The one thing that makes me ashamed of the trade union movement

It is a scandal that women standing up against gender fanaticism in the workplace are being forced to rely on Christian groups to defend them

You probably won't agree with all of Mr Embery's policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves — Wall Street Journal

Photo: Nick Efford, via Wikimedia Commons

TRADE UNIONS ARE a force for good in our society, and I’ll make that argument to anyone who cares to listen. Name a right enjoyed by Britons at work – the minimum wage, sick pay, health and safety protections, annual holiday entitlement, take your pick – and the chances are that the trade union movement was instrumental in getting it on to the statute book.

Without the courage and efforts of generations of trade unionists, our workplaces would unquestionably be less safe and contented environments.

I became a trade union member at 16, later serving as a senior official, because I felt my own generation had a moral duty to make sure our hard-won rights were not rolled back. That’s why I always get behind campaigns and legislation, such as the recently-introduced Employment Rights Act, designed to safeguard and extend those advances.

But while there is so much about the trade union movement that has made me proud, there is one thing that has made me truly ashamed of it. And that is its contemptible role in the whole transgenderism debate and, in particular, its shameful abandonment of women fighting to defend their sex-based rights.

The trade union movement has been on the wrong side of this debate since the beginning. Drunk on radical progressive ideology, which it had been imbibing for years, the movement succumbed to the overtures of the trans lobby and began to preach its gospel. Biological reality suddenly became irrelevant. In the name of ‘kindness’ and ‘inclusivity’, people were expected to comply with what in their hearts and heads they knew to be a lie.

Initially, the blowback was limited. But then the demands of the trans cultists became ever more extreme. They wanted individuals to have the right to ‘self-identify’ as members of the opposite sex, and they insisted that trans-identifying males be given the right to enter women-only spaces – including rape crisis centres and prisons – and take part in women’s sports.

And so women began to organise and fight back. But when they did so, they found that their trade unions were not standing with them.

Even in more recent years, with trans mania at long last on the retreat and after women have racked up a series of victories in the courts and tribunals, most unions have barely shifted their position and continue to sell their female members short.

Female nurses, in particular, have been in the frontline of the battle to defend sex-based rights in the workplace. Take the case of Jennifer Melle, an A&E nurse from south London. During a shift, Melle was racially abused by an aggressive trans-identifying male patient (who happened to be a convicted sex offender). Instead of defending her, Melle’s NHS Trust employer took disciplinary action against her. Why? Because during the exchange with the patient, she had used ‘incorrect’ pronouns – a cardinal sin in our woke-captured health service.

Last week, Melle won a much-deserved settlement payment from her employer. Good for her. But it was no thanks to her union which, despite the sheer injustice of it all, totally abandoned her.

In another high-profile case, Fife nurse Sandie Peggie found herself in hot water with her employer after challenging a trans-identifying male colleague using the women’s changing room. Like Melle, she found that her union turned its back on her in her hour of need. An employment tribunal later ruled that Peggie’s employer had harassed her.

In a similar case, a group of nurses in Darlington stood firm after their employer tried to force them to share a changing room with a trans-identifying male. Once again, the trade union – in this case Unison – was nowhere to be seen. The president of the union even went so far as to accuse the nurses of ‘anti-trans bigotry’. An employment tribunal subsequently ruled that the nurses had suffered discrimination and harassment.

Though such legal victories should be seen as a shot in the arm for the campaign to defend women’s sex-based rights, trade unions usually look upon them as setbacks. When the Darlington tribunal judgment landed, Unison released a terse statement declaring that it stood by its ‘beliefs in the rights of our trans, non-binary and gender diverse members’.

What a deplorable response to a ruling that should have been shouted from the rooftops, and what a display of contempt towards a group of women whose courageous actions in defending their rights at work stood in the best traditions of trade unionism.

In my own industry, the fire and rescue service, women spent years fighting for better provisions – such as single-sex toilet facilities and washrooms – in the workplace. The struggle was, in a male-dominated environment, long and hard. But, with the help of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), they eventually they got there.

Now the FBU, on whose national executive I once sat, has bought fully into trans dogma and looks upon anyone who seeks to uphold the principle of biological reality as a bigot or reactionary. When the supreme court ruled last year that women and men were defined by biological sex for the purposes of law, the union condemned it as being on the ‘wrong side of history’ (whatever that means) and motivated by ‘far-right ideologies’.

What a betrayal of women firefighters past and present and of the union’s own proud history in the struggle for sex-based rights in the workplace.

I hope that the trade union movement soon comes to its sense and distances itself from the trans cult. Too often, women who run into trouble at work for standing up against gender fanaticism are being forced to rely on Christian groups or the Free Speech Union to come to their assistance. That is a genuine scandal. Britain’s mainstream trade unions should be throwing their considerable heft behind these women and defending them when they come under attack.

Trade unions are needed as much today as they ever were. The battle against injustice in the workplace never goes away. But if unions remain determined to alienate an entire sex class – and many others besides – through their continued embrace of an increasingly fringe ideology, they will be hastening the decline of their own influence. And, ultimately, that is neither in their own, nor - given the vital and beneficial work they often do for Britain’s workers - the country’s interests.

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An edited version of the above piece first appeared on the GB News website.