Sir, What induced the National Women's Council of Ireland to join with the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed in a symbolic Signing on Day on December 13th to highlight something called women's enforced idleness"? ,And to allow the term "home duties" to be applied to our unwaged work in the home, on the land, in business and the voluntary/community sector? How insulting and degrading, when the NWCI is committed to demanding from the Government the recognition and true monetary value of this work.
For the INOU, the Signing on Day was part of their lobbying in the second tier of talks on the new National Agreement, seeking 0.75 per cent of the GDP to be spent on fighting social exclusion, particularly unemployment and training programmes. Women were asked to sign on to the Live Register as "unemployed" i.e. available for, capable of, and genuinely looking for waged work, while providing evidence of child minding arrangements. In short, the INOU is only interested in a small section of able bodied women, on the Department of Social Welfare's terms, who will do a double job for a single wage.
Whereas the NWCI's declared policy is that the value of women's unwaged work should be included in the GDP and that thousands of women doing unwaged work should be entitled, as of right, to all training programmes, whether they want to enter the wage market or not. Does not the NWCI see how it has been outmanoeuvred by the INOU, and the trap it has naively fallen into?
The Minister, Mr Taylor, in a reply to a question from Maire Geoghegan Quinn on November 12th, said (in effect) that it would cost too much to pay women to keep a diary of their unwaged work for a week. He added that it would place too great a burden on them to have to do it. Let him put it to women directly! To be paid to keep a diary of your work for a week cannot be a greater burden than doing a double job for a single wage.
We hope that Ireland's largest funded women's organisation is not going to turn out to be our greatest obstacle to real equality and economic independence. Yours. etc.,
St Bridget's Place Lower, Galway.