In the frigid winter of 1978–1979, British workers, from nurses to car workers to gravediggers, staged a series of more than two thousand strikes against statutory wage limits. These wage limits, or incomes policies, were not uncommon in postwar Britain. However, by late 1978, the Labour Government's imposition of a 5 percent limit on wage increases proved particularly galling, and trade unions were in a position to effectively resist the government's efforts. With more unionized workers than at any prior time in British history (over half of the total workforce), the British trade union movement appeared unbeatable.Footnote ¹ Despite the number of workers at the picket lines, the backlash against the strikes was just as strong. The negative response did not only come from Conservative leaders and newspapers, but from trade union and working-class voters as well. In response to this season of labor unrest, soon to be coined Britain's “Winter of Discontent,”Footnote ² one “Disillusioned Socialist” from outside Manchester wrote into the editorial pages of the local newspaper:

In the subsequent general election campaign, Conservatives, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, seized upon this “sea-change”Footnote ⁴ in public opinion and skillfully used the Winter of Discontent to come into office claiming a “mandate” to “clip the wings” of trade unions.Footnote ⁵ After her election in May 1979, Thatcher made good on that promise for more than a decade. When she left office, “labor was bludgeoned onto the defensive” through a combination of anti-union legislation, the defeat of the 1984 miners strike, deindustrialization, and the overall decline of unionization across Britain.Footnote ⁶ The British labor movement appeared to be a shell of its former self, and observers pointed to the Winter of Discontent as the beginning of the British labor movement's inglorious end.

The dramatic break in that winter of 1978–1979 had its roots in larger dissolution of Britain's “postwar consensus.” Like many other countries with Keynesian economies, Britain used incomes policies to battle inflation without compromising full employment. Nevertheless, both Conservative and Labour Governments' ability to enforce such policies became increasingly difficult in the volatile economic environment of the early 1970s. The global financial crisis of that decade hit Britain particularly hard, leaving the country with the highest levels of inflation among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations, further confirming the view that Britain had become the “sick man of Europe.”Footnote ⁷ When elected in 1974, Labour was supposed to use its historic relationship with British trade unions to facilitate this badly needed economic recovery. The “Social Contract” that the party and trade unions negotiated outlined that in exchange for unions' help in maintaining wage restraint among their memberships, the Labour Government was to pass important pieces of pro-union legislation, extend public ownership of major industries, and increase public expenditure. The agreement was relatively successful for three years, until pressure on the Government and within the trade union movement left both unable to hold up their respective sides of the bargain. When the Labour Government, already wary of increasing public expenditure, accepted a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1976, and with it, IMF-mandated expenditure cuts and monetary targets, it was left with little to offer the unions. As for the British trade unions, three years of wage restraint, coupled with wage-depressing inflation, made the rank-and-file membership increasingly less likely to abide by another year without significant raises.Footnote ⁸

The first rupture of the “Social Contract” came in September 1978 when Ford workers went on strike for a wage increase of 17 percent, effectively rejecting Prime Minister Jim Callaghan's stated limit of five percent. The Economist’s headline, “After Ford, The Deluge?”Footnote ⁹ became prophetic when other workers took the victory at Ford as a signal to strike for their own wage increases.Footnote ¹⁰ Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party capitalized on these strikes as shining examples of Labour's inability to control its own supporters in the labor movement. In the next general election campaign, the Winter of Discontent became a focal point as newspapers cried out on election day: “Don't Ever Forget Last Winter's Strikes! It's Time for a Clean Sweep! Vote Tory!”Footnote ¹¹ The strategy was not only effective in May 1979, but it became so powerfully emblazoned in popular memory that the Conservative Party and the British media continued to successfully evoke the “spectre” of the Winter of Discontent to characterize the Labour Party as “crisis-ridden” and incompetent for over a decade,Footnote ¹² during which time Labour endured a proverbial “political exile” from power.

