MORNING STAR readers are acutely aware of the ways in which capitalism is sustained by the oppression of women. Women’s oppression has intensified in recent years.

We have witnessed a wholesale erosion of women’s rights as the US and Nato-backed genocide in Gaza tears apart the lives and bodies of Palestinian women and children. The National Police Chiefs Council has declared the levels of male violence towards women and girls a “national emergency,” and the reversal of Roe v Wade has seen reproductive rights heavily restricted in some parts of the US.

Furthermore, the Covid-19 Inquiry shows the disproportionate impact that the virus and lockdown measures had on Scotland’s lowest-paid workers, who STUC general secretary Roz Foyer says were “killed by their class.”

It is widely recognised that the consequences of the pandemic fell overwhelmingly on women’s shoulders precisely due to the necessary roles we perform in society, for example, 80 per cent of care workers are women.

Through the cheap or free extraction of women’s labour via the social reproductive roles we occupy as primary caregivers or via the workplace as women predominate in precarious, low-paid industries, the super-exploitation of women is both obvious and pernicious.

Birmingham City Council’s reasons for declaring bankruptcy provide possibly the clearest modern evidence of capitalism’s predatory nature towards women’s labour.

After GMB and Unison members, most of them low-paid women, fought for and won their equal pay payout, the City Council declared bankruptcy, which will see further privatisation creep across its public services to make up the shortfall.

This lays bare how Budgets are predicated on pay suppression in highly feminised sectors, taking for granted and devaluing the important work of women in public services.

It also makes apparent how normalised this suppression has become, as Birmingham Council has lazily assessed that the blame for its bankruptcy rests with low-paid women and that in order to rectify its budget, it must, therefore, deepen privatisation.

Nearly one in four Scottish local authorities have warned that they, too, are facing bankruptcy, and instead of reinforcing the living standards of the working class, we will see city councils hold the line on further austerity.

This austerity status quo disproportionately impoverishes women, as evidenced by Rape Crisis Scotland, which states that “as an organisation that primarily serves women, we are acutely aware of the gendered impact of austerity and economic difficulties” in its blog about how poverty disproportionately affects women.

Of the top five industries most at risk of in-work poverty in Scotland, four have a women-dominated workforce, and women make up 72 per cent of all workers who are locked in persistent low pay, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report Poverty in Scotland 2024.

In response to persistent low-paid and precarious employment, women workers are getting organised in their trade unions. When the Scottish government announced in its Budget for 2024-25 that it was reallocating £38 million away from pledged uplifts to sick pay, maternity pay and paternity pay in social care, care workers from across Unison, Unite and the GMB held a protest lobbying for its reinstatement.

Across Scottish education settings, the lowest-paid workers are standing against violence in the workplace, with a majority of the 44,600 reported incidents having been committed against women, according to GMB Scotland.

The various aspects of women’s oppression, from gender-based violence to wage suppression, are crystallised in an environment of austerity whereby public services are outsourced, wages erode, staffing levels plummet, and service availability on the ground becomes scarcer.

This is why Scotland’s women need to organise, across their communities and workplaces, an anti-austerity alliance that is underpinned by an analysis of women’s super-exploited role in our economic and social lives, culminating in the type of transformative demands we need to address this.

The STUC 2024 women’s conference call for the expansion of free childcare and the Fire Brigades Union demand for 52 weeks of paid maternity leave are examples of such transformative demands as they pinpoint specific aspects of women’s oppression in relation to childbearing and caring responsibilities.

What we need to see more, however, is struggles for fair pay, safe staffing and similar campaigns for women in relation to the defining aspects of their oppression as women. Only when we are clear about the nature of capitalism’s systemic reliance on the super-exploitation of women does it become apparent how multifaceted it is and how a cross-industry anti-austerity alliance of women is required to unroot it.

It is predominantly women who deliver public services, and therefore, women carry the brunt of public service cuts and privatisation, either through the erosion of their pay and conditions or via the increasing scarcity of resources on the ground.

The crucial labour that women deliver across society is directly affected by austerity and therefore a reversal of that process must be driven precisely by those women.