Does the Step Aside Brother campaign offer a route to involving more women in the struggle?

The ‘Step Aside, Brother’ campaign was launched on International Women’s Day 2018 by Lynn Henderson (then STUC President and a Public and Civil Services union National Officer). It was heavily referenced by Lynn Henderson in the recent election for the assistant general secretary of the PCS union. Henderson was the favoured candidate of PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka in his campaign to defeat Socialist Party member Chris Baugh. Chris was the incumbent and the official Left Unity candidate, having held the AGS position for the past 15 years. Lynn Henderson finished last in the election but her candidature split Left Unity allowing a third candidate to come through the middle and narrowly win the election. 

Mary McCusker gives her view of the Step Aside Brother campaign.

“Step Aside Brother” has been described as an initiative to accelerate recruitment of women to both more active and high-profile influencing roles within trade unions.

It seeks to achieve this by requesting men to make a deliberate and “deeply political” choice to stand aside if they satisfy one or more of the following criteria: hold multiple TU positions, have held leading officer posts for many years, are a regular TU conference delegate, always first to put their name forward for TU events, always first to speak at meetings.

As a socialist and a feminist, I welcome any and all campaigns that can create a genuine path for more working class women to become reps and activists within their own union. However, is this campaign one that will plough an effective path for women? Or does it instead simply facilitate the creation of a more inclusive bureaucracy in place of a primarily male one, whilst simultaneously relegating socialism to an afterthought?

Income inequality, economic and gender oppression, and the denial of rights to full bodily autonomy are still the main global barriers to women playing equally full, productive and influential roles within society. And the key to dismantling those barriers is still the same – working class women have to own the means of production along with men, plus have full control over their own reproductive systems. In order to achieve this they must organise and fight alongside men for the collective and common interests of the working classes.

On the face of it, the ‘Step Aside, Brother’ initiative might seem to be completely aligned to the Marxist concept of promoting the ability of humans to consciously change the environment in order to meet their needs. However, it is fundamentally flawed because it focusses on a single factor – that men should step aside for women – without relating it back (as it should be time and time again) to the main tenets of socialism and why these are instrumental in freeing women from oppression.

Brothers can stand aside as TU reps, conference delegates, branch officers, NEC members, assistant general secretaries and presidents in their droves if they wish, but will there be a healthy unblocked pipeline feeding working class women straight into these free positions? No. I really wish that was not the case, but the pipeline is still blocked and millions of women facing barriers to involvement are still to trying to smash their way through. 

Real power and change comes from women and men having the means and capacity to organise within their workplaces and to receive both a practical and political education that enables them to combat capitalist oppression.

One of the many positive outcomes of the historic Equal Pay strike in Glasgow was the number of women who stepped forward to take positions in the unions and who acted as spokespeople for the campaign. They were encouraged to do so as a result of their involvement in the struggle and a conscious policy by, for example, Glasgow Unison to ensure working-class women fighters had a central role to play. This is a good model for how to involve more women actively in the trade union movement. 

What the Step Aside Brother campaign also fails to answer is what is the political platform and record of the woman or man seeking a trade union position? Should, for example, a socialist man with a record of fighting for the rights of women workers step aside for a woman who wishes to pursue a position to advance their own career, rather than the interests of working-class women as a whole?

There are of course extremely important questions to be asked, struggles to be fought and analysis to be made. From the chronic under-valuing of work done by women leading to battles for equal pay to same sex couples fighting for the right to openly express their love. This realisation will logically progress to seeking out where all these oppressions stem from and recognising the system that cultivates them – capitalism.

It is an opportunity to highlight the fact that all stripes of oppression are intrinsically linked and that capitalism seeks to exploit them to create ongoing irreparable divisions between the working class. Therefore, these issues can never be ignored or the impression given that they are tossed aside until the class war is won. Absolutely not. However, all strategies, campaigns and initiatives to increase inclusion must cite socialist politics as its primary driver whilst, wherever possible, underpinning it with direct action that will actually make a real difference.

So, whilst I can agree with the sentiments and goals of the Step Aside campaign to accelerate the representation and promotion of women within the TU movement, in reality, it is not making any tangible impact save for intensifying and encouraging negative debates around gender politics at the expense of fighting for the full emancipation of women through a comprehensive and clear socialist programme.