EDITION: CLASS.
“Some people go into a militant strike as a sleazy creep, participate in the action alongside women strikers and supporters, and emerge at the end of it still being a sleazy creep.”
This article contains descriptions of sexual assault and harassment.
The Kennedy report, which detailed the extent and severity of sexual harassment in the Transport Salaried Staffs Association (TSSA), was released in February this year, following similar reports into the GMB (August 2020) and RCN (October 2022). In the aftermath of the Kennedy report, many women active in trade unions have come forward publicly to talk about their experiences; countless more have reached out to others in private discussions. This article is not a report into what happened at TSSA. Rather, it is a reflection on the background issues of sexism within the movement, based on ten years’ experience as a union rep, and 20+ as a member of various public sector unions, and talking to a lot of other women reps. The behavior that has come to light in TSSA is not unique and is a part of a problem of behaviour and culture which undermines the trade union movement.
We live in a sexist society. Sexism pervades our lives like spores in mouldy bread, but it manifests differently in different places. Sexism will play out differently in a hospital than in a golf club. Because unions are organisations linked to workplaces, sexism within unions is connected to social changes in women’s status as workers—both within unions and in employment more broadly—including women’s historical inclusion in and exclusion from the workplace.
Similarly, there is a long and conflictual history of women’s involvement in working class politics. TSSA, for example, is a transport union, and all the transport unions operate in and are influenced by an environment where the first woman London bus and tube drivers took up their posts within my lifetime (1974 and 1978 respectively). Sexism is not, however, confined to male dominated industries or industries where women are relatively new arrivals, as evidenced by the report into sexism within the RCN. Nor is it the preserve only of ‘uncouth’ or ‘uneducated’ workers.
Ideas around who is a worker, and who the union is for, play an important role in enabling sexism. For example, migrant workers are both migrants and workers, but are all too often dismissively portrayed as mere ‘migrants’, whose presence undermines the conditions of ‘workers’—as if they are not also workers, with working conditions that are a site of struggle. Similarly, women are often viewed as not ‘real’ workers (or not fully workers), which means that the issues they face at work are not ‘real’ union issues. The ‘real’ working class is often associated with traditional masculinity; trade unions are seen by many as having been created by ‘real workers’ (men), and as being their exclusive property.
The concept of proper union issues and what matters and what doesn’t is related to who matters and who doesn’t. Issues such as pay can be seen as universal but issues that affect some workers disproportionately because of their race or gender can be seen as partial — and possibly divisive or not ‘real union issues’. Universal issues then are those which affect workers who are a perceived standard or default, and issues which affect non standard workers (women, workers with disabilities etc) are partial or divisive. In fact most people are some kind of non standard. Within some unions there is an idea of certain job roles who are the core members and other people who have been allowed in but are not core, for example teachers and classroom assistants in some education unions, and issues pertaining to core members are seen as more important. This also plays out with regards to casualisation, outsourcing etc. and these divisions all interact with race and gender.
A lot of people are responding to the report by saying we want women to get more active in trade unions, both just because we always need more people active in trade unions, and also because this is seen as a way to resolve the trade unions’ problems with sexism. However just having more women involved won’t necessarily resolve the issues. When women (or other under-represented groups of people) do get involved, there can be a lazy assumption that new people just need to fit in with the way we always do things, and that nothing needs to change because the way we always do things works fine. But if the way we always do things doesn’t work fine, then we actually do need to change it. If that doesn’t happen, then new people will probably either drop out quickly, or stay, but have a miserable time. If more women get active in the unions but at the same time problems like sexual harassment are not effectively dealt with, this could mean women getting involved and then being exposed to sexual harassment, and this isn’t acceptable collateral damage.
Women within trade unions (and similar organisations like tenants associations) often end up filling certain roles. Tasks such as doing secretarial work and making the food come up time and time again. Now, a lot of secretarial work is essential to a functioning organisation, so it’s not work without value, but this isn’t neutral. What these women are talking about is a situation where you are involved in the organisation, you attend meetings, but at the meetings you’re not listened to as an equal, you don’t have a full say in the direction the union takes, in what strategy to use in a strike, in what’s considered important. Maybe you’re out of the room making the tea while the decisions are being made. You attend meetings to listen to men pontificate on and on, decide on the strategy and tell you what work now needs to get done.
