Looking for a way to celebrate International Women’s Day? Join a union. That might seem a bit abstract, but it’s not at all.

Every year International Women’s Day becomes pinker, glossier and more about gimmicks and discounts than collective power. Feminist T-shirts are cute, but the roots of International Women’s Day are as ugly as it gets: in working-class and migrant women’s protests against life-threatening conditions in sweatshops. They were born out of the vision of Theresa Malkiel, a former garment worker and anti-racist socialist, in 1909 New York. If she knew her legacy was now shopping discounts and free prosecco, she’d be pretty bemused – to be honest, so am I.

The irony of feminist T-shirts becomes a bit painful when you realise that in 1911, within a week of the first International Working Women’s Day, 146 women were killed in a garment factory fire in New York. A rag bin caught alight and those who weren’t burned alive in the locked building jumped from the eighth floor to their deaths. The history of International Women’s Day is tied to working-class and migrant rights’ struggle through trade unions, and women’s right to fair and decent working conditions. And we can’t afford to forget that.

Unions are to thank for most good things about work: from the eight-hour working day to weekends, lunch breaks and paid sick leave. And it is through unions that we’ll be able to improve our current working conditions – by raising the minimum wage, fighting for better parental leave and creating zero-tolerance cultures to sexual harassment.

Unions have your back when your boss bullies you, or your colleague harasses you; they give you unforeseen power to push back against exploitation. I spent two and a half years as a union rep, supporting women getting their racist bosses sacked, and successfully fighting against redundancies and pay cuts – and I can honestly say they were some of the most empowering experiences of my working life.

But union membership is currently at an all-time low, and unions have been all but entirely missing from the #MeToo movement – despite being the main source of support for women experiencing harassment at work. Only one in four working women are union members, the 16-34 age group are drastically underrepresented, and the Trades Union Congress states that “women, BME workers and young workers are all underrepresented in union positions”. This is a feminist issue, considering that younger women are the most likely to face sexual harassment at work.

Time and time again, unions tell amazing stories about hard-working women winning power back from controlling bosses. One of the most powerful examples in UK union history is the Grunwick strike that began in 1976 for the rights of south Asian women working in film-processing factories, led by Jayaben Desai. She managed to turn the most horrific working conditions into a national solidarity movement – and won. Just last month, a former Topshop cleaner, Susana Benavides, won a £75,000 payout (with the help of the UVW union) after being paid poverty wages and then fired for speaking up.

We owe a great debt to women like Theresa, Jayaben and Susana. But not only that: we owe them our commitment to take up the baton. If we’re serious about honouring International Women’s Day, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and join a union. Membership actually costs around the same price as a T-shirt. But in a country where 86% of the burden of austerity cuts has fallen on women – particularly low-paid care workers and NHS staff – T-shirts aren’t going to help us.

Janey Starling

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