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My support of unions is not blind. They have bene responsible for some pretty awful shit. As a woman and a historian I am painfully aware of the role unions have played in the past (and actually more recently in a few cases) in perpetuating and even exacerbating sexual discrimination. During the 1840s it was the Union movement that insisted that women should not be allowed to work in a variety of crafts and trades. It was the unions who perpetuated the notion of the 'male breadwinner ideal'.
Time and again the sisters of the movement have been ushered to the back of the room and told to stay quiet. Laughed at when they tried to address their brothers in arms, derided for their work. Though always expected to show their support in other womanly ways.
Even as recently as the 1970s the male dominated unions in my country argued vehemently against the relaxation of laws prohibiting women from working nights in many fields or from working underground.
Sometimes protection becomes protectionism, and the unions loyalty to their base membership leads them to engage in exclusionary tactics agains other, even less protected workers than their own.
None of this changes the fact that without worker protection the employer class (and it is a class) is able to call all the shots. More importantly, we can see from periods of low protection that this employer class cannot be trusted to take account of their workers' well-being without an element of compulsion.
The argument that workers have the ultimate sanction at their disposal, that of withdrawing their labour and going elsewhere only works if the opportunities for better working conditions exist. Without worker protection those conditions fall away across the board.
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