EQUALITY
UCU Left - Policy Discussion - Disability Rights (click here)
Fight Discrimination at Canterbury Christ Church (click here)
Equalising Views - Gargi Bhattacharyya (UCU NEC Member)
Whinge whinge whinge. All those minorities and women going on and on, complaining together, claiming special privileges. Don’t they see what is happening in education? How is helping them going to help me?
I don’t think equality work and campaigning is grabbing our members’ attention at the moment. Lots of us are too busy fighting job losses, contract changes and other attacks on our members to think about anything apart from today’s emergency. Others are quietly suspicious that equality work has become a management tool – another way to split us from each other, to add even more bureaucratic hurdles to our jobs and to create yet another layer of managerial interference.
At the same time, all those things that black members and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) members and disabled members and women members have been complaining about are creeping into everyone’s working life. Bullying and harassment, non-promotion, career development that relies on personal patronage, impossible working environments that make us all unwell, hours that give us no time for ourselves or for our loved ones, job cuts that hit the most vulnerable and least popular members of staff first and hardest. All of that stuff that can make our jobs difficult and depressing and downright undoable – all of that is what equality campaigners have been fighting against for years. An effective trade union response needs to learn from that experience.
When I was little I wanted to grow up to be part of the ‘sari squad’ – like a striker at Grunwick or Imperial Typewriters, one of those inspirational women who defended our communities at work and in the street. I guess UCU might never be as glamorous as that, but I still think that trade unions need to build with communities, and that our strength has to come both from inside the workplace and from the places and people we work among. At its best, equality work can bring together workplace issues and the communities we live in and build alliances between different staff groups and local people that help us all.After all, every trade union issue can sound like a whinge until it happens to you …