The IER hosts fringe event at UNISON national conference on violence against women and girls

At last week’s UNISON national conference, IER partnered with UNISON North West for a fringe event: ‘The Employment Rights Bill, and the epidemic of violence against women and girls’. The fringe welcomed lively engagement between participants and our IER speakers. Dialogue and debate highlighted the strength of feeling that trade unions and workplaces are key sites for addressing the growing problem of violence against women and girls. For those unable to attend, we have included a summary of some of the discussion below.

IER speakers were Professor Lydia Hayes (Liverpool University and IER Vice President) and Zaf Aktar (Senior Employment Lawyer, Thompsons Solicitors). Both Lydia and Zaf sought to confront wrong policy assumptions that exclude workplaces, conditions of work and trade unions from formal accounts of how to address the growing problem of violence against women and girls across society.  Zaf spoke authoritatively and in welcome detail about how recent legal improvements to sexual harassment law can be used and offer much untapped potential to create change.  Lydia focused on the role of trade unions in tackling violence against women and girls (VAWG).  She summarised how the dimensions of class and power inform, sustain, and exacerbate the crisis of VAWG. Lydia identified workplace factors that contribute to the risk of violence against women and girls and to illustrate the structural dimensions of this growing problem:

• Increased lone working

• Under resourcing of service-provision and understaffing

• Budget cuts and low moral

• 24-hour economy and new ways of working

• Increased workplace stress, bullying and sickness

• Zero-hours working or not enough hours / pay to ‘make a living’

• Micro-management, indignity and dismissal

• Continued austerity, deepening of poverty, illness, and feelings of powerlessness in communities with whom we work

As noted by the meeting’s Chair, Unison’s north-west regional convener, Joanne Moorcroft, Labour has made the halving of violence against women and girls a key part of their ‘Safer Streets’ mission for government. Violence against women and girls is a category of violence, an umbrella term used to describe a variety of different behaviours, often crimes, that are known to disproportionately impact women and girls. These crimes include domestic abuse, rape, sexual assault, stalking, harassment, sexual harassment, coercive control, upskirting, image-based sexual abuse, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and murder.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) has reported, shockingly, that VAWG now makes up approximately 20% of all recorded crimes in England and Wales. The present-day reality for women and girls is that every year one in twelve report to the police that they are victims of VAWG. Since many instances of VAGW are not reported to police, we know the prevalence is far higher.  The recent reports of the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts and National Audit Office provide excellent insight into the practical difficulties government is facing in making progress on an issue that is deeply ingrained across society. Expanding on the ways in which VAWG is relational, sex-based, gendered and ‘classed’ – Lydia argued that public services are key for working class communities, and they are key to our social relationship with VAWG. She referenced reduced funding of public services to support the needs and rights of children in the context of a finding by Baroness Louise Casey in the recently published National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse that identification of child sexual abuse and exploitation has fallen in children’s services despite a rise in police recording of child sexual abuse. Lydia’s assessment also included difficulties in accessing housing, scarcity of public transport in many areas, precarity of employment and low pay as factors linking weakened public services to the growing problem of violence against women and girls.

Exploitative trends that we see in the workplace – such as precarity, longer hours, austerity, staff sickness and exclusions from statutory protections, contribute to the crisis and concentrate risks around conditions of work experienced by the working class.

Zaf raised the findings of the Skills and Employment Survey, which found that experiences of physical violence were higher in the public sector, with occupations facing the greatest risks of abuse including nursing, teaching, and those who work at night.

On the specific issue of Sexual Harassment in the workplace, an issue recently subject to a tightening of legal protection through both the Employment Rights Bill, and the new employer duty (s.40A amendment to the EqA) to prevent sexual harassment, effective of October 2024. Zaf  explored new proactive duties on employers to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment. You can read Thompson’s Solicitors briefing on the new proactive duty on employers here.  The Employment Rights Bill currently progressing through parliament requires employers to take all reasonable steps. Further, and on the Employment Rights Bill, Lydia told us:

“All measures to improve security of employment – to reduce arbitrary sackings- to give advance notice of shifts – to raise minimum wage- these are measures to reduce violence against women and girls”

Collective bargaining proved to be a critical part of addressing employment conditions in a way that protects women and girls from violence. Lydia framed this argument in light of the ILO Convention Concerning the Elimination of Violence and Harassment  (Convention 190, which came into force 2021). ILO Convention 190 was ratified by the UK in 2022 and, as Lydia noted, article 5, explicitly ties preventing and eliminating violence and harassment in the ‘world of work’ to the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining.

The session closed with a question and answer session, we would like to thank all attendees of our fringe event for such significant contributions to the conversation and for sharing experiences from their workplaces.