Mind the Gap

Here's an interesting article from today's Guardian by Beatrix Campbell - on the new woman leader of the TUC, Frances O'Grady.

Now I wish I could be as optimistic as Beatrix about the ability of Frances O'Grady to act as a catalyst for change - because the TUC is still controlled by the big trade unions which provide most of the funding and dominate all its decision making structures.

But it's good to see a woman in the top job nonetheless - and Bea Campbell is quite right to point out the trade unions disgraceful track record on equal pay - over many years.

Because the bottom line is that you can't close an historical pay gap - you can't achieve equal pay - without closing the pay gap - which means of course women workers gaining more (in relative terms) and catching up with  men carrying out traditional male jobs.

The first big betrayal of women workers came in modern times - as Bea Campbell correctly says - when the trade unions managed to restore differentials between male and female jobs in the mid-1970s. 

And since then there's been a tendency among some in the trade unions to do exactly the same thing - except to dress it up as something different - when it really is just a rose by another name.

The underlying aim being to preserve higher pay rates of existing male jobs - at almost any cost. 

Frances O'Grady: the future of a new TUC

Sexism has defined the union movement from the start. Now Frances O'Grady's triumph is a metamorphosis

by Beatrix Campbell

The labour movement has always been Also Known As the Men's Movement. But now, for the first time in its 200-year history, it can claim to be a People's Movement. Women today outnumber men among its 6 million members, and this week the Trades Union Congress has chosen a woman, Frances O'Grady, to be its leader. We cannot overstate the importance of this woman and that metamorphosis.

British trade unionism was wrought in the image of men, not by the laws of nature but by a conflict between capital and labour, men and women. Historically, women worked in shipyards, coal mines, mills and sweatshops, but by the end of 19th century the men of their own class had purged them from work that was waged after a protracted campaign. Masquerading as chivalry, a historic compromise between men and capital confined women to their homes or the cheapest of labour. That "social contract" ensured institutional sexism in the labour movement.

In the 1830s the great Grand National Consolidated Trade Union supported equal pay and protested that women's low pay was "fixed by the tyrannical influence of male supremacy". Half a century later the ascendant Trades Union Congress was confidently patriarchal. One of O'Grady's predecessors, Henry Broadhurst – the first emblematic "working man" to become a minister in the House of Commons – told the brotherhood in 1875 that its aim was to sequester "wives and daughters in their proper sphere at home, instead of being dragged into competition for livelihood against the great and strong men of the world". The men's movement was unequivocal: women were men's rivals. Equal pay was in effect abandoned in favour of the "family wage" for a male breadwinner. The family wage was the benchmark for pay bargaining even after the Equal Pay Act was implemented a century later.

Broadhurst's chauvinism defined the TUC's values. Misogyny created myopia, and it relieved employers, the state and civil society from social responsibility, by narrowing the collective mind of progressive politics.

In the 1920s, when the Tory party insisted on quotas to ensure that a third of conference delegates were women, it mocked the almost exclusively masculine legions of labourism as unrepresentative – and went on deriding "union barons" somewhat successfully thereafter. Despite being Britain's largest form of mass membership – 13 million at the end of the 1970s – trade unions were undone by their sexism and by butch practices that were simultaneously militant and weak.

The miners exemplified the tragedy. George Orwell's elegiac Road to Wigan Pier celebrated the heroic, martyred men who dug our coal. He chided the middle class for not noticing these heroes who brought heat into their homes. Orwell's chauvinism rendered invisible the women who were still working at the pits around Wigan, and who lay and lit the fires that warmed not only the homes of the middle classes but also the miners themselves.

There was only one moment in the movement's entire history when its interests converged not only with those of women but also with an egalitarian social project. That moment was in 1974-75 when the Equal Pay Act (resisted by many unions) coincided with the labour movement's deal with the new Labour government: the social contract.

A national pay deal proposed a £6 rise for all. The pay gap between men shrank more than it ever had, before or since. By the end of the decade the redoubts of macho Labourism had mutinied and insisted on the "restoration of differentials" – the gap between skilled, unskilled and women. The bonus was introduced into the public sector, but only for men. Today employment tribunals are congested with equal pay claims, the cause of which is those differentials and bonuses: they broke the heart of egalitarian politics and almost broke the movement itself.

O'Grady's entire political career has involved living with the consequences of this, and imagining how to invent recovery, in this country and beyond. Contrary to conventional wisdom unions are still the biggest mass organisations in Europe. Women's membership is holding up, though men's is declining. In half of Europe and in Scandinavia unions are actually growing, and 30% have more women than men.

Welcome, Frances O'Grady: you are the face of their future.