Women’s Union History: Revisiting a Century of Gender Struggle

1. Women’s Union History: Revisiting a Century of Gender Struggle Bradon Ellem Work & Organisational Studies The University of Sydney

2. The presentation • The relationship between women workers and trade union structures: ambivalent, contradictory and complex. • With an eye on current issues – the enduring problems of gender equity, the recent deterioration in conditions for low-paid women, the long crisis in union membership – what might we draw from history? • Concentrate on two issues: • Women’s activism and the connection with union structure; • The adoption of gender-specific issues taken up by unions, notably equal pay.

3. The Clothing Trades Union and Equal Pay, 1938 The chairman [Fallon] said that if the marriage tie was destroyed they destroyed the name of Mother. Comrade Smith (hear, hear). Comrade Fallon said that no man would like to think that his Mother’s purity, chastity and virginity had been assailed. The secretary could not see how the phrase mentioned by Comrade Fallon entered into the matter at all. Federal Council, Minutes, 21 February 1938

4. Union structure • Men talking about women – all male leadership of the union. • Was it ever thus? No: • Tailoresses’ unions and ‘women’s sections’ of unions from the late 19th century. • Some indications that there was more female leadership until the 1920s than afterwards. • Women were not inactive unionists: but the experience of women in different occupations was shaped by different family circumstances.

5. The decline of women’s active role in unions • So, what changed? • The state – the family wage, arbitration, union registration. • Employers and work – increased division of labour. • The political culture – the decline of feminism (despite the efforts of Council of Action for Equal Pay and the United Associations of Women). • Unions – male leadership entrenched.

6. What happened next? • The CATU in 1938 did decide to seek ‘equal pay for the sexes’. • In the union movement more broadly, the changes wrought by World War Two had very mixed results … • and progressive attitudes to women’s public life and to equal pay were damaged by the politics of the Cold War.

7. Was ‘Comrade Fallon’ right? • The equal pay debate plainly touched a nerve. • Equal pay was about more than equal pay. • Wallis had obviously listened to Muriel Heagney at the CAEP and read Engels on the family: with equal pay and equal rights marriage would be based wholly on affection not economic need. • The reading of political context saw unions and the CAEP downplay the importance of wage equity.

8. Some final thoughts • Overall, ‘what women did’ in unions was shaped by the state, family and employment conditions as well as by the actions (and inactions) of their ‘brother’ unionists and labour activists. • There is no necessary or linear progression to improvement simply because the number of women in paid work increases, for example. • Nonetheless – based on the assumption that women and unions need each other – there is evidence of immense change, of all varieties, over the years since the first IWD.