It’s fustrating and unfair, and also not how you get good decisions. If a small group of people make the decisions without listening to other members then they’ll make bad decisions. This is especially the case where the small group making the decisions are unaware of the issues faced by many workers. You can, in a certain way, be rank and file and democratic, but still be sexist. Meetings can be open to all roles in the workplace, have recallable and accountable delegates, and a good decision-making process, and delegates can also interrupt women, talk over them, and doubt their intelligence every time they speak. People have power in a union through holding formal positions, regional officer or branch secretary, but also informally through having access to information, understanding the union structures, knowing people, and being taken seriously. This informal power is not just something people have or don’t have: it’s built up in some people and not others in a collective process. This isn’t ‘just the way things are’. It’s a choice. And these informal power imbalances have a lot of consequences.
Harassment often follows a power differential. This isn’t always straightforward (there are students who harass teachers, and workers who harass supervisors), but a power differential is usually there. Victims of harassment at work are more likely to be in lower-status roles, or on precarious contracts. Within a union, harassers may be people with higher official positions, but also people with higher informal status. People often respond to harassment by quietly trying to avoid the harasser, which often means avoiding certain events or refusing certain roles, while the harasser is free to go everywhere and attend everything. This means that the victim is denied access and connection to the full activities of the union, becoming more isolated and vulnerable over time, while the harasser makes contacts, buys rounds in the pub, and can rise up in the union. This dynamic contributes to certain areas of the union becoming more and more male-dominated, along with other factors such as some unions’ lack of childcare, and the lack of provision for part time workers to become reps.
There exists in the unions a constant low-level sexism, which both provides an environment in which the really bad behaviour can flourish, and which also just wears women down. Dismissive and denigrating attitudes are tiring, and working with them long-term requires a steely self-esteem that few possess. It seems clear that simply ‘getting more women involved’ as active union members will change little while these structures and attitudes persist.
One way that socialist groups attempt to get around this problem is to insist upon the primacy of class struggle, narrowly understood as excluding women’s oppression. They argue that, since we won’t fundamentally get rid of women’s oppression without first overthrowing capitalism, what women ought to do is just put aside their liberatory demands and fight really hard in the class struggle. Now, firstly, most socialists are absolutely fine with, say, fighting for a pay rise, even though a particular group or sector winning on pay will not result in the complete overthrow of capitalism. Surely fighting for incremental improvements in other areas, such as against gendered pay discrimination, should also be fine. But secondly, this argument overlooks (or actively dimisses) the fact that mistreatment of women occurs within struggles themselves.
Some years ago, I was involved in a militant dispute in a male-dominated industry that I don’t work in. I spent months standing on early morning picket lines before going to work, helping to leaflet work sites, and making food for pickets. I did everything the workers involved in the struggle asked me to do. One evening, after a breakthrough in the dispute, we held a celebratory social at a pub. I was standing on the rooftop in a circle of men, including several shop stewards and avowed Marxists, when a drunk man with whom I had never spoken felt my breast, announced what he had done to the assembled circle of shop stewards and Marxists, and then went downstairs to the bar.
My issue here isn’t so much the behavior of this guy. Maybe he’s just an arsehole. But when I had first become involved in supporting the dispute, I had told a comrade that I was worried about sexism, seeing as I was often interacting with this male-dominated workforce by myself without anyone I knew there. That comrade had looked blankly at me, and then said, ‘oh don’t worry about that’. After the groping guy had announced his action to the assembled group of men, nobody did anything. It was as though they hadn’t seen it, or it hadn’t happened: but they had seen it, and it did happen. I’m not saying they should have dragged him back and made him apologise. I’m saying that somebody could have spoken to me, said something, asked me if I was alright. Instead, I was left standing there, knowing that everybody saw what and nobody would speak to me. I felt exposed, as if the guy had ripped my top open and everybody was looking. This was very upsetting, and after it happened, I stopped being involved in the dispute. The comrade who told me not to worry about sexism has probably not reflected on any of this for one second. I doubt he even knows about it. The point is that there are probably always going to be individual arseholes—but what are the structures that enable them to behave in that way, and that leave their victims unsupported and humiliated?
There is a vision of participation in struggle as a process that breaks down divisions between the working class, thus producing empowerment and proletarian unity. And, yes, at its best, it does do that. But it doesn’t do it automatically. Some people go into a militant strike as a sleazy creep, participate in the action alongside women strikers and supporters, and emerge at the end of it still being a sleazy creep. Some people’s approach to solidarity is extractive: they want other people to give them solidarity, but they don’t necessarily feel moved to return it. Some people are seen as the ‘true’ revolutionary subject, whose their struggles are very important and must be supported, and they are free to be sleazy creeps; whereas other people, who are also members of the working class, are perceived as less important, and as helpers and assistants to the ‘real’ struggle rather than active subjects equally engaged in struggle.
