Collective Bargaining and Gender Equality

Jane Pillinger, Nora Wintour

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781788210768
• eBook ISBN: 9781788212090
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Économie du travail

Collective bargaining has been a major force in delivering social justice and decent work in the workplace. However, the role of collective bargaining in achieving gender equality in the workplace is relatively under-researched.

In this book, Jane Pillinger and Nora Wintour investigate the complex and expanding area of collective union action for women's rights in the workplace. They explore how the feminization of unions in both developing and developed countries is changing bargaining agendas to address such issues as equal pay for work of equal value, work–life balance, maternity and parental leave rights, non-discrimination in access to employment, and the spill-over of domestic violence into the workplace.

The authors examine recent policy developments by the International Labour Organization, the United Nations, and the European Union, alongside many examples of national and industry-specific collective agreements to showcase how collective bargaining can be an effective tool for progressing equality in the workplace.

1

Introduction

This book examines the role and contribution of collective bargaining to gender equality in the context of globalization and women’s struggles, organizing and advocacy in trade unions. It tracks how union collective bargaining agendas have shifted to reflect women’s struggles for equality, providing avenues for sustainable gender equality gains. Building on the existing understanding of the role that women in trade unions have played in developing new agendas for “equality bargaining”, it reviews recent collective bargaining breakthroughs in areas such as equal pay, work–life balance and gender-based violence in the world of work. While the focus is mainly on European countries, initiatives related to union organizing and negotiating for women workers in developing country contexts and through global supply chains are integrated throughout the book, reflecting increased attention to this work over the past two decades. Nonetheless, it remains true that the vast majority of women, whether in paid employment, self-employment or informal work, do not benefit from collective bargaining coverage, particularly in the global south and in fragile states.

The authors draw on over three decades of engagement on equality issues with trade unions across the world. Based on primary evidence, original research and surveys, as well as the authors’ own participation in global union campaigns on issues such as pay equity, maternity protection, organizing self-employed and informal women workers, on migrant workers and on gender-based violence, the book also includes insights gained as a result of engagement with recent national, European and global social dialogue initiatives.

Despite the many challenges, it is important to recall that trade unions are the largest collective organization of women across the world. Collective bargaining remains critically important in the globalized economy, precisely because of new employment patterns and the increasing incidence of precarious work. By pointing to recent promising developments in collective bargaining, the book also reflects on some ways forward for collective bargaining to play a more central role in achieving gender equality.

UNION CONTRADICTIONS AND CHALLENGES IN RELATION TO GENDER EQUALITY

Trade unions were formed in the late nineteenth century to protect the interests of skilled male craft workers, a role later extended to the predominantly male workforce in manufacturing, transport and the public sector, mainly in Europe and North America. In this context, employment was based on an economic and social model of the family wage, women’s dependence on men and the limited participation of women in paid work outside the home. Trade-union structures and bargaining agendas reflected this reality. However, in recent decades, as women entered the workforce in large numbers and joined trade unions – most recently at a faster pace than men – new issues, such as the undervaluing of women’s work and women’s unpaid care work have been brought into the public domain and onto trade union agendas.

Unions face both contradictions and challenges in relation to gender equality. Trade unions are significant societal institutions, whose formation, roles and activities have been shaped by decades of male dominance and unequal gender roles and relations. Forms of representation and organizing have been slow to change since male power structures and resistance have been hard to challenge. However, with the decline of male jobs in manufacturing and the rise of service industries in developed economies, and particularly women’s employment in the public services, trade unions have adapted to the increasing feminization of work and rising female membership. Within trade unions themselves, the focus has been on women’s participation in decision-making and challenges to traditional methods of bargaining in a patriarchal system, described by the South African trade union COSATU (2016) as “a struggle within the struggle”.

Unions can give voice to and channel women’s workplace concerns into collective bargaining. As one UK trade unionist recently said:

When your black and women members see union reps who are like them and they see that they can do something to protect their rights, then they think that the union is relevant to them and they will join unions. That’s why we are seeing such a positive change in the union movement now.¹

Over the last two decades, despite the overall decline in union membership, the proportion of women’s members has increased. In 2012, women comprised the majority of trade union members in a third of the 39 developing and developed countries for which data exists. In 16 countries, women comprised more than 40 per cent of total union membership (Cobble 2012). In Europe, women comprise around 45 per cent of union membership and there is a trend to reach gender parity in decision-making (ETUC 2017b). In the UK, union membership among women is now higher than it is for men; 55 per cent of union members were female in 2015, compared to 45 per cent in 1995 (Department for Business, Innovation & Skills 2015). A higher level of union membership and leadership positions amongst women exists in the Nordic and Baltic countries, than in other European countries.

