Women Striving For Financial Security

This Friday is no holiday for America’s working women. It’s the day when their 1996-‘97 paychecks will, on average, finally equal what men earned in 1996 alone.

It’s an old story, this persistent wage gap between the sexes. Still, it will produce predictable outrage from feminist groups as well as political proclamations to end the discrimination that victimizes women, who represent 46 percent of the work force but earn just 71 cents for every dollar men make.

And it may obscure a new reality: Women are taking money matters into their own hands - militantly.

Women are starting their own businesses at an unprecedented clip. They are acquiring a sophistication about investing - women’s investment clubs have outperformed men’s in nine of the last 15 years - and surprising pollsters with their new concentration on pensions and retirement. And they are pouring into unions, giving life to the lagging labor movement and finding in collective bargaining the power to demand of employers what women say they want, sometimes more than pay: family-friendly benefits.

Why this female quest for financial self-sufficiency? It’s largely economic: A majority of women now view work as a lifetime commitment - and wages as a lifelong need - at the same time the global economy is undermining U.S. job security for all and technology is automating traditionally female-dominated clerical and service jobs. It’s also sociological: The female population is more single, divorced, or widowed than ever before; women can’t depend on the income or pensions of husbands, yet they know children or elderly parents will at some point depend on them.

“Workers are walking on Jell-O, and women are particularly challenged,” says Paula Rayman, director of the Radcliffe College Public Policy Institute. “They question whether job success means mimicking male roles and why the workplace has to be organized on an Ozzie and Harriet model. They wonder what skills they will need in the next century and where the benefits from Social Security and pensions will be when they need them.”

While pushing their agenda on the political front, women aren’t waiting for Washington to deliver. One of the most notable trends in labor last year was the success of unions in organizing low-wage manufacturing and service industries dominated by females. Women represent organized labor’s growth market: They made up 39 percent of all union members in 1996, up from 18 percent in 1960.

“We are the largest working-woman organization in the country,” says Karen Nussbaum, director of the department responsible for the AFL-CIO’s 5.8 million women members, “but up to now we haven’t acted like it.”

The unions’ most dramatic pitch to women, who are 65 percent of the nation’s minimum-wage workers, is on pay: In 1996 all union women earned on average 12 percent more than their nonunion counterparts, and black unionized women did even better. Also, because the majority of women working in the private sector have been segregated in jobs that rarely offer benefits, unions successfully appeal to women by promising packages of pregnancy and sick leave, health insurance, vacation pay, and pensions.

Perhaps because of discrimination and feeling powerless in the workplace, women particularly are attracted to the union label of strength through solidarity.

Nationally, women are pushing unions to fight for improved education, welfare rights, and bans on products from sweatshops. Closer to home, they are insisting that issues such as day care, workplace safety, and mandatory overtime be put on the table.