Report from Poppy Gerrard- Abbott, UCU Scotland delegate at STUC Women’s Conference 2023
I’m writing this report on Armistice Day, 11/11/23, two weeks after the Scottish Trade Union Congress (STUC) Women’s Conference 30th-31st October.
The significance of remembrance is highlighted by the global challenges that movements such as ours contend with – in our packed meeting hall in Glasgow, we debated over current issues affecting women far beyond its walls. Through conference motions, women’s rights around the world from working conditions to bereavement, garment supply chains to period dignity were animated.
Sisters, our global struggle is shared.
This is why UCU was particularly proud to propose motions on matters of solidarity and unity, rallying around women who need the rally of community help and protection right now. I moved Gender equality and job insecurity (Motion 27, Section 5 of the conference: Equality), addressing our over-representation in dangerous, ‘grey zone’ and low-paid labour forms. UCU Scotland President, Professor Jeanette Findlay, executed an emergency motion (Resolution 2) UK Government Secretary of State Attack on Academics was executed in sisterly support of UCU Scotland Officer and Professor, Kate Sang, and Dr Kamna Patel during such a desperately sad period in media and political relations.
Coming together in the Glasgow Central Hotel, trade unions from all over the nation gathered from across different sectors united by shared challenges, resistance, and resolve. From firefighters to teachers, hospital staff to childminders, what was fascinating about this collective was how industries where women are represented as the majority or minority spoke to similarities of experience and policy and practice needs.
What stood out to me in particular was just how radical and specialist the motions were, including proposals on water hydration for midwives, sanitary breaks for menstruating train drivers, getting employers to understand adenomyosis (a condition associated with, but less-known than, endometriosis), and the de-stigmatisation of cancer.
An online pack of all the motions discussed can be found here – please treat this resource as far more than a list, however, and as an excellent information source where I am sure you will learn of women’s matters you did not know of beforehand.
For this, I am sure all delegates will join me in thanking STUC comrades for their educational speeches, teaching us all insights less-represented in women’s platforms and that will subsequently enrich our feminism. From this, we are reminded how diverse women’s experiences and embodiments are, as stated by Audrey Lorde: “I am not free until all women are, even if her shackles are very different from my own”.
As I touched upon in my speech when moving, conference motions were delivered through acts of storytelling, which we should celebrate as a long-held tradition of feminist praxis. Oral histories, the (re)valuing of emotive data, and epistemic violence are defining themes to society finally starting to platform women’s voices, hearing their truths about domestic violence, about brutality from the police, the courts, and the justice system, about their work not being seen as work and their exclusion from male spaces.
Thus, characterising the conference was the process of hearing first-hand women workers on-the-ground. Her Story, a project archiving trade union women testimonies and achievements, represents this. I urge readers to take a look, participate in, and share this exciting initiative where we make and tell history through the prism of women’s eyes. Namely, in a post-pandemic world, this allows us to reflect on the immeasurable networks of valuable informal invisible labour – familial, reproductive, animal care, household, caring for the sick – that women do to make the economy, political movements, and trade unions operate and to maintain the wellbeing of society.
UCU delegates ensured such matters were centered in the conference. Mary Senior, UCU’s Scotland Official and STUC treasurer, moved Motion 6 Two child benefit cap advocating for its abolition. Professor Findlay acted as a supporting speaker for Motion 7: Childcare (both under Section 2 of the conference: the Cost-of-living crisis). She also seconded the amended Motion 20 The impacts of caring on women (Under Section 4: Discrimination at work, trade union organisation and employment rights).
Bringing motions to-life off-paper, I also encourage readers to look into the exciting backdrop of campaigning giving momentum to them – indeed, each of these on-paper represents the tip of a collective of voices and years of campaigning. Whether that’s the work of Hollaback (now Right to Be) or Our Streets Now and the new bill (the Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Act 2023) to tackle endemic sexual harassment on public transport, the drive of #CantBuyMySilence against the millions spent on Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) ‘gagging orders’ in the UK especially in cases of abuse, the new menopause pledge as public figures like Davina McCall break the silence, and revelations such as reality TV celebrity Gemma Collins revealing that she has suffered urinary incontinence her whole life. By naming these topics in motions, we breathe out untold suffering, we attribute faces and role models to the commonalities of womanhood, and we give power and recognition to our secrets of oppression. Hearing motions in these areas felt like the buds and beginnings of justice, where we have for so long put up with much less.
How times have changed. Whilst we fight on, tired, for old issues our foremothers did, a cathasis was felt at conference to name problems that were unspeakable even one or two decades ago.
This sense of uplift and hope was compounded by the appearance of local schoolgirls, which UCU posted support for, speaking at the conference panel on lad and rape culture in education settings. This was not only a topic I hold dear as it was the substance of my PhD, but I felt an immense ‘feminist joy’ at seeing the young women of tomorrow have access to women’s liberation vernacular, knowledge, and mobilisation most delegates including myself did not at their age.
Reflective of the sisterhood felt in the room, nearly all motions passed unanimously. Debate proved particularly lively towards the end of the second day on Israel and Palestine, where delegates disagreed over language. This is reflective of a much wider challenge in international law over the terminology of genocide, a cultural discourse that will surely be defining to our times.
A motion dedicated to women and girls in Gaza passed smoothly, a relief at a time when we sit in fear and grief at the realities of women giving birth in war and hostage conditions, lacking medical supplies and being unable to feed their children.
Above: the UCU delegation at #STUCWomen23
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