had stopped; or if you are going hungry because your tools to farm have all been destroyed you can't call that peace either - just ask the women in Darfur who have been raped and fled with their children without the world turning up to help; or if you worry every day about whether you can feed your children then its hard to say that you are living in peace - just ask any woman in an Indian peasant community who doesn't know where her families next meal will come from.
We should apply the same thinking to violence. Violence is not just a situation of abuse that is inflicted by one person on another; it's not just the absence of that abuse that determines whether violence is over. If women suffer from extreme poverty, go hungry, have to see their children deprived and scramble for childcare arrangements or have their lives undervalued, their bodies objectified. isn't that also abuse? I'd like to start to explore that a little here tonight.
It's impossible to do justice in a short time but I can make a start and you'll fill in the gaps over your next few days together.
Let's start with where women are at in our union and the country:
Our union today has a membership of over 30% women; the largest local union is in the retail sector and the leadership of that local are majority women.
This is a huge change from 20 years ago when our union was formed and women made up about 14% and no major local was led by women. Those changes in our union are not yet being reflected in the overall top leadership - we still have to push in terms of the executive positions and stay vigilant on the staffing. We have made progress and we do have very active women's programs. Julie White as Director spreads her passion about women's participation and representation and about the need to continue to address violence against women in all its forms.
If you look beyond our union to other indicators for women in Canada things are standing still or in some cases poised to erode in terms of rights. We still make up the majority of the poor and along with our children suffer the consequences of that.
As of the last Federal election we still only have 64 or 20.7% of the MPs elected who are women - embarrassing! No matter how proud we are of our own Peggy Nash being elected in the last Parliament, Canada is 54th in the rankings for representation of women in government. That means there are 53 countries ahead of Canada with more representative governments when it comes to women! Countries like Rwanda have 49% women in government; the President of Liberia is a woman as is the prime minister of Mozambique and the President of Chile. We have a long way to go here in Canada.
We may not have a situation here like in many, many other countries where you have absolute poverty instead of relative poverty. But if you happen to be a working woman in Canada, at minimum wage, with no benefits or pension, life can be pretty miserable. That's why we have to continue as trade unionists and progressives to fight so hard to improve workers lives. Don't forget that the powers that be have never given us anything and we have to be constantly vigilant about protecting and improving our rights.
That goes double for women - we have fought for every right we have; from being recognized as persons under the law to winning the vote, to having the right to own property and the right to control our own bodies. Those rights all have to be constantly protected and improved on because each one is a part of our overall equality.
What about the situation for women in other parts of the world? I'd like to touch on a few struggles and then talk a little about how that affects us here at home.
Millions of women throughout the world are denied fundamental human rights for no other reason than that they are women. What we mean by absolute poverty and abject deprivation is that every single day is a total struggle to simply survive, to simply get through it. As Human Rights Watch reports: Men fighting in conflicts, such as those in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and Rwanda, have raped women as a weapon of war with virtually no consequences.
Men in Pakistan, South Africa, Peru, Russia, and Uzbekistan beat women in the home at incomprehensible rates, while these governments either refuse to intervene to protect women and punish their batterers or do so in ways that make women feel responsible for the violence.
As a direct result of inequalities found in their countries of origin, women from Ukraine, Moldova, Nigeria, the Dominican Republic, Burma, and Thailand are bought and sold, trafficked to work in forced prostitution, with insufficient government attention to protect their rights and punish the traffickers.
In Guatemala, South Africa, and Mexico, women's ability to enter and remain in the work force is interfered with by private employers who use women's reproductive status to exclude them from work.
In the U.S., students discriminate against and attack girls in school who are lesbian, bi-sexual or transgender, or do not conform to male standards of female behavior. Women in Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are discriminated against by the governments, rendering them unequal before the law. Discriminatory family codes take away women's legal authority and place it in the hands of male family. Women are also restricted from running for office.
Abuses against women in many parts of the world are relentless, systematic and widely tolerated, if not explicitly condoned. Violence and discrimination against women are global, social epidemics.
We live in a world in which women do not have basic control over what happens to their bodies. Millions of women and girls are forced to marry and have sex with men they do not desire. Women cannot count on government to protect them from physical violence in the home, with sometimes fatal consequences, including increased risk of HIV/AIDS infection. We now know that AIDS sufferers usually have a woman's face.