Trade unions have become more relevant to women, as reflected in the expanded scope of collective bargaining on gender equality issues (Baird, McFerron & Wright 2014; Briskin 2006). In the UK, struggles to transform trade unions from male-dominated organizations into women-friendly organizations took place, particularly in the public sector, in the context of the combination of the “second wave” of feminism and the introduction of gender equality legislation (Colgan & Ledwith 1996). In other countries, as is the case in Sri Lanka, women workers have challenged entrenched social norms and cultures that perpetuate the gendered division of labour and inequalities in trade unions (Withers & Biyanwila 2014). Global unions have also played a significant role in shaping equality agendas and supporting national trade unions in developing countries to address women’s participation in trade union decision-making and key workplace issues such as maternity protection, equal pay, living wages, gender-based violence and organizing informal, domestic and migrant workers.

Women’s struggles in unions have brought new issues onto bargaining agendas, including the multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination faced by women, particularly working-class, black, migrant, LGBTI and other groups of marginalized women. In many contexts, traditional “male” bargaining agendas have been transformed, as is increasingly evident in the public sector, not only in Europe and North America but also in some African, Asian and Latin American countries. Furthermore, women in unions have used established occupational health and safety initiatives as an entry point to challenge patriarchy and unequal gender relations, by tackling issues such as women’s safety and gender-based violence at work.

SOCIAL DIALOGUE, COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AND THE PROMOTION OF GENDER EQUALITY

The fundamental labour rights, as laid down in ILO Convention 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize (1948) and ILO Convention 98 on the Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining (1949) provide the normative framework for trade unions to represent workers and negotiate on their behalf. Many workers in countries across the world, particularly in developing countries, are denied the fundamental right to freedom of association, including the right to form and join a trade union and negotiate collective agreements. This situation is particularly true for the most marginalized workers at the lower end of global supply chains: informal workers, migrant workers, domestic workers and others.

In some countries collective bargaining remains very limited. In central and eastern Europe, collective bargaining exists principally at company level. This situation differs from the gradual shift of bargaining away from sectoral level to company level, that has taken place for example in Germany and the UK over the last two decades. In many developing countries, strong, independent unions are largely absent outside the public sector and larger private enterprises, while the great majority of workers are in precarious and informal work.

Collective bargaining is one aspect of the broader concept referred to by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as social dialogue. Social dialogue involves workers, employers and governments in decision-making on employment and work-related issues and “is both a means to achieve social and economic progress and an objective in itself, as it gives people a voice and stake in their societies and workplaces” (ILO 2013a: 5).

Social dialogue includes collective bargaining, and other forms of negotiation, cooperation and dispute resolution. Social dialogue can be bipartite between workers and employers, referred to as the social partners, or tripartite between government, workers and employers. Tripartite social dialogue includes consultations and discussions about public policies and laws affecting workers and employers. Collective bargaining is the means through which employers and their organizations and workers, organized in trade unions, negotiate wages and working conditions. The objective of these negotiations is to arrive at collective agreements that regulate terms and conditions of employment. Collective agreements also address the rights and responsibilities of both employers and trade unions.

Trade unions benefit all workers in unionized and non-unionized employment, in securing rights at work, fair pay, entitlements to holiday and sick leave, occupational safety and health and other protections in the workplace (ILO 2017a; Mishel & Walters 2003; Oxfam 2018; Schafer & Gottschall 2015). However, it is when women are present in union decision-making and in collective bargaining that there can be a notable difference in the attention given to promoting equality (Colgan & Ledwith 1996; Dickens 2000; ETUC 2010; Pillinger 2014).

Chapter 2 examines the preconditions and enablers for collective bargaining to contribute to gender equality, recognizing that a range of interlinking social and economic factors, women’s advocacy, and progressive legislation all have a role to play. Strong trade unions and centralized or national-level collective bargaining have played a decisive role in promoting policies that benefit women and families, such as work–life balance and flexible working hours. In this context, collective bargaining has the potential to go further and be a crucial tool, among others, for achieving gender equality commitments in the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda (Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls; and Goal 8: Promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all, the latter of which includes social dialogue).

