ABSTRACT
Women’s work is particularly low paid, often poorly organised despite the increasing numbers of women in trade unions, and women are a growing proportion of unemployed. A good deal of the increase in women’s recorded employment in the post-war period, as indeed of the labour force as a whole, is due to increase in part-time workers, most of whom are married women. Part-time workers are especially low paid, but this is not reason for women’s generally low pay. Struggles around equal pay showed that substantial gains could be made where women were involved in job evaluation (and hence the possibility of jobs being recognised as of equal value if not directly comparable to those of men) and where unions took strong action. Nineteenth-century attempts to relegate women to home and restrict their employment merely served to marginalise women’s position in factory work and further concentrate women in low-paid, badly organised sectors such as the sweated trades, outwork and domestic service.
