DESPITE the frequent assumption that women’s work outside the home is a relatively new phenomenon, paid labour — in addition to their “natural” role as home-makers and child-rearers — has been a feature of women’s lives for centuries. 

This may have been piece work in a domestic setting, where bosses cut capital costs by outsourcing work to women in their own homes; running a small business adjacent to the home, such as brewing or tailoring; or work outside the home, such as domestic service. 

The industrial revolution transformed the world of work and, with it, every aspect of our society. Women’s low-status but often skilled or semi-skilled work was increasingly replaced by factory labour, sparking the birth of the organised trade union movement. 

Factory work was divided by gender and men’s work was considered skilled and was better paid compared with that of the women, who were all supervised by men. Women generally organised separately from men and early on saw how gender was used to divide and undermine the working class. 

The Women’s TUC in 1888 heard the first equal pay resolution, describing how, because women were “employed merely because they were cheaper, all work gradually fell into their hands (…) and that this resulted in lower (wages) to the general injury of men and women alike.”

That same year saw the matchwomen’s strike in east London. The 1,400 women, some as young as 13, at Bryant and May’s factory worked 14 hours a day. Their pay was often docked for “offences” such as talking, going to the toilet or dropping matches and all were at risk of developing “phossy jaw” — a facial bone cancer that was fatal unless the infected jaw was amputated — due to phosphorus exposure. The British government refused to ban phosphorus, considering such action a restraint of free trade. 

The appalling conditions endured in this “sweated labour” were exposed by journalist and activist Annie Besant in an article with the sensational title “White slavery in London.” Rather than improve the circumstances in which the women worked, Bryant and May pressed employees to sign a statement saying they were happy with the factory conditions. 

When a group refused to do so, the organisers of this resistance were sacked. The workforce came out on strike and after three weeks the company conceded — it would cease fining workers and re-employ those who had been dismissed.

The matchwomen’s courage inspires trade union activism to this day and too often we face the kind of battle they would find familiar — arbitrary and unreasonable workplace regulation, disregard for health and safety, divide and rule. 

With the prospect of five years of unadulterated Tory attacks on workers’ rights, all while the government undermines the most basic machinery of the modern state — the NHS carve-up, decreasing access to justice through legal aid, a fragmented education system of academies and free schools — the role of trade unions has never been more necessary. We are hampered by highly successful anti-union propaganda from a right-wing press and a legal framework that impedes workers from exercising the right to strike and demonstrating solidarity across workplaces. 

Many young people, even those who are politically active, may be ignorant of the existence of trade unions or unclear about what they actually do. Unions’ work on equalities offers us a way to more swiftly adapt to a changing workplace environment in which the traditional tools of member recruitment and retention do not deliver as well as before.

They make clear that a diversity of people are welcome in the union and create a way for those people to self-organise to improve the union of which they are part. GMB, Britiain’s general union, is uniquely placed to develop outside traditional union methods.

From the start the organisation has included marginalised groups and those considered to be unworthy or unable to be unionised. This includes people in the sex industry. GMB has stood strong in supporting sex workers’ right to organise — a basic human right — despite attacks from other trades unionists seeking their exclusion. More than half our 631,000 members are women.

In GMB London Region, home to 56,396 of those members, women’s network Sisters holds regular meetings on subjects ranging from legal aid, the history of equal pay, maternity discrimination and the No More Page 3 campaign. We promote greater participation by female members, encouraging and supporting them to be more visible within the union and having more confidence to take up positions within their branch and at regional and national levels.

This regional lay member self-organising echoes priorities at a national level, which includes a country-wide taskforce of female lay members and organisers examining obstacles to women taking up positions within the union.  All regions are now required to hold an annual women’s conference and London region’s residential weekend event will be held on women’s history month, March, in 2016. 

One of our aims is to engage female members who have had no former participation in the union in order to involve and inform our members on issues that affect them, encourage activism and build a collective to challenge the onslaught of Tory cuts that hit women so cruelly.

• Catherine Stephens is a GMB member involved in LGBT group GMB Shout! and women’s group GMB Sisters.