Surveying Older Working Women

By Andrea Gundersen

Did you know that in 1973 the average woman worked for 25 years, today's woman averages 34 years in the workforce, and that by the turn of the century, women will average 40 years of work? These figures signal an enormous growth in the participation of older women in the workforce. One-third of the working women aged 45 or older are clerical workers..

But what kinds of conditions do these increasing numbers of older women face on their jobs? The unfortunate truth is that mature women are paid less than younger women and less than men of the same age. Their unemployment rates are double those of men, and twice as many women as men have no pension coverage. During an age when youth has come to be valued as the supreme virtue, older workers also face the prevalent belief that they are less reliable, that they will be sick more often, and that their years of experience are not as valuable as a younger person's college degree.

In fact, studies show that not only are the rates for absenteeism and turnover lower for older women than for younger women, but older women are actually among the best workers, and only when faced with age discrimination do they begin to lose selfconfidence and their ability to be productive.

The Equal Employment Task Force of Cleveland

Ione Biggs:

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Women Working is initiating an age discrimination campaign to publicize the plight of older women who work, improve the enforcement of state and federal discrimination laws, and win specific changes on the job for women over 40. This is a national campaign, coordinated by the Cleveland-based Women Working, that will be carried out by a number of working women's organizations, allowing it to focus both local and national attention on the increasingly larger role, that women over 40 play in the nation's

economy.

CWW's Task Force wil be working initially to plan a meeting with the Age and Pay Division of the EEOC and to plan topics for a series of workshops focusing on the rights and benefits due to older women on the job. The organization is also distributing a survey throughout the downtown area which asks questions about retirement benefits, pressure to retire, and opportunities for advancement for older women. Survey results will help the task force to identify the most important issues for older women. It will also form the basis for evidence to be presented at a public hearing on age discrimination, sponsored by Cleveland Women Working, to be held in the spring.

If you are a working woman over 40, or you have a friend who could complete a survey to help in the age discrimination campaign, write to Cleveland Women Working, 1258 Euclid Avenue, Suite 206, Cleveland. 44115, and a copy of the survey will be sent to you.

Paying the Piper

By Carol Epstein

When someone wants to make his way into the upper echelons of the powerful elite, he tramples not only on his competitors but also on the less privileged, the least powerful. On January 19, Roldo Bartimole reported in his bi-weekly Point of View the situation facing lone Biggs. Her story needs to be told.

'lone Biggs has worked as a civil service employee of the City of Cleveland for over 45 years. For 24 of them, she had steadily taken on more responsibilities in the Cleveland Municipal Court until she became Assistant to the Chief Filing Clerk. On November 20 after this last election, something strange occurred: Jerome Krakowski, Clerk of Courts, notified Biggs that she had been "transferred as of that moment" to the position of docket clerk. With arthritic pain and high blood pressure, 62-year-old lone Biggs now lifts heavy case dockets all day. She has also been reassigned to several other duties. After receiving no reason for the change, she had to orient the man taking her place to his new job responsibilities.

Biggs's supervisor has recently been transferred to another department, in the storage room of closed court cases. Several other workers have faced similar changes in duties. All these employees are black women who are over 40 years old. During the Krakowski election campaign, when employees were "asked" to purchase fundraising tickets amounting to $100-$150, all these women refused to cooperate.

"In 1978," Biggs told me, "I decided that I wasn't going to buy any more tickets." That year she gave $150 to Krakowski's campaign. This year she refused. She realized there was no reason why she should subsidize her boss's career. After the election, the ax fell on anyone who did not comply.

Calling her fellow victims an "endangered species," Ione Biggs analyzes the current harassment on several levels. Krakowski is trying to build a

political machine in the same way that Kucinich did as Clerk of Courts. To do so he needs devoted workers willing to grease his machine with money. He also needs young workers, who are more likely to campaign in the evenings, walking the streets and canvassing the neighborhoods. The last thing he needs is someone who thinks for herself.

Ione Biggs is a very active woman involved in such organizations as Cleveland Women Working, Clergy & Laity Concerned, Women Speak Out for Peace and Justice, the ACLU, and the League of Women Voters. When Roldo Bartimole called the Municipal Court's Personnel Director, Zeke Forbes (brother of City Council President George Forbes) to find out why Biggs had been demoted in status, Forbes replied angrily: "We're not going to kiss her black ass, and if she were white I wouldn't kiss her white ass."' Biggs suggests that Zeke Forbes represents the upwardlymobile "black people who do not like any suggestion of militancy, even wearing an Afro. They have something against black women who are ambitious and may get a little publicity."

Last year Congressman Louis Stokes made a tribute to Ione Biggs at a CWW event where she was named the organization's Woman of the Year: "...for maintaining a vision of justice in sharing through your own life how to carry on that struggle; for knowing first hand the experience of discrimination, years without a raise, limited opportunities and untapped talent; for learning not only to survive but to thrive in a world hostile to you as a black woman; for sharing your time, your energy and indeed your life."

Men such as Krakowski and Forbes, Biggs said, know that CWW means business when investigating the problems of women office workers: "It's not just a nice group of easily-pacified females who will shut up with a few promises. They are fearful of women (continued on page 13)

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Senior Activists

By Mary Walsh

The Senior Citizens Coalition of Cleveland was formed in 1974 as an activist organization to improve the quality of life for senior citizens. Organized originally by about 100 older people to protest poor and expensive bus transportation in Cleveland, the Coalition has since used activist tactics to dramatize its concerns and force changes beneficial to older poeple in a youth-oriented society. With assistance from the Buckeye-Woodland neighborhood organization, the Coalition won its first victory when bus fares were abolished for senior citizens, except during rush hours when they pay half fare, throughout the county-wide RTA system. Members of the Coalition. also demonstrated for, and obtained, safer bus shelters; they are disturbed, however, by RTA's covering the glass shelters with posters, obscuring the see-through aspects and rendering them less safe.

There are approximately 250,000 senior citizens locally, about 60,000 of whom live in the City of Cleveland. They all face the problems common to "Golden Agers"-rising hospital costs, high utility rates, and the toll taken by inflation on their fixed incomes, among others. The average monthly Social Security income for members of the Coalition, for example, is $276-and the government is thinking of making cuts in Social Security!

The Coalition has 2,000 individual members paying dues of $2 per year, and is also supported by 70 dues-paying organizations, including church groups, senior citizen highrises, neighborhood organizations, and various senior clubs. Much of its budget comes from grants from charitable foundations, and the members are aided by a 5-person staff, some of them VISTA volunteers.

Almost 80 percent of the Coalition's members are women. Pauline Penfield, 59, a former librarian,

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social worker and teacher who is now President of the Coalition, attributes this fact to sex discrimination: women, many of them widows, have been unpaid and unpensioned homemakers or, if they were in the workforce, got less salary and therefore smaller retirement pensions than men. Women, therefore, are more drastically affected than men by inflation and other economic issues. Further, there is more depression, or "retirement syndrome," among

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February, 1980/What She Wants/Page 3