www.thepensivequill.com/2026/08/the-...
The Empty Delegation 🪶 How Four Trade Unions Sold Out Their Female Members
UNISON, ASLEF, USDAW and the Musicians’ Union are boycotting Labour’s Women’s Conference because its formal proceedings are reserved for women.The Oldest Story in the Labour Movement Has a New Chapter, and It Stinks…In 1874, a bookbinder named Emma Paterson founded the Women’s Trade Union League because the unions of her day would not organise women. This is not a new story. It is, if anything, the oldest story in modern history, and not only in the labour movement. Men shut the door. Women build their own room.Those rooms worked. Mary Macarthur built the National Federation of Women Workers for the women the established unions would not take, and in 1910 the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath struck to force employers to honour a minimum wage the law had already granted them. They won. The movement absorbed their victory into its mythology and has been proud of it ever since. That is the pattern, and it repeats: women organise separately because the general movement has neglected them, they win something nobody else was fighting for, and afterwards the movement discovers it had always believed in equal pay.
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