Lecture features role of women in trade unions
As part of its sixtieth anniversary celebration, the University of the West Indies School of Continuing Studies, in conjunction with the Hugh Shearer Institute, this morning held a lecture in honour of women in the Caribbean Trade Union movement. Entitled “Forever Indebted to Women: In Spite of the Difference”, the lecture series was presented by June Castello of the Centre for Gender and Development at the Mona Campus in Jamaica. News five spoke with Castello and Elena Smith, President of the Belize City Branch of the National Teachers’ Union.
June Castello, Guest Lecturer, Centre for Gender and Dev.
“How I feel about women in the union movement in the Caribbean really is directly how I feel about en and women in the Caribbean and I think that—basically what I was trying to say this morning—if we keep raising boys and girls to see particular characteristics as just exclusively masculine and exclusively feminine, it’s going to work against us, both boys and girls, men and women. And those are the kinds of things that contribute to women not feeling that they can come out and be leaders in some of these—the union movement—because some of it has to do with how leadership itself is defined. We see it as kind of a masculine space. The assertiveness that has been spoken about earlier, the aggression as some might want to call it, those things are understood to be masculine traits and so when women take them on, when they wear those garments it’s as if they are disrupting the idea of what it is to be a woman. It puts a lot of pressure on them.
Ann-Marie Williams
“You spoke about globally there are thirty-nine percent of women represented in the Trade Union Movement yet only one percent at the decision making level. Aren’t we as women responsible of that?”
June Castello
“We are with everybody else as part of our societies again because of the same things we spoke about, our not that we can step out into this space, not having the confidence sometimes or fearing that it is going to make us less of a woman. And if this is what we’ve been raised to understand that us as good women being in a particular way and this acts as kind of a counter to that, then there are going to be problems.”
Ann-Marie Williams
“I feel the Trade Union Movement in Belize is very powerful but I feel that we usually see the union people come out strong when it’s time for salary increase, something to benefit them and they don’t really get involved in some of the other community issues that they should. Speak to that.”
Elena Smith, Union Activist
“In 2005 we had said that salary was the last thing on the list and unfortunately it ended up becoming the point on the list. I kinda agree to some degree but I think we are changing towards looking at other social issues instead of just salaries because we realise that salaries will not made things different because you get salaries and if you’re taxed what will it do for you?”
This morning’s programme also included remarks by visiting Caribbean lecturers along with Belize City Mayor Zenaida Moya who first came to national prominence via her union activism. The University of the West Indies has several activities planned throughout this anniversary year.
