Unions & Equalities

Can Marxism can help us to understand autistic experience in modern capitalism? How might Marxism inform our struggles for equality and liberation? There are different approaches to understanding autism. Perhaps the dominant approach is a medical one: seeing autism as a disease or tragedy, and autistic people as being broken and needing fixing. Over recent years, a more progressive approach has developed. It stresses acceptance of autistic people rather than simply “awareness”, and demands rights, equality and support rather than abusive “treatments”. This approach is based on the concept of...

According to a report leaked to the Guardian last week, over half of Unite the Union’s 74 female officials have been bullied or sexually harassed by fellow officials or by union members. One example of the kind of behaviour complained of was: “I have to sit among colleagues who refer to our secretaries as the girls … [They] think it is correct to refer to black people as coloured, talk about chairmen, and refer to women as a piece of skirt.” Some of the worst examples in the 39-page report, entitled “Women Officers in Unite”, related to the treatment of women officers by individual members and...

Val Graham reviews Autism Equality in the Workplace by Janine Booth. Janine Booth, poet and author of Autism Equality in the Workplace, is both a worker and trade union activist. A member of the TUC Disabled Workers Committee, her handbook Autism in the Workplace was published online by the TUC in 2014. Her radical approach to removing barriers and challenging discrimination against autistic people is developed in this book which is both practical and visionary. It needs to be. Despite the positive changes in education, including access to work experience, only a small minority (15%) of...

Nearly 200 delegates from dozens of trade unions gathered in London on 19 and 20 May to discuss issues affecting disabled workers and plan the fightback against discrimination and austerity cuts. TUC Disabled Workers’ Conference debated and agreed over twenty policy resolutions, on subjects including the disability pay gap, disability hate crime, and disabled people in the arts. A resolution highlighting suicides linked to Work Capability Assessments provided a platform for delegates’ anger and determination, and was selected to go forward to TUC Congress in the Autumn. Pretty much all...

Cathy Nugent reviews Autism Equality in the Workplace: Removing barriers and challenging discrimination by Janine Booth. Available to buy online here . This is not a book of advice for autistic people on how to adapt to work or how to socialise with colleagues. There are other books and resource that do that. This is a book, based on many interviews with people with autism, as well as the author’s own experiences, which says employers should remove barriers that autistic people face at work. As Janine argues, “if we wait for employers to make their workplaces autism friendly voluntarily we...

The Annual General Meeting of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union voted to back Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for Labour leader, fight the Tories’ attacks on trade union rights, and step up its work on equalities. As well as committing to militant industrial struggles, delegates also voted unanimously for several emergency resolutions from branches opposing the tightening of anti-union laws promised in the Queen’s Speech. These included support for a national demonstration and rank-and-file conference this year. Delegates voted unanimously for the union to defend migrant workers from increasing...

TUC Disabled Workers’ Conference, meeting two weeks after the general election, resolved to mobilise and take direct action – and called on the full Trades Union Congress to do the same. Nearly 200 delegates debated and passed a variety of resolutions and discussed issues and strategies with guest speakers. An emergency motion about the general election from the Disabled Workers’ Committee stated that “With the Conservatives promising £12 billion cuts, we can anticipate further cuts in benefits levels and entitlements, privatisation and closure of health and support services, and new attacks...

Women working in Finland’s transport industry face similar issues to their UK sisters. The largest party in the Finnish government is the National Coalition (the equivalent of the UK Conservatives). The Green Party is also part of the government, and holds the position of Minister of Transport. It is selling the state-owned transport companies. All public sector companies are up for sale. This is in line with European Union anti-trust laws, but the right-wing government seems to be going along with it willingly, rather than being reluctantly forced by the EU. Women's employment rate in Finland...

7 November 2013 was Equal Pay Day in the UK: the day on which, due to the gender pay gap, women in effect stopped being paid for the rest of the year. In the same week, European trade unionists gathered in Vilnius, Lithuania, for the final conference of the European TUC’s 'Bargaining For Equality' project. The Project sought to address inequality in men's and women's wages, and to identify ‘collective bargaining’ strategies that trade unions could use to tackle these inequalities. What is the Gender Pay Gap? The gender pay gap (the difference between men’s and women’s earnings) can be measured...