During Labour's time out of office, the party's handling of the Winter of Discontent was a source of internal division. Many on the Party's Left blamed the Labour Government and its refusal to negotiate with unions on their pay policy for the Conservatives’ victory.Footnote ¹³ For striking union leaders, the pay policy was especially controversial because the Labour Government's pressing need to control wages “. . . didn't fit with members' real living experiences of going to the shops and try[ing] to pay for things.”Footnote ¹⁴ Those on the Right of the Labour Party alleged that the “irresponsible left-wing trade unionists” led ordinary workers to revolt against Labour's incomes' policy and eventually defeat the Government.Footnote ¹⁵ One former advisor to Prime Minister Callaghan, who eventually split with the Party, underscores the bitterness surrounding the events of 1978–1979: “But what the trade union movement cannot dare say—this is my accusation—is that up to 1978, they had more direct power and influence over government policy than any time in their history, and they blew it in the Winter of Discontent.”Footnote ¹⁶

Historical examinations of the Winter of Discontent remain largely in the grip of such heated political assessments and fall into three general categories. The first, and the most prevalent, is the charge that trade unions irresponsibly destroyed a Labour Government, inaugurating more than a decade of Thatcherism that came to successfully undercut trade union power.Footnote ¹⁷ Second are accounts more sympathetic to the trade unions that blame the Labour Government for its own downfall, due to its failure to live up to the goals of economic redistribution and nationalization initially promised when the party took power in 1974.Footnote ¹⁸ The third interpretation sees the Winter of Discontent as connected to a larger dissolution of “old-time, working-class, political” collective consciousness that was supplanted by individualistic “economist militancy,” or a narrow focus on wage increases, disregarding the wider aims of the British labor movement.Footnote ¹⁹

While this paper will not address arguments surrounding who was to blame for the rise of Thatcherism in late 1979, it will seek to reconsider the consensus that the Winter of Discontent was the harbinger of the British labor movement's decline. The key actors in most historical studies are major political parties and male-dominated manufacturing unions; these works fail to note the importance of the burgeoning numbers of rank-and-file women and service sector employees involved in these strikes.Footnote ²⁰ While male-dominated manufacturing unions were key players in the disputes, female-dominated, service-sector unions, many of the largest in the nation at that time, also led strikes across Britain. Therefore, this paper will seek to redress such absences by making women the primary focus of discussion. I will ask two questions: What role did women workers play in the strikes of the Winter of Discontent, and what effect, if any, did the strikes (and women's participation in them) have on the British labor movement?

To answer such questions, I employed a combination of oral histories and archival material as the foundation of my historical research. I conducted a series of approximately forty interviews with an array of both female and male shop stewards, lay members, and trade union and Labour Party leaders involved in the Winter of Discontent. In this paper, I will focus my attention on interviews with fifteen female shop stewards and lay members of the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) in order to discern the role these women played in the strikes of 1978 and 1979. While these oral histories are at the core of my research, newspapers and trade union and Labour Party archives also served to inform my research.

In the following pages, I will, first of all, chart the development of working-class women's activism within the context of the social, economic, and political changes in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Secondly, I will examine how women in NUPE participated in the strikes of 1978 and 1979 and how these experiences impacted the overall development of their activism in NUPE. Finally, I will establish how these women's individual experiences affected a larger shift in both NUPE's and the larger British labor movement's overall policy toward working-class women.

I will argue that the Winter of Discontent was a pivotal moment when women in NUPE began to assert themselves more in both the grassroots activism and leadership of the union. Soon after these strikes, women's activism in NUPE gained momentum and continued to develop through the early 1980s. Furthermore, the increasing influence of women in NUPE was instrumental in reshaping the trajectory of both NUPE and the wider labor movement to more effectively advance the interests of working-class women in Britain.

