Scottish Communists

At work:

Campaign to reduce the gender pay gap and highlight its causes:

• End job segregation by improving training and opportunities for women.
• Ensure that unions fight more equal value claims.
• Campaign to change equal pay law to permit 'class action' (group claims) and remove employer 'get out' clauses.
• Campaign to raise the level of the national minimum wage to at least half, and rising to at least two thirds of male median earnings.
• Demand statutory pay audits.

Equalise opportunities and improve conditions for women workers:

• Demand full-time right for part time workers.
• Root out bullying and sexual harassment.
• End casualisation and especially zero hours contracts.
• Reduce job segregation by providing training opportunities for women in non-traditional areas.
• Campaign for affordable childcare including pre, after school and holiday provision.
• Campaign to end institutional and other forms of racism and ensure that status and pay of Black women workers is a bargaining priority.
• Campaign for a shorter working week for all.
• Improve maternity leave and pay, including paid paternity leave.
• Campaign for a change in the qualification criteria in the Industrial Injuries Disability Benefit scheme, to end discrimination against women and in particular to extend the list of disorders in the prescribed disease schedules

In society:

• Highlight the feminisation of poverty and campaign to reverse cuts in welfare state and public services.
• Expose the ideologies which are used to perpetuate women's inequality (for example, the notion of 'family values' and the 'family wage').
• Draw attention to the role of the media and other cultural agencies in shaping gender identities which reinforce the unequal relationships between men and women.
• Campaign for greater support for lone mothers, carers and women fleeing domestic violence.
• Improve access and rights to abortion.
• Ensure that women and girls are entitled to the full range of free and high quality educational provision (from nursery to university) and subject choice.
• End women pensioner poverty by increasing the State pension in line with average earnings.

In the labour movement:

• Tackle the under-representation of women in the labour and trade union movement structures by proportionality and other measures.
• Ensure the accountability of women's structures to women (eg. women's seats on TUC General Council).
• Maintain and extend women's committees, women's courses and other measures to ensure that women's issues/concerns are collectively articulated and actioned.
• Campaign to raise the profile of the TUC, STUC and Welsh TUC's women's conferences as the 'parliaments of working women'.

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