perhaps to a local paper moaning about the fact that school children have to waste their annual summer holiday. I bet that if delegates looked at their local papers they would find that in a number of them during the past six or seven weeks there was some comment about some wicked trades council or some wicked trade unionist objecting to the exploitation of school children. Yet the Equal Opportunities Com- mission, which we welcomed when it was established as a result of the 1975 Sex Dis- crimination Act, sees fit to claim that the pres- ent legislation is one of the main obstacles to women achieving equality. Well, if you believe that you begin to doubt whether Red Rum could have cleared a match stick.
I am sorry, I do not want to get personal with Baroness Lockwood she is a good woman fallen among a bunch of thieves - but we ought to have been able to expect better of that Commission. The real struggle for equality has nothing to do with doing away with the shift work provisions. That is not the answer. Of course women occupy an undesirable position in the wage earning league. Of course women are denied promotional opportunities. That is not a result of the shift work system or due to skill structures. That is the result of a system which has conditioned all of us. men and women, to believe that men should work and women should stay at home and look after kids and raise a family. As to those women who lack patience with men because they see men as an obstacle, I appeal to them to have some forbearance because it is difficult for us to shake off the conditioning to which we have been subjected day in and day out.
If the Equal Opportunities Commission really examined the reasons that prevent women from achieving equality they ought to direct their attention to the Equal Pay Act. The Equal Pay Act contains all the faults that many of us feared were there in the first place, and of course when we go to employment tribunals those fears are all too soon confirmed. If the Equal Opportunities Commission wants to be an ally in the struggle for the emancipation of women, and of men, they should have directed their attention to the lack of adequate child. care facilities. I suggest that the lack of nursery facilities and trained baby minders and child minders for women, for one-parent families (and for widowers with young children) is much more a barrier to women achieving the equality they ought to get in employment. It is in that kind of area that I am highly critical of the Commission, with the notable exceptions of those who appended their signature to minority reports. It is cloud cuckoo land for the Commission to be arguing for an extension (for that is what it means if you do away with
the provisions; it means an extension) of shift work when a silicon chip dawns around the corner when we shall be talking about men and women perhaps doing a 25-hour week. Given the organisational structure that exists among women, given the fact that the majority of them still work in fragmented industrial and commercial situations, if all the protective legislation was removed they would unfortu- nately not inevitably but unfortunately still be subjected to mass exploitation. I call upon the Commission to withdraw this report and rethink it.
I am pleased that we have the relevant paragraph in the Report. My organisation submitted its motion because we thought we ought to get a declaration from this Congress that Congress is behind the General Council in its resistance to any whittling away of the cur- rent protective legislation. We believe that the protective legislation ought to be extended. Shift work is no joy ride for a man either. It destroys his social life, as was mentioned this morning; it destroys the life of the family; it very often prevents a man from assuming parental responsibilities, too — a very impor- tant factor in the campaign for women. Shift work reduces the opportunities for a man to play a part as a father, and perhaps help with the washing up or the shopping.
There are some people, of course, for whom protective legislation could not be extended. I would submit that when nurses enter their pro- fession they know what is expected of them. We should see that they are well paid for the job they do. There are certain other categories of work to which the legislation obviously can- not be applied, so to say that in blanket form the motion just gets carried and that is it, is not a solution. The matter does need examination. I am sure that what we have to do is to rebut the continuing attack upon the protective legisla- tion, which it took us a long time to establish. If the Commission's report is adopted by this Government, it will not be "back to the Thir- ties"; it will be back to the 19th century.
Ms D. Hardacre (Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers: Technical, Administra- tive & Supervisory Section): I should like to point out that the Equal Opportunities Com- inission's proposals are based on the argument that in order to achieve equality women should work under the same conditions as men even though this would mean a deterioration of their conditions. This is a movement we cannot accept The trade union Movement histori- cally has always pursued the improvement of living and working standards of its members and we cannot allow any section of members to be treated in such a manner as that contained in these proposals. Surely what we should be
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