Soon after the Second World War, the race and gender of the British workforce began to change rapidly. In 1961, the biggest group of immigrants came from Ireland, but by 1966,Footnote ²¹ immigrants from the British Commonwealth became the largest group. The arrival of SS Empire Windrush in 1948 proved a symbolic historical moment, as it brought 400 British subjects from the Caribbean to the UK to work.Footnote ²² Women made up an important part of this growth in immigration. For instance, by the end of the 1950s, six thousand overseas nurses arrived to meet labor shortages in the National Health Service (NHS).Footnote ²³ The overall employment of British women would also begin to increase. In 1951, 43 percent of women were working; by 1979 this figure would become 64 percent.Footnote ²⁴ These changes coincided with the gradual disappearance of male-dominated jobs in manufacturing and production. For example, from 1966 to 1979, of the 2.9 million jobs lost in production, three—quarters were lost by men.Footnote ²⁵ Finally, the number of jobs in production and manufacturing were soon to be eclipsed by the growing numbers of service-related jobs in the public sector. From 1966 to 1976, public sector employment grew from approximately 16 to 27 percent of the workforce, employing a significant number of women.Footnote ²⁶

As male manufacturing jobs were lost, the image of the male “breadwinner” began to lose its resonance. By 1972, of the nine million women working in Britain, 62 percent were married,Footnote ²⁷ and the employment rate among married West Indian women was much higher.Footnote ²⁸ In a letter to the Manchester Evening News, Mrs. M. P. Blackley conveys what numbers and statistics cannot: the importance of women's wages to the family household in the 1970s. In her letter she refutes the assertions of another reader, “Happy Homebird,” that “. . . women who go out to work fritter their wages on bingo and pubs.”

“Like me, most of my friends work because they have no choice,” Blackley wrote. “I work a full day, from 8:30 am to 5 pm, and I work! Our family does not have a colour TV set or a car. I don't play bingo or visit the pub except on the very rare occasion when my husband and I go out for a quiet drink. We haven't even a washing machine. This we are saving up for, and we are buying our own house.”Footnote ²⁹

Mrs. Blackley's impassioned description underlines the fallibility of the myth of the male worker as the sole breadwinner. Furthermore, in a decade of economic crisis and escalating inflation like the 1970s, the pay of women like Mrs. Blackley played an increasingly crucial role.Footnote ³⁰

However, the British labor movement was slow to harness the energy of this “new working class” because of perceptions of who did and did not belong to the movement. Many trade unions focused on organizing white male manufacturing workers and relied on stereotypes of women, West Indian, and Asian workers to justify their reluctance to organize these groups.Footnote ³¹ For instance, some trade unions did not organize West Indian and Asian workers due to the influence of broader racist attitudes toward non-white people, coupled with the idea that such workers were an economic threat to white British workers.Footnote ³² In the case of women, many trade unions viewed women's work as a temporary state before marriage, or as a part-time endeavor after marriage, to earn “pin money” or extra wages for consumer goods or leisure.Footnote ³³ Also, women's supposed “psychological passivity” made them unsuitable for the rigors of trade union membership and activism.Footnote ³⁴

Despite the barriers placed before women, West Indian, and Asian workers, the trade unions eventually began to reflect the evolving composition of the British workforce. Between 1966 and 1979, female membership in trade unions grew at a rate of 73 percent, compared to a rate of growth of approximately 19 percent among male workers. During these thirteen years, women constituted almost 52 percent of the overall increase in trade union membership.Footnote ³⁵ West Indian and Asian women made up a significant number of the women joining trade unions at the time. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, West Indian and Asian women had higher rates of trade union membership than white women.Footnote ³⁶ Unions with large numbers of service and public sector members, such as the Transport and General Workers' Union (T&G), the Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE), and NUPE, especially benefited from the growth of female membership. Initially, however, their numeric dominance rarely translated into any local or national positions of leadership in the unions.Footnote ³⁷

One of the first groups to challenge the gender inequalities in trade unions were coalitions of working-class women and activists from the Women's Movement. Those in the Women's Movement, first of all, began to reframe their activism by arguing that work and career were not necessarily “emancipatory” for all women and called upon the British trade union movement to advocate for working-class women.Footnote ³⁸ For example, in late 1970, activists in the Women's Movement joined forces with working women to organize cleaners in what became an extended campaign known as the Night Cleaners' Campaign.Footnote ³⁹ Campaigns to organize women workers were also complemented by efforts to broaden trade unions' agendas to include issues such as domestic violence and sexist imagery in the media. In 1976, the National Union of Journalists published a pamphlet called Images of Women in the Media, citing examples of sexist imagery in the workplace and how to correct it. Although many mocked and criticized the pamphlet as “farcical” and “typically committee-written crap,” the work reveals how the influence of the Women's Movement began to reframe so-called “women's issues,” like sexist imagery and sexual harassment as pressing concerns for the entire trade union movement.Footnote ⁴⁰

