Women and the Right to Strike
Nurses lead the 'Hastings Demands a Pay Rise' Rally
By Kay Green
I’ve been to dozens of trade union rallies and picket-line support actions in the last year or so. I’m self-employed, and have never been in a large enough workplace to be a part of an in-house union branch, so some might ask what I’m doing there. I’m not unusual, though. Like many people, I’ve found life steadily moving from difficult to near impossible in recent years.
The lockdown effect
Only 36% of British women were able to continue working full time alongside their caring responsibilities during the pandemic, compared to 66% of men (Guardian Mar 2021). Women are over half the working population of this country, and because they are vastly the majority in the ‘five Cs’ – cleaning, catering, cashiering, clerical and caring – they faced disproportionate risk and difficulty on a number of fronts during lockdown. For many, the situation has gone from difficult to desperate, and the soaring expense of daily life is now constantly adding to the struggle.
Women along the south coast, who regularly see refugee boats come in, and see those half-frozen, half-starved, terrified refugees stagger onto the beach, often with unaccompanied children amongst them; women who are holding down two or more jobs and still failing to pay the bills; women who can’t find work, and consequently find themselves treated as undeserving failures by the DWP, are among those finding the situation unendurable. There is no option now but to turn and fight back.
I came up against financial problems after lockdown and then health problems in my family. Trying to negotiate using the NHS, we found neither my GP nor our local hospital seemed to be coping very well, and appointments and arrangements were extremely difficult to keep up with. I was also reaching a point where I could not afford the train and bus journeys I would have liked to have taken. Meanwhile – oh my, the household bills! Like many people, I was beginning to feel that drastic action was necessary – but what kind of action?
Demand better
That was the context in which our local Trade Union Council held a #DemandBetter meeting in our town (Hastings, Sussex), and lots of people like me came along – women and men who were reaching the end of their tether with both their own financial state and the failings of our public services. Life had just got too difficult, and we needed to know how to fight back.
That was the beginning of the growing movement of strikes, demonstrations and cost-of-living campaigns you see growing around you. A friend and I did a by-eye survey of the crowd that turned up to support the nurses at our local hospital on the RCN (nurses’ union) action day on January 18th. At the centre of the protest there was, of course, a group of nurses, but the majority of those who turned up to support them were retired people, or working people taking part in local TUC actions through their unions, or through single-issue campaign groups such as Defend our NHS, and people who weren’t members of anything at all but just wanted to stand by our hard-pressed nurses, and have their say about people we value not getting paid properly.
The same is true of the picket lines I’ve joined at the station in support of the RMT (rail workers), and the CWU (posties). There will be a dozen or so striking workers, and several dozen others from the National Pensioners Association, or commuters’ support groups, or people who’ve signed up to Bring Back British Rail or the People’s Post, but also people who just wanted to support key workers, and have their say about rail price increases, the importance of having station and train staff to help passengers, and people who value what used to be our Royal Mail. This week (1st Feb) there’s an NEU rally in Hastings for the teachers’ strike. I do not doubt for a moment that many of the people who come along will be parents, unsatisfied with their children’s schools, and the way school staff have been treated.
The dwindling right to strike
The high proportion of ‘the general public’ at these actions by no means implies that unionised workers themselves don’t support the strikes, it’s an indicator that everyone’s had enough, and the rest of us can come in support more easily than the affected workers can. All the unions currently taking action are doing so despite a legal and social culture that makes official strikes extremely difficult to organise. The high bar this government has set for a legitimate strike-ballot dictates the number of workers who must vote, the number who must vote in favour, and also stipulates that employers must be officially informed before the workers when a ballot is planned, and that the ballot must be postal. Like the recent government requirement for photo-ID at general elections, whatever the reason may be for those rules, they make it much harder for people to take part – no currently sitting MPs could have won their seats if the same requirements were laid on them in elections as our trade unions have to work with – and of course, those requirements can only be met in workplaces that are large enough and organised enough to have official trade union branches in situ.
