"the AFL-CIO is the largest women's organization in the country"

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http://www.truth-out.org/is-labor-movement-speaking-its-female-members62456


Is the Labor Movement Speaking for Its Female Members?


Karen Nausbamm, the director of the AFL-CIO's Working America, has a penchant for pointing out that the AFL-CIO is the largest women's organization in the country. In fact, the AFL-CIO comprises about six million dues-paying women, who represent 45 percent of the organization's membership. By 2020, women will constitute the majority of union members.

Why, then, did the AFL-CIO refuse to assume a position on the Stupak amendment to the Affordable Health Care for America Act - the health care reform bill negotiated earlier this year - which restricts women from using health insurance plans toward the cost of abortions? As my colleague Roger Bybee chronicled last spring, Michigan AFL-CIO President Mark Gaffner refused to put any pressure on strongly labor-supported Bart Stupak to drop the measure.

For lower-income working women, the ability to pay for an abortion is often a very important issue. Had the issue been banning insurance coverage for colonoscopies, a medical service that affects men directly, the AFL-CIO would have been up in arms.Disproportionate to the high percentage of female members, the executive council of the AFL-CIO is 80 percent male.

-snip-

The labor movement, at its core, is about class struggle - the working class overcoming the power of the owning class in order to take control over their own lives. For women, class struggle historically has centered on overcoming the oppression of men who want to have control over their lives. Workers struggle to overcome superiors who want to control their lives.

-snip of the 'why' of it all-

If we wish to build a vibrant movement that advocates for workers having control over their own lives, we must advocate for women having control over their lives.
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