These tensions emerged at the same time that trade unions were engulfed in political conflict over the broader interests of the British labor movement. During the 1970s a divide between two groups began to emerge. The form of trade unionism that evolved soon after the Second World War influenced one generation of trade unionists. This group, which came to dominate the Labour Party up to the end of the 1970s, adhered to ideas of strong national union leadership and had ties with the right wing of the Labour Party. The second group was made up of a generation of trade unionists that joined unions during the 1970s and were influenced by the New Left, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and the Women's Movement. These “new trade unionists” sought to reinvigorate the power of shop stewards within the unions and were attracted to the left wing of the Labour Party. At the core of these political differences were diametrically opposed attitudes toward free collective bargaining. More conservative, private-sector unions like the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EEPTU), for instance, sought to preserve the right of workers to negotiate their wages, free of government intervention. However, public sector unions, with low-paid memberships, like the NUPE and the T&G rejected ideas of free collective bargaining and saw government intervention as key to improving their members' wages.Footnote ⁴¹

One of the most prominent unions at the center of the divisions was the public sector and left-wing NUPE. General Secretary Alan Fisher and Deputy Secretary Bernard Dix, part of the new generation of trade unionists, made women workers a focal point of their organizing.Footnote ⁴² From 1968 to 1978, NUPE saw its female membership increase by almost 236 percent, the largest increase in female membership of all unions in Britain at that time.Footnote ⁴³ However, both Fisher and Dix recognized that the staggering growth in female membership had not translated into any significant changes in the male-dominated leadership. By the mid-1970s, NUPE's membership was 65 percent female,Footnote ⁴⁴ but only 26 percent of shop stewards were women.Footnote ⁴⁵

Prompted by a wider goal of “democratization” in the union, with the aim to “wid[en] and deep[en] membership participation in the union,” Fisher and Dix called for a complete reorganization of NUPE's institutional structure, of which the empowerment of women members would be a central facet. In the process of the reorganization, the union observed that most women were not active members, but they stressed that it was not due to “women's nature” but had “to do with the position of women in the wider society and at work.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Recognizing the social forces at hand that limited women's ability to participate in the leadership of the union, NUPE made structural changes to overcome these obstacles. In 1975, for example, NUPE made a concerted effort to recruit more women as shop stewards and reserved five spaces on their Executive specifically for women.Footnote ⁴⁷

The national changes would often clash with a deep-seated undemocratic and male-dominated culture that permeated the union at the local level. Throughout the 1970s, outside of Liverpool in Prescot, porter Mike Donovan noted the absence of any rank-and-file, male or female, participation in their branch. According to Donovan, “When we used to have mass meetings to handle a pay rise, a payoff, we would all be on the stage as stewards, but [the Branch Chair] would be doing the talking. We were there, but we weren't noticed.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In northeast England, shop steward Anne Gardiner noted that this lack of local activism was due to a local union culture that was explicitly hostile to women's activism. At one union meeting Gardiner attended, a male shop steward explained that his members were not going to take any strike action. When Gardiner pressed the issue more and asked him how his members voted, “He just said, ‘I hadn't had a meeting with the women because [I] knew what [my] women would do and what [my] women wouldn't do.’”Footnote ⁴⁹ Such feudal relationships between shop stewards and the rank and file highlighted an institutional structure that prevented members, especially women members, from becoming active.

