Holding up Half the Sky – Women and the Labour Movement
This is the speech made by Kiri Tunks at the Morning Star Conference 1926 to 2026: Organised Labour 100 Years from the General Strike on Saturday 11th April 2026 as part of a Women-only panel.
Kiri was speaking on behalf of the FiLiA Trade Union Women’s Network.
‘Women hold up half the sky.’
It’s a pretty image, but it hides an ugly truth. We don’t hold up half the sky. We hold up way more than half – and we have done for centuries.
And this work, this labour, has been ignored, undervalued, dismissed, expected.
It’s underpaid (or unpaid), it’s overtime and it’s time it was over.
I hope I don’t have to rehearse here the range of burdens and oppressions that Women are subject to.
Quite frankly, I’m sick of hearing them trotted out year after year and nothing changing.
The handwringing that goes on around International Women’s Day or on Sixteen Days to End Violence Against Women is in sharp contrast to any concrete actions that are taken to address Women’s rights in the movement. In fact, the opposite happens. Women who try to organise for Women’s rights are often subject to conditional support, restrictive dogma or outright hostility.
Sadly, the labour movement, which should be the route to our liberation, is too often a source of sexism or outright misogyny.
Which other oppressed group is told how to determine their own boundaries?
Which other oppressed group has the terms of their self-organisation dictated to them by those who don’t share the oppressions we face?
Which other oppressed group is prevented from accessing the collective tools and resources of union organising unless we toe a line determined by others?
Because this is how the left and other progressive movements treat Women who believe that sex is a material fact and the basis for the discrimination we face.
Women are abused, harassed, threatened and traduced. We are blocked, ostracised and ejected from movements we have helped to build. For all the sympathising we get from the labour movement about the burden Women carry, very little changes unless Women take on the fight ourselves. Repeatedly, we have looked to the movement for support – and sometimes, eventually, we get it, but usually only after a struggle, just adding to the burden we already labour under.
Too often this movement lets us down. Too often it is complicit in the oppression that we face. Some examples:
Repeated instances of sexual harassment, abuse and violence within unions at all levels, including the most senior (GMB, TSSA, ITF Women C190).
The failure of unions to remove or address the obstacles (procedural and practical) that prevent Women from taking up our rightful places in union activity and leadership.
The exclusion of Women with analysis deemed to be transphobic when, in reality, it is about addressing the material facts of Women’s lives.
Too often, Women’s liberation is something the labour movement pretends to care about while doing the minimum to achieve it.
It is worn like a cloak of glory on International Women’s Day when they hark back to past struggles like The Match Women’s strike or Burston or Dagenham or Grunwick, despite the fact that these were battles led by Women in the face of hostility or apathy from unions. And still we fail to address the perpetration of Women’s oppression in our own structures.
How many men guilty of, or complicit in, sexual abuse or harassment do we still tolerate and push forward in our movement? Can unions really be taken seriously in their condemnation of sexual abuse and violence in society when we fail to address its prevalence in our own organisations?
How can we call out the Far-Right for sexual abuse and violence when we repeatedly fail to address it ourselves?
How many unions have actually engaged with the excellent TUC action plan to tackle this problem?
It’s a problem for the movement. And it’s existential.
I’m part of two groups trying to empower and organise Women to take their rightful place in the movement.
The FiLiA Trade Union Women’s Network is helping Women to organise, to gain power and agency in their unions. We have members all over the UK and in a wide range of unions and we are connecting and supporting them with resources and tools – many of them produced by unions who don’t seem to be implementing them.
I’m also part of the Women’s Liberation Alliance which is organising within the movement to ensure that solid socialist analysis and discussion take place and that Women are supported to debate the questions that matter to them.
This is work that unions should be supporting us to do. But if the movement won’t do it, we will ‘do it for ourselves’.
We know that without work like this nothing will change. And we simply cannot trust anyone else to do it on our behalf.
We will not franchise out our own liberation. And here we come back full circle because this is more labour on top of all our other work.
More sky.
And while we are holding up all this sky, we are restricted in what we can change on the ground.
We cannot be properly active in building a labour movement that successfully confronts and tears down the oppressions endured by all working people. Can it even call itself a movement for working people if Women are not empowered by it?
As Thomas Sankara said: ‘There is no true social revolution without the liberation of Women.’
At this point in time, the labour movement is not the answer to Women’s oppression, it’s part of the problem.
And Women are not just in the labour movement. We are the labour movement. We make up the majority, but we do not have the majority share of power or resources or victories. Unfair as that is, we are used to organising with no time, no money, no inside track to power.
We are used to organising at the grassroots and we are getting used to winning.
These are skills the movement needs now. The enemies we face are immense and cannot be beaten without us. A failure to harness our insights, our knowledge, our drive, our strength weakens the movement and contributes to the oppression unions claim to oppose.
So, we are not walking away. We are throwing down a challenge.
We want you to remember your roots.
We want you to remember what unions are supposed to stand for.
And if you can’t – or won’t – then we’ll do what Women have always done – we will organise ourselves.
Yes, it’s more labour, but what choice do we have? And it comes with a warning:
This sky that Women are breaking our backs to hold up…If – when – it falls…… it falls on all of us.
Kiri Tunks