IT IS no accident that too many working-class women end up trapped working long hours in low-paid dead-end jobs while juggling the lion’s share of caring and domestic duties. 

All too often women who try to get active in our unions to change the workplace end up having doors slammed in our faces. 

We quickly find ourselves relegated to the sidelines in union branches that are dominated by older men who wrongly think they know better than women. 

This was certainly my own experience when I first became active in trade unionism in the NHS and it never failed to amaze me how in an organisation with a majority female workforce so many of the union branches are dominated by men. 

The consistent failure of the labour and trade union movement to mount an effective challenge to the status quo is deepening a socio-economic crisis which working-class women and children are right at the forefront of. 

The welfare state, public services and the NHS are all being stripped away by rampant cutbacks and profiteering and there is very little effective co-ordinated resistance to any of this. 

As a result working-class women end up exploited in the workplace, denied the means to keep ourselves safe, locked out of the services we need to ease the burden of caring, and denied healthcare services too. 

So it’s very important that women’s voices are heard and that women take a bold lead in deciding on policy and lead the struggles that directly affect us and the entire working class.

Women must organise ourselves within trade unions and communities in order to start advancing our own collective material interests. 

Pay, secure housing, flexible working and decent affordable childcare will be high priorities for women facing a growing cost-of-living crisis. 

The struggle cannot be limited to individual liberation or advancement — it must be a collective struggle. 

If we are to bring everyone under the same banner, to fight against the exploitation that is intrinsic to capitalism, it can be on no other basis but class.

The hospitals in London and south-east England, the area where I am a trade union rep, are filled with low-paid women who clean, serve food and provide clinical care to patients. 

The healthcare assistants and nurses who occupy the lower ranks of the clinical roles suffer an additional layer of injustice as they are well educated and highly skilled but their pay does not reflect this. 

Organising and leading collective trade union action could make a real difference to the lives of the working women of the NHS. 

Year on year NHS workers are driven even further into poverty as the impact of cuts and privatisation bite and many hundreds more leave the sector. 

The NHS cuts and privatisation steamroller has to be stopped for all of our sakes and the women workers of the NHS will ultimately find themselves with no choice but to put themselves forward to lead the struggles. 

This is exactly what happened to me in a period when I had a young baby and very little time to take on trade union or political work. 

I had to organise my colleagues to resist an NHS restructure that proposed to cut our pay and destroy the service for patients because no-one else would do it. 

We won that dispute together without the necessity to take strike action and I have never looked back since. 

The skills I developed and the confidence I gained from becoming an active trade union rep have served me well in every aspect of my life and I would recommend the same for all working-class women.

In spite of years of discussions and statistics being published about the gender pay gap, working-class women are still being denied the wages they need to enable them and their children to have decent lives. 

According to official statistics on the gender pay gap, women earn on average 6.5 per cent less than men and this puts them at greater risk of slipping into the ranks of the working poor. 

One of the main causes of women’s homelessness is an inability to pay rent on a private home. A report by the university of York and London 2021 found that women’s homelessness occurs at a far greater scale than was previously recognised and there has been a failure to count and respond to women’s homelessness effectively. 

The brave GMB women of Glasgow City Council who are embarking on an industrial struggle for equal pay should serve as inspiration for all low-paid women to come forward in their trade unions and do the same. 

Women’s rights are not some subsection of the class struggle and our rights should be absolutely at the centre of everything the labour and trade union movement needs to fight for and everything we need to achieve. 

The trade union movement needs to emphasise, the disporportionate impact of cuts and privatisation on women’s working lives — on our domestic and other responsibilities.

Of course we should run campaigns around specific women’s health issues but also women can and should collectively take on bad bosses and they should get nothing but encouragement to mount collective resistance to government policies that do little to advance our collective interests around housing, pay, sick pay and flexible working, benefits and public services. 

Women have just as big a role to play in the trade unions and in political life as men because every aspect of our day-to-day lives is affected by workplace policies and by the decisions of the politicians in Westminster. 

All too often working-class women like the nurses of the NHS are served up platitudes by those holding the keys of power when they are the sole breadwinners struggling to pay the bills and put food on the table for their kids.

On International Women’s Day it is important that every last working-class woman takes a conscious decision to step forward and lead the charge against the cuts and privatisation that hurt ourselves and our children so much. 

We must stand shoulder to shoulder with the male comrades and enable them to understand that standing with women and fighting alongside women to advance our interests is intrinsically linked to their own interests too.  

It is important for everyone to recognise that struggling to advance the material interests of working-class women will serve better than anything else to protect future generations of our entire class from the rampant greed and excesses of capitalism.

Helen O’Connor is GMB Southern regional organiser.