II

While the changes enacted in 1974 to reorganize NUPE were running up against resistance within the union's own ranks, external events helped to accelerate this process. In 1978, after three years of wage restraint, the rank and file in both private and public sector unions grew increasingly reluctant to support yet another year of stringent incomes policy. The Labour Government's failure to deliver on many of the promises of reform outlined in the Social Contract only proved to exacerbate unions' frustration with this agreement. In September 1978, the Ford workers' successful strike was soon followed by strikes among oil tanker drivers in December and lorry drivers in January 1979. Seeing their settlements of up to 30 percent, public sector unions vowed not to be eclipsed by private sector workers.Footnote ⁵⁰ NUPE General Secretary Fisher already knew his members would not accept the 5 percent, especially after seeing other workers successfully strike for much more. Fisher warned, “If the Government fails to understand the problems of the low-paid and to act to overcome them, they are in for a serious winter of discontent.”Footnote ⁵¹ With no headway made in negotiations, NUPE, along with other major public sector unions like COHSE, the GMWU, and the T&G, called for a National Day of Action on January 22, 1979.

Once NUPE rank-and-file workers were mobilized across the country, women's presence in the strike was not only felt in numbers, but in the types of strikes and the gendered nature of their demands. Female hospital workers, from nurses to laundry staff, assumed key roles in the strikes. For instance, ninety thousand hospital workers in northwest England, many of whom were women, went on strike, “paralyzing” six major hospitals in the area.Footnote ⁵² Pam Clemens, a laundry worker at Northhampton General Hospital, cited low pay and unhygienic work conditions as motivations to strike. She added that, “Most of us here helped to pay mortgages and buy food, but it's got so it's not worthwhile. And if you use the crèche (nursery), it is £9 a week for a child.”Footnote ⁵³ From Middlesbrough to London to Manchester, women working in school cafeterias were also on strike, forcing schools in those areas to close.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Birmingham, one such worker, Maureen Groves, explained that she was on strike because the £30 she earned for the 28¾ hours she worked failed to help her husband, who was a lorry driver, raise their family.Footnote ⁵⁵ Not only do these examples indicate the significant number of women involved in the strikes of the Winter of Discontent, but their demands illustrate that previously peripheral working women's issues were becoming focal points of mobilization. The presence of women could also be seen in the creativity rank-and-file strikers in service sector industries had to employ. Since many of the strikes were based in hospitals, most workers had to devise ways of participating in the strikes without risking their patients' lives. This proved especially difficult for Brenda Treadwell, a nursing auxiliary, and her coworkers at a care home for special needs patients in South Wales. In line with NUPE directives of providing essential services and their own dedication to their patients, they would not stop providing patients with medication, food, and other essentials. Therefore, the only way to strike was to not take the patients swimming one day, or to not do the patients' hair on another.Footnote ⁵⁶ Outside of Liverpool, in the town of Prescot, Lorraine Donovan faced similar challenges. Donovan was a switchboard operator at the local hospital, and although she had been a NUPE member since 1972, she never became active until January of 1979. As part of “emergency services,” switchboard operators could not take part in the strikes. Nevertheless, Donovan and a fellow coworker devised a way to show solidarity with their striking coworkers.

“If we were supervising at the switchboard, the other one went to the gate and vice versa… We were considered ‘Bolshi.’ Anyone who was … um … active politically was considered to be Bolshi.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Both Brenda Treadwell and Lorraine Donovan's accounts reveal the challenges many women faced when striking in caring professions. However, the Winter of Discontent furnished these women with the opportunity to increase their activism and develop new ways of striking in these female-dominated, service-sector industries.

In addition to the rank-and-file membership, shop stewards like Celia Newman also took advantage of the opportunity to play leading roles in the organization and coordination of the strikes. Newman and other strikers managed to turn away deliveries to the local hospital, while directing in ambulances at the same time, and thwarted management efforts to furtively bring in deliveries along other routes. Newman and other strikers had lookouts on all the roads, and when a truck was sighted, they would run down to that road and block the delivery.Footnote ⁵⁸ The organizational skill and leadership Newman employed for the first time in these strikes made her realize her own capabilities. She notes that before the Winter of Discontent, “I was just this ordinary person, young lady, you know, … that was sort of like getting a little bit more active in this union, whatever this union was.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Her shift from an “ordinary person” to an active NUPE steward demonstrates how participation in these strikes acted as a conduit from passive union membership to energized activism.