That means that already, in practice, most people have no legal right to strike. Nevertheless, the actions that have been building in the last year or so under the banners of #CostOfLivingCrisis, #DemandBetter and #EnoughIsEnough are making an impact, to a great extent because many of us have decided off our own bats to support strike actions. This week, in spite of all the obstacles laid down by their particularly oppressive employer, the Amazon warehouse staff have declared industrial action, and as I write this, the TUC petition defending the right to strike has just passed a quarter of a million signatures.
The end of your tether
As Sharon Graham, General Secretary of Unite, said this week, if you push people to the point where they just can’t make ends meet, they have nothing to lose – they will come together, and they will fight back. That was certainly the case in what is perhaps the best known of historical strikes – that of the East End ‘match-girls’ in 1888. Never mind the Victorian fondness for Hans Christian Anderson’s tale, those Bryant and May factory workers weren’t little girls, they were tough women. Nor did they wait for privileged, middle class figures like Annie Besant or George Bernard Shaw to tell them what to do – they organised themselves; they made their point. They didn’t have a trade union to support them (although they did form their own union, after the strike). They didn’t have ‘the right to strike’. They had just reached the end of their tether, and needed to take action.
The school girls and women in Iran, fighting back against the limitations placed on them, do not have the right to strike but they have challenged the compulsory wearing of hijabs as the symbol of their oppression, and they are fighting back. Similarly, women in Afghanistan are fighting back against the Taliban’s view that women do not need education and should not work outside the home. They don’t have the right to strike, but they know everything is at stake, so they take action.
We are the people we need
Jin Jiyan Azadi – women, life, freedom – seen here on a women’s conference banner in Berlin, is a call to action which is beginning to be heard all over the world.
Our situation in the UK is not as bad as what some women face around the world but it is steadily worsening, and we need to take action. If the idea of joining industrial actions is new territory for you, it may seem hard to see what to do, or what good it can do, but we all need to join the pushback whilst striking and protesting are not yet entirely illegal. We need to stop the erosion of the right to strike now, because if workers don’t have the right to withdraw their labour they are in effect, bonded labour – that is, slaves.
Does it work?
What is the point of the endless pickets and demos? Can they force politicians and bosses to do anything? You know, politicians and bosses pour vast amounts of effort into making people believe it does not work. I can only think of one reason for that – they don’t want you to join in, because they know that if the crowds at pickets and demos get big enough, people get confidence from realising they’re part of a movement and then they won’t give in – so the politicians and the bosses have to. They also know the other side of the coin – that if trade unionists don’t feel confident that they can take action safely, they are less likely to make the demands for pay and conditions that we all need in order to survive. We all go along to their pickets and rallies to show those workers they are supported, so that they won’t give in.
Historians know now, that when the General Strike of 1926 caved in, politicians were on the verge of giving in to them (not that they admitted that at the time). The March That Shook Blair by Ian Sinclair is a very interesting account of the protest march held against the Iraq war – the one in London – and the related marches in other countries. It demonstrates how the size of the crowd in London really frightened our politicians and shows how close they came to pushing Blair back from his decision to join in that war (politicians kept that a secret too). Big protests work – that’s why the current government is willing to make itself unpopular by trying to make them illegal.
A large part of Sinclair’s book is about the effect that huge demo had on the people who joined in – different groups meeting each other and discovering common ground, and individuals realising the power of being one of such a huge, single-minded crowd. A similar thing happens on picket lines and TUC rallies. The change in people’s hearts when they are out there, supporting something that’s important to them, is what we mean when we say ‘solidarity’, and although many of the names you hear in conversations about union action are the names of men, a large proportion of the workers who took the risk of starting those strikes and other protests, and a large proportion of those who organised, raised funds for, and attended the big demos, were and always have been women.
Unlike many of the big strikes in the UK, the results of the Women’s Strike in Iceland could not be kept a secret, and it changed their country for the better – for women and for everyone.
