Women And Trade Unions

First published in 1999, this volume aims to examine the extent to which such a partnership has been developed between women workers and trade unions, with a comparative emphasis. Jennifer Curtin analyses how women trade unionists have sought to make trade union structures and policy agendas more inclusive of the interests of women workers in four countries: Australia, Austria, Israel and Sweden.

This study focuses on working-class women, catering and cleaning workers, and the way their interests were presented in trade unions. It argues that there is an institutional bias within trade unions which precludes the full representation of women's interests. Based on empirical research into two trade unions in the National Health Service, the book stresses the importance of how women's work is structured, in order to investigate the role of trade unions in challenging or reproducing inequalities.

Gender and Leadership in Trade Unions explores and evaluates the similarities and differences in equality strategies pursued by unions in the US and the UK. It assesses the conditions experienced by women union members and how these impact on their leadership, both potential and actual. The discussion of women trade union leaders is situated more broadly within debates on governance, leadership and democracy within social justice activism.

This work offers a varied collection of case studies, from both developing and developed countries, on organizing women workers at national and local level in areas that are difficult to organize - small-scale enterprises, the rural and urban informal sectors, home work, domestic service and export processing zones.; This book is a source of material, lessons and ideas for all those involved in, or planning to embark on, such initiatives.

Sarah Boston recounts the story of women workers from the early nineteenth century to the present day: the struggles and strikes, successes and failures in their strenuous efforts to organise and win recognition from employers and male trade unionists. Women Workers and the Trade Unions - now republished with the addition of two new chapters covering the period from 1987 to 2010 - is the only comprehensive account of this neglected overlap of women's history and labour history. Sarah Boston argues that male trade unionists' exclusionary treatment of women workers contradicted not only the socialist aims of most trade unions but also the very logic of trade unionism itself. The account is essential reading for anyone concerned with the history of industrial relations, but also with the history of feminism and of women in the workplace. --

Explores issues of gender and union activism by means of a study of female and male shop stewards in Sheffield National and Local Government Officers' Association (NALGO) conducted in 1989 and 1990.

This book, first published in 1941, is concerned to relate the argument for Trade Unionism to the needs of women who work, whether in their homes or outside them. It is, in part, a historical analysis of the inter-war years, and it also prefigures the changes to women’s working conditions brought about by the two World Wars. War necessitated the mass employment of women, and Trade Union action had greatly improved the position of the woman war-worker of 1941 compared to a quarter century previously. This invaluable book examines that Trade Union action.