However, because bargaining has traditionally been stronger in male-dominated sectors (Schäfer & Gottschall 2015), collective bargaining can reinforce existing gender divisions and prevent the achievement of substantive equality (Briskin 2014a, 2014b; Guillaume 2013; Ledwith 2012). Traditional male bargaining models, as Dickens (2000) argues, continue to pose significant challenges for trade unions. Male resistance in trade unions (Cockburn 1991) has in the past often thwarted the campaigning and bargaining efforts of women, which is still evident today in many unions across the world.

Subsequent chapters examine how unions have adopted programmes of renewal, leading to changing gender power dynamics within unions and new organizing strategies and union agendas. Changing the structure of power relations in any large organization is a long-term objective: the challenge faced by unions is how to change these power dynamics from within (internal trade union policies and representation) and how to effect wider economic and social change (external influencing of the law and policy). These dynamics are discussed in Chapter 3 in relation to collective bargaining in three distinct areas: equal pay for work of equal value, work–life balance, and gender-based violence at work to showcase the transformations in bargaining in recent years.

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AND NEW FORMS OF EMPLOYMENT IN THE GLOBALIZED ECONOMY

The UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association considers that women and other groups face the most severe forms of discrimination and lack of rights:

Women in the global economy are often relegated to low-paying, low-skills jobs. Persistent gender-based violence suppresses the individual and collective assertion of their rights to resist exploitative/abusive employers or State authorities. Further, certain groups of workers – including women; internal and external migrants; racial, ethnic, religious and sexual minorities; dispossessed rural workers and others – are often disenfranchised from the start by their status, making it more difficult to assert rights. (UN General Assembly 2016: 6)

Chapter 4 examines the issues and challenges relating to bargaining strategies to protect the rights of precarious workers and informal workers. In many countries, collective bargaining coverage has been seriously eroded in recent years (Visser, Hayter & Gammarano 2015). Particularly since the global economic crisis, there has been a weakening of collective bargaining mechanisms as a result of labour law deregulation and austerity policies that undermine the capacity of unions to bargain collectively. Overall union density has reduced and brought new forms of precarious employment, including in the so-called “gig” economy (Akhtar & Moore 2017; Heeks 2017; ILO 2016a; Johnston & Land-Kazlauskas 2018; Moore 2018). The new “precariat” (Standing 2011) is a “distinct social group” in insecure work denied basic civil, political, cultural, social and economic rights, and alienated from identification as members of the working class. In the UK, the TUC (2017) estimated that the growth of insecure and precarious jobs accounts for a 4.2 per cent decline in trade union membership in the previous year, where one in ten UK workers are now in precarious jobs.

While in some cases globalization has brought new employment opportunities for women in developed and developing countries, it has also created new loci for discrimination and exploitation, reinforcing and in some cases widening existing gender segmentation in the labour market. In India, for example, this is connected with service provision to the developed world through information technology enabled services (ITES) and business process outsourcing, such as call centres, and in the healthcare and hospitality sectors. These are also sectors and countries that have low levels of unionization and collective bargaining (ITUC 2017). In garment-producing countries, such as India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Myanmar, factory employment provides an entry point for poor women, often young migrants from rural areas, into formal work, but it is work that is often exploitative and dangerous, and trade union representation is weak.

Globalization also brings new challenges to traditional bargaining models because they are based on national industrial relations frameworks, while a transnational response is now required. With the growth of multinational enterprises (MNEs), new global framework agreements have been negotiated. In some cases, they have been used to expose gross abuses of women’s rights, for example, in export-orientated horticulture, garments and electronics (Asia Floor Wage Alliance et al. 2018; ILO 2016a; Morris & Pillinger 2016; Rosenbaum & Silliman 2018). These issues are explored in Chapter 5, with a particular focus on gender equality concerns across global supply chains and in export processing zones (EPZs) in developing countries.

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1.Zita Holbourne, PCS National Vice President and Chair of the PCS Women’s Committee, interviewed by Jane Pillinger.

2

The gender dimensions of collective bargaining

This chapter reviews the necessary preconditions for collective bargaining to promote gender equality. There is wide agreement that centralized (national or sector-wide) arrangements, strong employers’ and workers’ organizations, participation of women in negotiations, and government support for collective bargaining and equality are among the most important preconditions for gender equality to be progressed through collective bargaining (Dickens 1998; Hayter 2015; Rubery & Koukiadaki 2016). This chapter builds on this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The gender dimensions of collective bargaining
• 3. Collective bargaining as a tool for gender equality: evidence from across the world
• 4. Changing employment patterns, precarious and informal work, and the challenge for collective bargaining
• 5. The global dimension of collective bargaining: the role of global framework agreements in promoting gender equality
• 6. Conclusion
• References
• Index