Why unions' attempt to defy Supreme Court’s landmark gender ruling cannot stand
After the TUC conference votes unanimously to reject the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the definition of the word ‘woman’, Susan Dalgety says legal action against unions may be required
Fifty-five years ago, Labour’s Red Queen, Barbara Castle, paid a glowing tribute to the role of the trade union movement in securing equality for women at work. Speaking in the Commons during a debate on the Equal Pay Bill in May 1970, she said: “… it is largely due to their pressure and the growing strength of women in the unions that we are here today debating this historic step towards justice for women in the workplace.”
Earlier this week, the annual conference of the Trade Union Congress spat in the face of women in the workplace when delegates voted unanimously to reject the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on sex and gender, and dubbed the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s updated guidance on single-sex spaces as “flawed”.
One of the most senior female trade unionists in the country, GMB president Barbara Plant, went as far as to call the EHRC guidance “ill-considered, rushed and far from being coherent or impartial”, and in an astonishing intervention, said the government “can simply avoid it”.
Cheap jibes at JK Rowling
No delegate in the debate spoke in favour of women’s sex-based rights, as set out in law. No delegate spoke of the growing strength of women in the trade union movement, who now make up the majority, with 58 per cent of all members being female.
No delegate recalled the fight for women’s rights, led by the trade union movement of the 1960s and 70s, that resulted in not only the Equal Pay Act but the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, on which the 2010 Equality Act is based.
Instead, delegates made cheap jibes against author and philanthropist JK Rowling and warned of “segregation” in the workplace if transgender men were not allowed to use women’s single-sex toilets and changing rooms. The debate was a “feast of legal ignorance mixed with age-old union misogyny” wrote journalist and filmmaker Teresa Smith on social media.
“The TUC has become a de facto men’s rights organisation that seems to want to destroy our rights in law. Not a single dissenting voice stands up for women’s rights in the workplace,” she added.
Women trade unionists in Scotland have long suffered the misogyny that arguably festers at the heart of the trade union movement. Last year, I wrote of the grotesque spectacle of Scotland’s big three – Unite, Unison and the GMB – voting in a block to defeat a motion at the Scottish Labour conference which included such ‘controversial’ statements as “conference celebrates the provisions of the Equality Act 2010, enacted by the last Labour government”.
READ MORE: JK Rowling claims Sturgeon created a 'dystopian nightmare' in foul-mouthed review of Frankly
No voice for STUC Women’s Committee
In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in April, Scotland’s leading trade unionist, Roz Foyer, head of the Scottish Trade Union Congress, described the judgment as “hugely problematic” and said she did not agree with it.
And while the STUC’s LGBT+, Black, Disabled and Youth Worker committees have voting rights at its annual congress and can submit motions, delegates voted this year against giving the Women’s Committee similar rights. Nearly 100 years after it was established in January 1926, the Women’s Committee of the STUC has effectively no voice in the organisation.
Ann Henderson, former STUC assistant secretary and a member of women’s rights organisation Filia’s trade union women’s network, believes the movement is in danger of spreading confusion about women’s rights at work. “I am determined that the past struggles of working-class women should be respected and built on by our trade union movement. And that means paying attention to the legislation and regulations that were hard fought for and supported across the trade union movement in the past,” she said.
“But the current trajectory of the STUC and TUC appears to be placing some workplace reps in the position of arguing against employers who simply seek to enforce current equality law – law and workplace protections that were shaped with trade union input.”
Senior Labour councillor and trade union activist Alison Ann-Dowling went further. A leading member of Community, she said that in her view conference delegates do not represent the views of the majority of trade union members.
“Women trade union members have had enough of being ignored on the issue of our sex-based rights. It’s time the trade union movement found its voice and backed women’s legal sex-based rights, because we have found ours,” she said. “Women aren’t scared to speak up any more or to litigate in the courts if that’s what it takes to bring the trade union movement back to defending the lawful, sex-based rights of its female membership.”
Blatant disregard for law
Sandie Peggie, the Fife nurse who is awaiting the outcome of an employment tribunal where she claimed unlawful harassment under the Equality Act after her employer, NHS Fife, expected her to share a changing room with Dr Beth Upton, a transgender male, is not scared to speak out.
She is now suing her trade union, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), for failing to support her after she was suspended by NHS Fife over allegations she had bullied Dr Upton. She was later cleared of all charges.
Her lawyer, Margaret McGribbon, said the RCN “repeatedly failed to exercise their industrial muscle to advocate for female members distressed because they are being deprived of genuine single-sex spaces to dress or undress at work.”
Given the trade union movement’s blatant disregard for the law as set out by the highest court in the land, and its stubborn, some would argue contemptuous, refusal to properly represent its female members, then perhaps it is time for more women to exercise their ‘legal muscle’ and challenge their trade union in court, where the law is firmly on their side. Barbara Castle would surely approve.
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