Treating participation in struggle as the cure for other oppressions within the working class, without the need for anyone to actually have to do anything to confront them, has an element of victim blaming. It suggests that women who experience sexual harassment have obviously failed to raise the temperature of the struggle high enough to melt away their comrades’ wish to harass them. It also provides an excuse to ignore the issues: if all we need is ‘better’ class struggle, anything else is a distraction. On top of this, it ignores the painful experience of participating in a struggle, of really putting yourself into it, and then experiencing sexual harassment, which turns what should be an empowering experience of connection with other workers into a lonely and painful experience of alienation.
When challenged about the issue of harassment, people will often say that the victims need to ‘speak up’. But the fact is that victims do speak up. Shared accounts of harassment contain a grimly familiar list of reaching out to the branch secretary, the regional officer, the reliable solid comrade—and being dismissed, minimised, and ignored. Clearly, people who have the position and responsibility to address the complaints are, in very many cases, choosing not to do so.
Often, this choice not to act is based on a pragmatic calculation about how much hassle it will be to address the case, rather than to simply ignore it. Harassers don’t like being challenged. In the workplace, challenging sexual harassment can be bad for your career. In the union, it can affect your ability to move comfortably within the institution, to get support, and to be involved in things that interest you. If the harassment isn’t happening to you, then it can remain somebody else’s problem. It’s also an issue of politics. The lazy dismissal of feminist ideas, which is commonplace in unions and on the left, gives intellectual cover for selfishness and cowardice.
Okay—I did a lot of complaining, so where’s my solution? In discussion with trade unionists, people responding to the Kennedy report into TSSA have often flagged up issues such as lack of internal democracy, unaccountable cliques and members having a lack of oversight. In the case of TSSA, these were all fundamental issues. Internal democracy and accountability are, in any case, important to any trade union, and it is good practice to ensure that these processes are operating properly. But there is some risk in highlighting these necessary issues and stopping there. Harassment and sexism occurs in unions at a rank and file level as well as in the leadership, and it can occur in branches that are, in many ways, well run. The changes needed require a capillary action at all levels of the unions.
Existing trade union structures empower some workers and disempower others. The structures are less navigable for part time workers, casualised workers, second language speakers, people with caring responsibilities, disabled workers, and so on. These barriers could be addressed: childcare, translation, accommodations, and role sharing all exist, and the unions could make better use of them (access to these adjustments is currently quite patchy). Addressing these issues calls for an allocation of effort and resources, which will require people affected by the issues being able to access and influence the decision-making structures of the union.
Challenging the situation would involve both changes on the formal level of union policies (childcare for meetings, more emphasis on equalities struggles in union training and education, especially for reps, a sexual harassment helpline), but also on the informal level. A lot of union learning and assistance is passed down through chats with experienced reps. When some people are excluded from the social and informal side of the union, or feel less at home in it, they are losing out on important parts of collective education and support. To combat the exclusion and mistreatment of women, reps and active union militants need to be looking and thinking: who is not here? Who is quiet? Who is unhappy? They need to go out of their way to tell the new rep things they may not know, to suggest that they give something a go (and to offer help and support if needed), and also, crucially, to watch out for how other people are treating them.
The battle to make union structures accessible and properly democratic and responsive to the rank and file has been going on for as long as unions have existed. This is not a quick fix issue. It runs deep. But there are things we can do. Specifically relating to sexual harassment, when I have asked survivors what needs to be done, the most emphatic answer has been that people need to step up and act to stop sexual harassment. People are told about harassment (in some cases, they see it happen right in front of them)—but they don’t act. That feels like a crucial point.
Writing this gave me nightmares. I turned up to an emergency mental health assessment I had been waiting for, and only talked about this the whole hour. I don’t know what the (very nice) nurse must have thought. The level of psychological damage people are taking on through these issues being left unaddressed is causing serious harm. This in itself should be a reason to act. In addition, letting these problems continue to fester undermines the effectiveness of the movement. Fixing things won’t be quick or easy. But, in exchange for some discomfort, we would have a stronger, better, more fighting fit trade union movement.