Melbourne, 1 September 2009: Trade unionists at a rally to demand equal pay for women and to oppose legislative changes threatening to water down workplace safety laws. Women workers are a crucial component of the working class who can link the fight for women’s equality to the broader struggles of the powerful union movement.

4 May 2009 - Kushi is a strong, intelligent and cultured woman. She has a powerful sense of justice.

But today Kushi is suffering. She is trying to find a job in these difficult times and a place to live while at the same time bringing up on her own three young children. As just one woman, on a daily basis Kushi confronts all the different hardships and discrimination that single mothers, the unemployed and non-white migrants face in this cruel and unequal society. Kushi loves her children deeply. But her life today is one of financial difficulty, drudgery, stress, too many disappointments and depression.

Kushi (not her real name) wants her story to be told because she knows that it is a story that many, many others will relate to. Her story begins in India: the place where she grew up. In that country of extreme inequality between the haves and the have-nots, Kushi was somewhere in between but in some ways relatively fortunate. She was raised in a middle class family and was able to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours degree. She worked for eight years in the banking industry.

Kushi was a great catch for her husband and his family because of her strongly religious, socially conservative upbringing. As she explains, her “ex-husband and his family was strictly looking for a homely, religious and traditional woman who respects family values.” But in Kushi’s case, as is the norm, a man’s demand that a woman be a “strictly religious and traditional person who respects family values” was just so much hypocrisy. It just meant that the woman should be stuck at home shackled by “traditional” discipline and serving the entire joint family while the man goes out and has great fun with carefree abandon.

Furthermore, a man’s requirement that a wife be “homely” is often a code word for saying that she should be a house slave with no independent source of income. That was certainly the way it worked in Kushi’s marriage. Kushi describes a shocking incident that captures this reality. Once, when she was out of home during the day, her then husband called her on her mobile and wanted to know what she was doing outside. She joked that she was going for a job interview. He went mad and yelled that he would kill her, kill the children and kill himself if she took a job. Kushi was not alone in suffering this way. She recalls what her friend faced. Kushi’s friend was also married to an Australian citizen of Indian origin who went back to India to have an arranged marriage to a “homely” woman. When Kushi’s friend moved to Australia, the woman’s husband would literally lock her inside the house every work day to make sure she didn’t leave while he was out at work.

Kushi for her part was often required to get up very early in the morning to cook paratha for Amman and sometimes Amman’s relatives too. Paratha, sometimes known as rothi paratha, is an Indian pastry dish that requires much labour to prepare. One morning when she failed to have the paratha ready for Amman’s brother, her husband’s brother proceeded to bash her.

Physical violence is something that Kushi has experienced a lot of. Her ex-husband would beat her terribly. The bashings started in March 2003. An argument over the smallest of issues could end up in her getting beaten up. One particular beating sticks out in Kushi’s mind. It took place in 2006. Her husband sat on her and repeatedly hit her in the face. Kushi desperately yelled out to her children: “Please call for help.” Her middle daughter, then only just over four years in age, pulled at Amman’s clothes, crying, “leave mummy alone.” Then Amman rose up and grabbed the little girl and screamed at her, “I will smash you and I will kill you first.”

Sometimes when beaten Kushi would flee to a refuge centre for abused women. There she would meet large numbers of women from all backgrounds: from White Australian women to women from various non-European origins. As Kushi commented, in her own country women are subjugated but there is little pretence that women have equal rights there. But here they say that women have equality but the truth is that women are downtrodden here as well. Indeed, Kushi has experienced how much Australia’s state organs perpetuate women’s oppression. Once, some five years ago after again being beaten by her then husband she went in desperation to Merrylands Police Station. The policeman who “served” her rudely demanded, “What’s the problem?” When she described how her husband was beating her he retorted angrily, “Why do you have to upset your husband”! This took place at a police station not in Iran or Afghanistan but right here in Australia. Right here in Australia, the guardians of law and order treat women as second class citizens.

In capitalist Australia, the police, courts, prisons and bureaucracy are part of a state machine that is designed to maintain the existing unequal social order. An “order” where rich business owners are on top and working class people and the poor – especially those that are Aboriginal, women, or of non-European migrant background – are at the bottom. The personnel enforcing this system, like the police, necessarily imbibe the most extreme prejudice against the sectors of society that they keep quashed down at the bottom.

Kushi points out that the cop’s response to her plea for help was not only male chauvinist but was shaped by racism. The racism in Australia really grinds Kushi down. She explains it as a product of an unfriendly cutthroat society. “They hate each other and so they hate you (i.e. non-white people) even more.” The terrifying spate of racist attacks that Indian students have been subjected to shows the depth of bigotry that people like Kushi have to deal with every day.

November, 2008: Staff of ABC Learning Centres after a creditors meeting. Collapse of privately owned childcare company caused anguish for employees and turmoil for children and parents. Lack of free, publicly provided childcare makes it impossible for many women to participate in social and economic life or acquire financial independence.

Slave Labour within the Family Unit
In the “traditional” family arrangement, women do unpaid work cooking and cleaning, looking after the ill and raising the children. Women are denied an adequate independent source of income. This reality both restricts women’s freedom and means that their husbands know that even if they are abusive to their wives, their wives will find it difficult or even nigh impossible to leave and make do on their own. Such a set up is often made even more unfair when the family runs a small business in which the wife participates. Such was the case in Kushi’s marriage to Amman.

Amman and Kushi operated a fairly successful family business from home in a maintenance-type field. Amman did the maintenance calls while Kushi took care of all the administration – including customer liaison, quotes and accounting. But Kushi received not a solitary cent for her work. When Kushi asked to be paid, Amman refused saying this was a “family business.” But the business remained in Amman’s name. Furthermore, he had cunningly moved the equity in their house into the business. So when Kushi and Amman later split, Amman walked away with not only the business but also with the equity in their house. Kushi, meanwhile, not only had no money to show for her toil but had no employer’s reference or record of her work that she could use to gain future employment.

After the split with Amman happened, Kushi experienced first hand how much the scales of the Australian legal system are weighted towards those with money. By paying out big money to hot shot lawyers, Amman was able to retain ownership of all the equity from their house as well as the assets of the business. Kushi, having received no pay for her labour, had little means to fight this rip-off. She had to rely on Legal Aid. But Legal Aid claimed that they could only assist with child custody matters and not with property issues. When challenged on this by Kushi, they basically fobbed her off. With limited funding and an increasing drift like every other public service towards “user pays”, Legal Aid is less and less capable of providing real support to the disadvantaged.

Most decisive has been the bias of the courts. The Federal magistrate hearing Kushi’s case has been completely unsympathetic to her plight. And that includes being unsympathetic to Kushi having received no wages for her work in her then husband’s business. Although a woman, the magistrate finds herself having much more in common with affluent Amman than with financially struggling Kushi. Recent figures show that Federal magistrates get a whopping $260,220 annual salary (The Australian, 28 May 2009) and then a whole heap of perks on top of that. Inevitably, those with such privilege have a condescending and disdainful attitude towards the poor while they see fellow well-off people as “upstanding citizens” … like themselves! What’s more, those on such a massive package as the Federal magistrates usually have considerable capital invested – either directly through shares or indirectly through private equity investments etc – in companies. In other words, they make big money not just from their own salary but from sharing the profits derived from other people’s labour. Hence, individuals like Federal magistrates are naturally empathetic towards employers that profit from workers’ labour and hostile towards employees like Kushi who demand greater payment for their work (in Kushi’s case merely any payment!) from business owners.