Thousands of low-paid women are striking. Where’s the solidarity?

Glasgow’s carers, cleaners and caterers have voted for strike action over a £1bn pay claim. They deserve our support
glasgow city chambers
‘Glasgow city council responded to strike ballot results by claiming that ‘putting vulnerable people at risk by calling a strike … cannot be justified’.’ Photograph: Doug Pearson/Getty Images/AWL Images RM

Blink and you might have missed it, but last week in Glasgow women made history. Bringing to a head a decade-long dispute between thousands of low-paid carers, cleaners and caterers with Glasgow city council, Unison and GMB members voted in landslide numbers to strike over historic equal pay claims estimated to be worth up to £1bn. If no other arrangement is reached, working-class women will soon bring Scotland’s biggest city grinding to a halt as they withdraw the labour that is so often invisible and yet vital to the functioning of any society.

In the age of #MeToo and an unprecedented public interest in the gender pay gap and equal pay at organisations such as the BBC, these women should now be taking their rightful place on the fronts of newspapers and at the tops of bulletins, with feminists and socialists everywhere lining up behind them in solidarity. Instead their activism has largely gone under the radar, framed as a local or party political issue, or not really acknowledged at all. Not all forms of feminist or trade union action are created equal, it seems.

Trade unions have fought in recent years to shrug off an image of gruff blokeiness, just as black, LGBT and working-class women have advocated for a feminism that is intersectional and inclusive. Both have made great strides, but Glasgow’s equal pay women serve as an example of how far we still have to go. Compared with the rightfully extensive coverage of Birmingham’s refuse strikers or Hollywood’s abuse scandal, is it that they are too female to be a proper workers’ rights story, and too working class to be a proper feminist one?

Inherent in the dismissal of Glasgow’s equal pay women is an assumption that the domestic work of cleaning, care and catering should naturally fall to women, preferably those who’ll get on with it quietly and be grateful that they’re getting paid at all.

When Glasgow city council responded to strike ballot results by claiming that “putting vulnerable people at risk by calling a strike … cannot be justified”, they failed to acknowledge that these women have propped up Glasgow’s economy for decades precisely by caring for vulnerable people – not to mention that many have their own families who also live in precarity, owing in large part to the undervaluing of their work. An eagerness to interpret the dispute as the political manoeuvring of union bosses has similarly ignored the ability of these women to self-organise and act in interests beyond those of political pawns.

Some of the women involved in this dispute have been fighting since 2007, and many are nearing retirement. Their equal-pay battle began with a national pay scheme that jumped through hoops to combine different criteria and conditions just to maintain the unequal status quo. But on top of this, the outsourcing of their work to arm’s-length companies has seen many landed with increased workloads, faster turnaround times for home carers, meagre sick pay and conditions that mean they receive payouts of just a few months of salary upon leaving work, many having never earned enough to build up a pension.

All of this is set against a backdrop of decades of physically demanding and often emotionally draining work that ultimately forces many into early retirement anyway. Theirs is a story of the many ways in which class and gender intersect with austerity, privatisation and other capitalist forces to keep working-class women busy and quiet. But now Glasgow’s women have found their voice.

If society really does find itself on a post-#MeToo precipice, then we have a decision to make: take the path of least resistance and focus on representation and CEOs, or fight for a feminism that goes beyond the boardroom, and a politics of workers’ rights that accounts for the specific ways in which women are oppressed by low-paid and precarious work.

Glasgow’s cleaners, cooks and carers have made their choice. Over the coming months the city could see thousands of working-class women on picket lines, demanding what they’re owed after decades of being downtrodden. Our solidarity is the least that they deserve.

Eve Livingston is a freelance journalist