Women in state custody often face sexual assault by their jailers. Women are punished for having sex outside of marriage or with a person of their own choice. Husbands and other male family members obstruct or dictate women's access to reproductive health care. We must reject legal, cultural or religious practices where women are discriminated against, excluded from political participation and public life, segregated in their daily lives, raped in armed conflict, beaten in their homes, denied equal divorce or inheritance rights, killed for having sex, forced to marry, assaulted for not conforming to gender norms, and sold into forced labour.
Arguments that excuse these human rights abuses - those of cultural differences. Arguments that say there are no universal human rights and that rights are culturally-specific cannot disguise their true meaning: that women's lives matter less than men's.
Women have had victories and constantly refuse to be victims - you are going to talk about some of those women later in the week as you learn of the struggles of women like the African grandmothers to overcome enormous odds. When you hear of the adversity these women face and the sisterhood they forge, you will be awed by their strength and courage. What can we learn from these ongoing situations? Aside from our duty as activists to expose and denounce as human rights violations those practices and policies that silence and subordinate women - do they really threaten our situation? How can we fight in solidarity with sisters in other struggles around the world?
Look at some examples close to home.
Let's start with Mexico and the over 500 women in the past 10 years, who have been murdered in the Mexican-U.S. border town of Juarez.
The victims of these crimes have been mostly young women, between 15 and 25 years of age. Many were students, and most were maquiladora workers in foreign owned factories. A number were relative newcomers to Ciudad Juarez who had migrated from other areas of Mexico. The victims were generally reported missing by their families, with their bodies found days or months later abandoned in vacant lots or outlying areas. In most of these cases there were signs of sexual violence, abuse, torture or in some cases, mutilation...
Canadian reporter Lynda Diebel wrote an article earlier this year in which she used the word 'femicide' - the targeting and destruction of women - to describe the horror that continues not far south of our border.
But communities are organizing, women fighting back even in the face of corrupt police and government officials and Mexican women continue to demand justice for their daughters.
Let's move a little closer again and look to the U.S. and the ominous erosion of women's rights that is well under way there. Right wing, religious extremists, hand-in-hand with the current Bush government are attacking the most basic of women's rights - the right to control our own bodies.
The U.S. abortion battle is really not about protecting the sanctity of life and saving unborn fetuses at all. It is about sex. The alleged original "sin" of women's sexuality. In fact, right-wing attacks on contraceptive availability proves that abortion is not the issue. Christian right extremists don't just want to control a woman's pregnancy; they want to control her ability to prevent one in the first place. The U.S. right wing has gradually encroached on all aspects of sexuality, family planning, contraceptive availability and sex education. Internationally, they have stopped the funding of HIV-Aids projects if they don't preach abstinence.
This is very much about pushing women back into the submissive roll that every fundamentalist religion endorses and making it clear that we are subordinate to men. This is a battle to maintain women's equality that we are watching carefully here in Canada as the current government would very much like to follow the same road. The anti-choice movement, that is the basis of attacking women's equality in the United States, is trying hard to establish a foothold here.
Progressive women are fighting back in the U.S. and helping to stall the agenda that would see women's lives controlled once again by men.
And here at home, many of you may have followed the careless way in which the authorities in more than one Canadian community have failed to deal with the serial disappearance and murder of women - especially sex-trade workers or aboriginal women. Women whose lives were not valued or cherished. There is also a disturbing number of Eastern European women forced into the sex trade, slave market here in Canada.
And the first act of our minority Conservative government in canceling the child-care agreements was a clear signal that they were going to try and turn back the clock on women's rights here. This of course affects working women, single mothers and women who are the majority of the poor more than any other sector.
The Harper government also has dismantled gun control something opposed by the chiefs of police as well as feminists who remember the Montreal massacre of women and the numbers of women killed in domestic violence each year. The conservatives have also pledged to re-open the divisive issue of gay marriage to make sure that only their definition of heterosexual, male dominated love is recognized.
And the dramatically increased military spending is a slap in the face to those of us who had to endure the years of being told that there was no money to properly care for this countries collective wealth of children.
No, the systemic denial of women's equality that can easily be defined as abusive continues and we have a lot to do sisters to push back hard.
And this is where we need to concentrate most of our efforts - in our union and our country. We must keep up the struggle to become a beacon of hope to other women, by showing that we are determined here in Canada to 'end violence through women's equality'. And if anyone can do it, it is the women in this room in alliance with our sisters around the world.
