Male doctors take an oath to protect women doctors (Picture: @drsfaizanahmad on Twitter/X)
It is possible to fight women’s oppression—and collective action in our workplaces is a key way to do that. Inspiring actions by doctors in India have underlined this in practice. They struck and protested after the recent rape and murder of a colleague in a Kolkata hospital.
It unleashed a wave of resistance across the health sector in India. It’s important that the Indian doctors win over their specific demands. But the strikes also represent a challenge to a society that tells women they are to blame for sexual violence.
Today in India they are building the class solidarity, confidence and organisation necessary for a broader fight against the system as a whole. In throwing themselves into the nature of collective action required to successfully organise strikes, occupations, or protests, workers are pulled towards class unity.
As a result, striking together plays an important role in breaking down the sexism, racism or homophobia that is pushed under capitalism. For example, India’s ruler Narendra Modi has put Hindu supremacy and the scapegoating of Muslims at the centre of his vicious government.
But both Hindus and Muslims work at and are treated by the same public hospitals in India. For the doctors’ action to be effective, all these workers are forced to put Modi’s toxic ideas aside and unite. In India, the strikes were led by women, but overwhelmingly male workplaces enthusiastically took up the torch of women’s liberation.
Oppressive behaviour and ideas aren’t just hurtful to individuals, they corrode the solidarity needed to win. Sexism is a ruling class ideology and enters deep inside all classes. Yet such ideas don’t have a hold over all people all the time. Strikes create a chance to combat oppression, but it’s possible to have sexist ideas while also fighting alongside women.
Backward views don’t automatically weaken when workers come together. But during the course of struggle, people’s vision of the world can shift drastically—so long as the issues of oppression are consciously fought against.
This is part of a process of what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci dubbed “contradictory consciousness”. He theorised that workers held oppressive ideas “inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed”. Simultaneously, the same worker held progressive ideas that are “implicit in their activity and which in reality unites them with all their fellow workers in the practical transformation of the real world”.
Workers struggling together can have a huge impact on society. And social uprisings can also shift workers’ attitudes and push them to fight for more. The mass outrage after the rape and murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 didn’t lead to action in the workplaces. But it raised questions and demands from ordinary people. This can spur on the class fight against oppression, both in and outside the workplace.
Examples from British working class history show how it is possible for workers to fight— and win—over questions of women’s oppression. While many of these examples are on a smaller scale than India, they show how workers can fight sexism in the workplace. In 1968 some 850 women machinists at the Ford factory in Dagenham, east London, struck for equal pay.
Their victory had a massive effect inside the working class. In 1990 some 700 postal workers in Oxford—most of them men—walked out for six days because a supervisor sexually assaulted a cleaner. Workers left 200,000 addresses without post, 1,200 post boxes sealed and around seven million items held up. They received huge solidarity and only voted to go back into work once the supervisor had been demoted and redeployed to a different depot.
Post worker Ann told Socialist Worker at the time, “I felt proud that our union was fighting, that women were taken seriously. It really brought us together and got rid of many of the silly remarks about being a woman you get at work. The real gain is that issues which never used to be talked about have come into the open. Not in a way that divides up the men and the women, but in a way that helps us all to fight for better conditions and to improve the life of ordinary people.”
Taking action together forces workers to confront oppressive ideas or behaviour that exist within their ranks and wider society. The workplace isn’t isolated from the real world—it’s an essential part of it. Striking together over one element of oppression—sexual assault— can forces workers to confront the broader reality of sexism.
In 2022, around 100 bin workers in Welwyn Hatfield District Council struck against a sexist, racist and bullying manager. One worker told Socialist Worker, “This manager says sexist things to the women working in the office. He’s made comments about their weight and complained that ‘better-looking girls’ are needed. He’s made racist comments to black workers.
“He punches walls and constantly shouts and swears at us.” That manager got booted out after just a single day of strikes. And in south London, Woolwich Ferry workers walked out over management bullying and sexual harassment in 2017. One worker said she had received unwanted sexual attention from a manager over an extended period. “I didn’t think I could get through this, but my workmates, friends and family are angry and have given me support,” she said.
“I almost applied for another job, but I thought, ‘Why should I be pushed out?’” These examples show that it is genuinely possible to challenge creepy managers and sexually violent bosses.
This gives women the confidence to assert women the confidence to assert that they do not have to work dangerous workplaces—or even live in a sexist world. McDonald’s in the United States is another recent example. In a three year period from 2018, workers staged five strikes over sexual harassment. Workers walked out in five cities in 2021 because a manager followed a 14-year-old into a work toilet and raped her.
“I’m on strike today because we need McDonald’s to realise that we’re not going to stop. What needs to stop is sexual harassment,” said Adriana Alvarez in Chicago. “It’s unfair to these workers, making close to poverty wages, and then on top of that to have to worry about being sexually harassed on the job.”
Those who have been striking in India know that mass action can win results. The country is no stranger to mass uprisings over sexual violence. In 2012 huge protests exploded across India after a young woman was raped by six men on a bus.
They threw the 23-year-old onto the roadside to die, which she tragically did two weeks later. Mass action in response forced both local and national government into important changes in the law. Any collective expression against sexism needs to be encouraged and supported. The bosses, the state and the system won’t protect women. And they don’t care about the lives of working class people.
Every example of resistance, both in the workplaces and on the streets, collectivises the experience of fighting sexism. Taking the question to trade union meetings, picket lines and the megaphone pulls oppression out from individualised experiences of shame and trauma.
The actions of women organising themselves—whether as workers or not—have been crucial in the fight against sexism But strikes and workplace occupations can be more impactful than petitions and street protests.
Firstly, they are hugely disruptive to the capitalist system in a way that other forms of action aren’t. And each strike—especially ones that take on political questions—builds a group of people capable of taking on not just the bosses but the entire system and its horrors. Today in Britain there is a huge potential to fight back together against sexual violence, abuse and harassment in the workplace.
Women are not an incidental element to the working class. Struggles against sexism shouldn’t come second to issues of pay or conditions, or be seen as separate from class fights. There are 16 million women workers in Britain. And for the last 22 years women workers have been more likely to be a member of a trade union than their male counterparts.
The demand that no one should work in a dangerous workplace needs to be pushed out into every factory, office and call centre. Indian doctors have shown us how to fight—it is the responsibility of workers in Britain to organise to be able to follow their example.
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