A similar transformation could be seen in shop steward Betty Hughes. Although Hughes had been a shop steward since 1968, her role in the strikes in Middlesbrough, a city in northeast England, allowed her to exert a level of influence she had not wielded previously. As a member of the Cleveland County Strike Committee, Hughes was one of eight people who decided which NUPE local authority workers, such as road gritters, did or did not go out on strike. In one instance, the Chief Executive of Cleveland County attempted to enter the town hall to force the strike committee to have the roads gritted. Despite the cold and the snow outside, Hughes refused to let him in, asserting that it was the strike committee's decision, not the Chief Executive's, to grit the roads. Hughes's husband noticed that it was at this point that she “got stronger.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Her assertiveness grew and by the end of the strike, Hughes began to question the decisions of full-time officials in NUPE.

“[Full-time officials had] already been offered a rise, more than what we were getting, so I strongly objected. I said, ‘No! Why should we get a smaller rise? And you were negotiating your rise more than you are negotiating ours. No, Mike.’ And [Mike] would go, ‘Here we go! She's off again! She's off! She's got something on her brain.’ … But I stuck it out. But it didn't work because the full-time officers did get a good rise.”Footnote ⁶¹

Hughes's account reveals that the organizational confidence she gained shaped her ability to challenge actions both outside and inside the union. The conflict between the full-time officials and Hughes further underlines the growing rift between entrenched full-time officials and a new generation of female shop stewards.

Shop steward Anne Gardiner joined the Strike Committee in nearby Darlington. Gardiner and other committee members decided to have only three men in the stores department go on strike. The critical role these workers played in supplying parts for repairs had a crippling effect on the town of Darlington, with only a bare minimum of workers asked to strike. Gardiner notes:

Gardiner emphasizes how coordinating the strikes became a rite of passage of sorts because it demonstrated her ability to her male peers. Furthermore, the leading role she took in the strikes signaled that a space had opened up to allow female stewards to assert their role in the union.

However, when Gardiner sought to mobilize the female care assistants in her section to join the strikes, she faced resistance. Fellow strike committee member Brian Whattam was critical of Gardiner's efforts:

Whattam's criticism of Gardiner's action reveals the inherent tensions between an older generation of NUPE officials, such as Whattam, and the recently-organized generation of female shop stewards. While Whattam explains his moral objection to the strike, what he had interpreted as Gardiner wanting to “make a name for herself” marks an underlying resistance to Gardiner taking an independent leadership role in NUPE. Despite this resistance, Gardiner, like other women during the Winter of Discontent, used the strikes as an opportunity to assert more grassroots leadership among the rank and file.

All of this strike activity ground to a halt in March 1979. On March 28th the Labour Government lost a vote of confidence in the House of Commons, and Callaghan scheduled a General Election for May. NUPE immediately encouraged its members to accept the settlements they were offered and threw all its weight behind Labour's electoral campaign. Following NUPE's lead, many of these women strikers shifted gears and campaigned for the Labour Party in their local areas. However, on May 3, 1979, Thatcher's Conservatives proved victorious in the General Election. Nevertheless, Labour's defeat did not deter these women from embracing their newfound roles in the labor movement. By the early 1980s, many women, and also a new generation of men, whose labor activism was forged in the strikes of 1978 and 1979, began to become more visible in the local and even national leadership of NUPE.

III

While both the Labour Party and the trade unions attempted to come to grips with the defeat they suffered in May, many in NUPE began to sense that something had changed in the union. Shop steward, and later branch secretary in northeast England, Stuart Hill notes the overall transformation in NUPE's leadership:

This shift in leadership also could be felt in Prescot. Celia Newman notes that soon after the strikes of 1978 and 1979, many people became shop stewards. Mike Donovan notes that, “They came on because of the Winter of Discontent, mainly.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Part of this overall shift was a change in the role women were playing in the union. NUPE steward Jonathan Neale noted the change in leadership in London while organizing collections and support for strikes in 1976 and then in 1982. He observed that in 1976 most of the union leaders were men, but in 1982, although men continued as the formal leaders, “about half the people who could actually get things done were women.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Linda Perks, a trade union officer who became active during the Winter of Discontent, explains further that women were active in NUPE before the strikes of 1978 and 1979, yet she believed that the momentum for women in NUPE “grew very quickly” afterward. Instead of being “lone voices in a man's world,” women were beginning to assert a more “collective presence” in the union.Footnote ⁶⁷

