Sunday March 8 marked International Women’s Day (IWD). Looking at the plethora of IWD events, from women’s cycling sessions run by my local council to the arts-focused Women of the World festival at London’s Southbank — which, it was announced with great fanfare this year, now has royal endorsement from the Duchess of Cornwall — one could be forgiven for thinking that IWD had little to do with trade unions or the struggles of working women around the world. 

Actually, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The day itself has its origins in socialist trade union movements at the beginning of the last century.

The notion of an annual international women’s day was first tabled by the German Marxist trade unionist Clara Zetkin at a 1910 international conference of working women in Copenhagen.

The first IWD rallies were inextricably linked to working women’s struggles for the vote, for the right to work, for decent pay and conditions, for training and for an end to discrimination.

Rather than being a “celebration of women,” which many IWD events are today, or an opportunity to flog handbags and skincare products to women as one particularly depressing IWD event I attended turned out to be, the history of the day is radical and progressive and seeks to effect change rather than merely to “celebrate” women.

Today marks the start of TUC Women’s Conference and the launch of a new report on the impact of recession and austerity on women, but it’s clear that Zetkin’s battles have not yet been won.

As the International Trade Union Congress statement for this year’s International Women’s Day points out, we still have many challenges ahead:

• Women’s trade union membership stands on average at 40 per cent, yet women occupy only 15 per cent of the top decision-making positions in their organisations.
• Women’s labour force participation rates are stagnating at 26 percentage points lower than those of men.
• Women continue to predominate in informal, low-quality, precarious and undervalued jobs.
• Women’s average wages are between 4 and 36 per cent less than those of men.

Gender-based violence remains an all-too-tolerated feature of the workplace, with no comprehensive international legal standard to outlaw it.

Just a cursory glance at this year’s TUC Women’s Conference agenda shows that women in unions are fighting for their rights on many different fronts, from cuts, to attacks on employment rights, to violence against women, to attacks on their reproductive rights, to underrepresentation in industry and in public life.

The long shadow of austerity continues to affect women heavily, cutting jobs where women have traditionally worked, slashing public services which women tend to rely on more than men and increasing their already disproportionate share of care responsibilities. Women living in poverty are particularly vulnerable to economic policies that redistribute wealth away from the 99 per cent to the 1 per cent, while their labour subsidises global and local economies by providing the care services that governments won’t fund.

After centuries of being counted on, on IWD and at TUC Women’s Conference, working women say: “It’s time to count us in!”

Let’s follow Zetkin’s example and use these events as an opportunity to build solidarity, agitate, educate, and organise.

Scarlet Harris is TUC women’s equality officer.