Women betrayed: should we smash the unions and start again?
The history of trade unionism has a proud tradition of fighting for women’s rights. In the mid-1800s, separate women’s unions, such as the Women’s Protective and Provident League, were established to address the specific needs of female workers, including dressmakers, typists and bookbinders. This year marks the centenary of the 1926 General Strike. But it also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Grunwick dispute, a two-year strike at a film-processing company in Willesden, north London of mainly South Asian women over working conditions, and in rebellion at the ‘atmosphere of fear, control and degrading treatment by managers’.
How then do we explain the reality of 2026, when it is trade union officials who are more likely to endorse ‘degrading treatment’ for female employees and to act as the censorious enforcers of management’s equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies than protecting their members’ rights? Why would four major Labour-affiliated unions (ASLEF, the Musicians’ Union, USDAW and UNISON) threaten to boycott the party’s women’s conference over the exclusion of ‘trans women’ (ie, men) from participating in debates on the conference floor – done to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of ‘woman’?
It is so bad that women are now taking their own unions to court. Stephanie Pratt, a specialist biomedical scientist with 20 years’ NHS experience in Scotland – and significantly, a lifelong trade union member – is the latest sex-realist employee taking her union to an employment tribunal. UNITE stands accused of discrimination and harassment on the grounds of Ms Pratt’s gender-critical beliefs. How did someone who served as a workplace and equality representative in her branch become the target of such hostility, because of her support for women’s sex-based rights, that she talks of a ‘climate of fear experienced by UNITE members’?
Sandie Peggie, the nurse at the centre of a high-profile dispute over a trans doctor’s use of a female changing room, is also suing her union, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) for failing to support her and even contributing to her mistreatment after she was suspended by NHS Fife in 2024. Andrea Egan, who recently took the helm of the UK’s biggest trade union, UNISON, said in an interview that she wouldn’t feel comfortable representing someone like Ms Peggie, arguing that coverage of the case didn’t look at the ‘real issues’ within workplaces like the NHS.
Elsewhere, two academics, Deirdre O’Neill and Michael Wayne, makers of the film Adult Human Female, launched a tribunal action against the UCU for viewpoint discrimination after campus branches blocked screenings. And lest we forget, Professor Kathleen Stock noted at the time of being drummed out of her academic post that it was her own Sussex University union, backed by the UCU and its general secretary Jo Grady, who threw her under the bus.
When modern trade unions appear not fit for purpose, do we just give up on them and parrot the old right-wing slogan ‘smash the unions’? Perhaps we need to start again and build anew. What can we learn from those courageous County Durham NHS nurses who fought against their employer’s insistence they undressed in front of a man who ‘identified’ as a woman, and were so disillusioned with official trade unions that they launched the Darlington Nursing Union (DNU)?
Is the DNU, believed to be the first union of its kind, expressly founded on the ‘gender-critical’ principle of defending the rights and dignity of women defined by reference to biological sex, a model others should follow? Is a recent paper by the Free Speech Union, Shopped Stewards correct in its argument that the divisive nature of contemporary trade union is due to its adherence to the toxic ideology of identity politics – and how best to root out these ideas from workplace organisation? How can rank-and-file members seize back control of their unions from ideological capture and a small cohort of bureaucrats betraying their members?