The first indication that women were establishing this “collective presence” in the union may not have been immediately apparent in the upper echelons of leadership, but signs were soon emerging at a local grassroots level. In 1981, there were only nine more female branch secretaries than in 1974, with men continuing to significantly outnumber women in these positions.Footnote ⁶⁸ Also, by 1983, only 12 out of 180 trade union officials were women.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, from 1974 to 1983, there was an 18 percent increase in the number of female shop stewards, so that by 1983, 44 percent of all shop stewards in NUPE were women.Footnote ⁷⁰

In addition to an increased numeric presence, there were more subtle indications that a shift in power toward the female membership in NUPE had occurred. For example, employers began to recognize that these women were becoming more powerful leaders among the rank and file, which some regarded as a potential threat. Soon after the Winter of Discontent, Anne Gardiner and Celia Newman were both offered promotions. As Stuart Hill observes, “The two ways of getting rid of a good shop steward was to promote them or to sack them.”Footnote ⁷¹ Celia Newman notes:

As Newman notes, her role in the Winter of Discontent earned her more respect among her coworkers; when her employers observed this, they sought to neutralize what they perceived as a threat by promoting her. However, both Newman and Gardiner rejected these promotions, indicating that their commitment to the union was not fleeting and was actually deepened by their involvement in the Winter of Discontent.

NUPE campaigns in the early 1980s bore the visible mark of increased activism by women who were involved in the Winter of Discontent. Thatcher's free-market ethos soon took hold of Britain, and in 1982, Secretary of State for Social Services Norman Fowler announced plans to have private companies take over NHS ancillary work, like catering and laundry services. These changes threatened thousands of jobs, but, in particular, the changes would affect seventy thousand West Indian and Asian women who dominated the workforce.Footnote ⁷³ In response, West Indian and Asian women, who made up 50 percent of the workforce at St. Giles Hospital, joined other NUPE members across Britain in a 33-week dispute against privatization and for increased wages. One of the women working at St. Giles complained: “How can someone live on £45/47 a week? Rent is £30 and you have three children to look after, it's disgusting.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Other newly energized groups of women began to be instrumental to the fights against privatization. In 1984, Asian women workers at Hillingdon Hospital in London protested against privatization of services.Footnote ⁷⁵ Like the women at St. Giles, they were not successful in keeping private contractors from taking charge of services in their hospital. Nevertheless, a few were able to resist this wave of privatization. In Prescot, Pat Corr, a hospital cleaner who became a shop steward during the Winter of Discontent, began to actively resist the efforts to contract out cleaning services at her hospital. She joined Branch Chair Mike Donovan one day when the hospital's management met with private contractors to discuss contracting out hospital ancillary work. Donovan led the women with banners into the meeting, forcing the private contractors out of the meeting and eventually chasing the contractors down the motorway with placards.Footnote ⁷⁶ Eventually, the hospital Pat Corr worked at became one of the few hospitals in Britain to successfully resist privatization.

The growth in women's local influence translated into a gradual shift at the regional and national level. Soon after the Winter of Discontent, for example, Anne Gardiner would become the first woman chair of the Area Committee and later the first woman chair of the Divisional Council.Footnote ⁷⁷ In 1974 no women held seats on the National Executive Council of the union, but by 1982 one-third of the individuals on the Executive were women, an increase of five elected officials in addition to the five reserved seats.Footnote ⁷⁸ Moreover, many of the women who were gradually assuming national posts had been involved in the strikes of 1979. In 1982, for example, all three applicants short-listed for the post of NUPE's National Women's Officer—Linda Perks, Maggie Jones, and Dorothy May Harden—had all begun their careers during the Winter of Discontent. As Dorothy May Harden would state in her application for the position:

