WHICHEVER way you look at it, the coalition’s “austerity” programme is shrinking women’s lives. 

More work, less pay, fewer benefits, reduced support for childcare and caring and slashed services are now the everyday realities of women’s lives. 

A 2014 Unison “damage report,” Shrinking Women’s Lives, has shown how the fatal cocktail of pay austerity and ravaged public services is forcing women to retreat from the public sphere, with less money in their pockets.

Eighty per cent of the revenue “achieved” through George Osborne and David Cameron’s slash-and-burn strategy has been robbed from women through tax and benefit changes, according to the Women’s Budget Group. 

Tax reduction — a clear plank of the coalition’s neoliberal agenda — has failed to help the 25 per cent of women who don’t earn enough to benefit, while the cost to the public purse has been £10 billion. 

Meanwhile, Osborne’s deficit reduction strategy is clearly failing as he is forced to borrow to make up for lost tax and national insurance income.

At work and in their personal lives as mothers, grandmothers, partners, carers and daughters women are suffering.

Cameron and Osborne’s war on women — because that is exactly what it is — requires closer examination. 

Unison’s Women’s Conference, happening now in Southport, has been doing just that. Let’s take the workplace first. 

Across all public services, women make up over two-thirds of the workforce. In local government and the NHS — Unison’s largest groups — over three-quarters of all employees are women, which is true of Unison’s overall membership too. 

Coalition pay restraint has hit at our members’ pay packets hard. In local government, basic wages have declined by 20 per cent since 2010. 

Already the lowest-paid of any public-sector group, they not only faced a three-year pay freeze from 2010-13, but the one million council and school workers paid less than the coalition’s “low pay” threshold of £21,000, were denied the £250 lump sum paid to other public-sector workers. 

On top of this, unsocial hours payments, retainer pay, hours of work, car allowances and annual leave have all been slashed — adding to income woes.

What does this mean for women? In a Unison local government survey carried out late last year, a shocking 77 per cent of the 1,500 respondents said that they had reduced spending on food in the previous year. 

Eighty-seven per cent had reduced spending on social events and 87 per cent on clothes, books and other personal items. Only 49 per cent felt able to pay all their bills. Shrinking women’s lives indeed. 

As if that weren’t bad enough, the Office for Budget Responsibility has warned that 1.1 million public-sector jobs will have gone by 2019. 

Some 500,000 of them have already disappeared from local government alone and our members face ever-expanding workloads for less and less reward. 

Sixty-one per cent of all local government workers are part-time and those with higher hours have found them slashed over the last couple of years. 

Nonetheless they are expected to do the same work — and often cover for those made redundant too. Shrinking employment, growing workloads.

It’s no surprise then that workplace stress levels are soaring. In a survey carried out by Unison’s local government section in late 2014, 85 per cent of respondents said that workloads and pressure had increased in the previous 12 months, while service user expectations were rising. 

Sixty-nine per cent said that this was affecting their job performance and 70 per cent felt that it was affecting their personal lives too.

So what does austerity mean for the other dimension of women’s lives — childcare, caring and perhaps even a social life?

Our Shrinking Women’s Lives report looked at the impact of cuts — amounting to 40 per cent of council budgets in England since 2010 — on women. 

This is what we found:

• 60 per cent of more than 2,500 women surveyed thought that public services had deteriorated in the previous year 
• 60 per cent said that parks and leisure facilities had got worse and that they were concerned about their safety 
• 13 per cent had been cut from leisure budgets in the preceding year
• £82 million had been cut from children’s centre budgets over the previous three years and 285 children’s centres had closed 
• Over one million street lights are now switched off or dimmed overnight, leaving women feeling less safe to go out or travel to work 
• As a consequence of these cuts, over a third felt more cut off from their communities, 28 per cent thought it would be more difficult to find a job and 12 felt more cut off from their families.

As if this weren’t bad enough, our women members with responsibility for caring for older family members are having to face the consequences of a £3bn cut in the social care budget, reducing visits to 15 minutes — for those lucky enough to qualify for care. 

Eligibility thresholds have gone through the roof, with fewer and fewer elderly and vulnerable people able to access care. 

As for home care workers themselves, almost a quarter of a million are forced to live on pay levels below the national minimum wage because they are not paid for travel time between visits. 

Although Unison’s Ethical Care Charter and our campaign to tackle these iniquities is beginning to bear fruit, this is not before many carers and cared for have lost support and confidence in the system.

So women’s lives are certainly shrinking. 

At a meeting of local government delegates at the Women’s Conference, we discussed the importance of mobilising our one million women members to fight back against austerity and grow women’s lives again. 

We intend to mobilise our women’s organisation alongside other parts of our union to combat the cuts and vote against the most anti-woman government in our history. The fight starts today.

Heather Wakefield is Unison head of local government.