I remember during the RMT’s #KeepTheGuardOnTheTrain campaign, rail workers told me about the difficulty of organising outsourced workers – did you know that many of the people you see around train stations, cleaning, staffing ticket offices and so on, are zero-hour contract workers, often immigrants, often Black people, often women, and often the lowest paid people on the railways? During lockdown, Bella Fashola and her colleagues, train cleaners employed by contractors, managed to get talking. Last year, Bella won an award from the TUC for ‘organising the unorganisable’ – a coming together of train cleaners of 40 nationalities, all ‘outsourced workers’, now striking for a living wage under the banner of the RMT.
RMT Train cleaners on their picket line.
“This is what strikes are: daring to be free, to demand, to complain, to seek redress, companionship, sharing. Picketing, one is four hundred percent alive.”
How’s it done?
If you’re not a member of a trade union active in the current #CostOfLivingCrisis movement, you can still join in, and you don’t have to do it alone. You could contact your local TUC, and ask how you can help – or you can choose which section of workers you want to support – such as nurses, rail workers, post office workers – even Amazon warehouse workers – and contact their union. Or you could join single-issue groups such as Defend Our NHS, or Bring Back British Rail – there may be branches of those organisations that are taking groups to strikes and rallies in your town. If not, you could start one. Or you could simply get together with a few friends and design a placard or banner, and go along to the next announced strike near you, and have your say. Usually, the TUC will be there with a microphone and anyone who has a particular point to make can contribute – it could be ‘why I need the NHS’ or, ‘what a train conductor did for me’ or, ‘what I think ambulance paramedics should be paid’. Anything you think is important.
Me at a GMB rally, telling ambulance paramedics why we support them.
If you’re not one for making speeches, there are some extremely popular supporters who come along with sandwiches for the picketers, or who head off to the nearest café to buy coffees for people standing vigil. Why not do that, and then stick around for a chat?
There are so many ways of joining in – it’s easy, it’s fun and it really does help to change our lives. #DemandBetter #EnoughIsEnough and #TheCostOfLivingCrisis are all trade union initiatives, but anyone can join in. The larger this movement gets, the more of us who are seen gathering in support of our workers, the more the government and the bosses will have to give, when they give in. When trade unions win wage-rises, it lifts expectations, and the level of pay across the country starts to go up. Let’s all join in and push together!
A woman’s place is in her union
Most of this article has been about what you can do without being active in an industrial union, so I’d better finish with a reminder that over half the UK workforce is female, that a much larger proportion of those people we called ‘key workers’ during lockdown are female, and that the trade unions really have not been a male preserve for a long, long time. Leaving aside early female organisers (and historians generally do leave them aside), in her introduction to the pamphlet Dangerous Liaisons: Celebrating the achievements of women in the trade unions fighting for women’s rights, former STUC Secretary, Megan Dobney, points out that all the trade union confederations in the UK are currently led by women, as indeed are the biggest industrial trade unions, Unite and UNISON, and well over half the total union membership in the country is female, so if you’re thinking of joining up, you’ll be in good company.
Why join a union?
Because the larger and more active our unions are, the better able they will be to fight the anti-strike laws, the anti-protest laws, and the #CostOfLivingCrisis – and traditionally, the most active union members have been women. So join them today!
Show me the evidence…
In Dangerous Liaisons, I read about the huge, and often forgotten, variety of wins women have had from the industrial revolution onward – from Yorkshire textile workers who struck for equal pay for women in 1832 to the women in the RMT still battling to make the government understand why people, particularly women, need staff on trains and in stations when they’re travelling.
Much has been done by and for women through trade union work, but there is much still to do. To name but a few: one in every 20 working mothers is made redundant during pregnancy, protective clothing designed for the female body is still not present in every workplace, and injustices in pay and pensions are still unresolved. The trade unions are battling on all these fronts, and they are making headway. The more women members they have, and the more active those women are, the more likely they are to win those battles.
Here's a handy tool from the TUC, to help you look into which union might be right for you…