As women became more visible in the NUPE leadership, their influence began to shape NUPE's agenda. Deputy General Secretary of NUPE in the 1980s, Tom Sawyer, explains that “… out of the Winter of Discontent, you got women marching on the streets who previously wouldn't have done that … and there was this awareness amongst the women that the union was fighting for something.” As Sawyer notes, women in NUPE began to highlight issues of equal opportunity at work and child care, forcing NUPE to shift away from the “traditional trade union agenda” of pay and working conditions to taking a more “holistic approach” to serving the needs of its membership.Footnote ⁸⁰ Linda Perks explains that at this point, industrial issues were no longer seen in isolation but instead as they connected to broader “community issues.”Footnote ⁸¹

This evolving agenda became more visible at both local and national levels in NUPE and extended beyond the union into broader issues affecting working-class life in the early 1980s. For example, Betty Hughes joined other trade unionists in supporting the miners' strike. In addition to delivering parcels of food to striking miners, Hughes refused to sit as a magistrate during the miners' strikes because she believed that the miners were being “unnecessarily” arrested.Footnote ⁸² Also, in January of 1984, NUPE, along with unions such as NALGO and the NUT, campaigned to resist cuts to the Inner London Education Authority, the Greater London Council, and metropolitan councils. A NUPE school cleaner explained her motivation to join the campaign by stating that, “The whole school is the community. We all need one another … I think the whole country should get out and march.”Footnote ⁸³

The effect on the broader British labor movement could be seen in more union-wide acceptance of “women's issues” as trade union issues and the trade union movement's efforts to get the Labour Party to make these changes, as well. Signs of this shift were immediately apparent in 1979 when the national Trades Unions Council (TUC) published the charter Equality For Women Within Trade Unions. The charter set out that unions bring about greater equality for women members by encouraging unions, among many things, to provide child care for women members to attend union meetings and to have union publications “be presented in non-sexist terms.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Specific changes in NUPE also began to have a wider effect on the labor movement. For instance, NUPE's rhetoric against low pay began to lay special emphasis on the connection of low pay and working women to the wider labor movement. In 1981, the TUC's Women's Conference passed a resolution to urge the TUC to review low pay. The TUC did a review of policy and published the report Low Pay and Women Workers in 1984. The report not only brought a previously peripheral issue to the foreground of the British trade union movement, but it cited goals to specifically address the issues of women workers. The document recognized, for example, that the Equal Pay Act failed to eliminate the problem of low pay among women, and one of the suggestions to remedy the situation was for unions to implement “positive action,” or quotas, to encourage women's increased activism in unions.Footnote ⁸⁵

The continuing shift in focus toward working women in the broader trade union movement would also be brought to the forefront of Labour Party policy. NUPE had a long-established campaign for a statutory minimum wage. However, when NUPE sought in the 1980s to have the TUC and the Labour Party support the passage of minimum wage legislation, the emphasis was placed on the benefit it would have to working women. At the 1983 Labour Party conference, for instance, NUPE General Secretary Rodney Bickerstaffe urged the Labour Party to accept the minimum wage as part of the party manifesto, “So no employer shall force and exploit our people. And, you know, the two-thirds target is not too much, but what a lift it would be for so many women.”Footnote ⁸⁶ After many unsuccessful bids to convince other unions in the TUC and the Labour Party to accept the minimum wage as part of their policy, NUPE was finally successful. By 1986, both the Labour Party and the TUC had committed themselves to statutory minimum wage legislation. The next year, when the Labour Party explained its commitment to the idea of a statutory minimum wage, the Manifesto emphasized that it would be “… of particular benefit to women workers.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Therefore, the growing influence of women in NUPE after the Winter of Discontent was not only reflected in the increased number of women activists and officials. By the mid-1980s, women in NUPE were beginning to reshape both NUPE's and the broader trade union movement's attitudes towards working women. It was the efforts of the women involved in the strikes of the Winter of Discontent that pushed trade unions to see the demands of working-class women as more than “women's issues,” but as integral goals of the British labor movement.

IV

For trade unions and the Labour Party, 1979 signaled the beginning of more than a decade of defeat at the hands of the overpowering force of Thatcherism. Due to the rapid flight of many industries, increased privatization, the defeat of the miners in 1984, and the Labour Party's successive electoral losses, the Winter of Discontent has previously been seen only in negative terms. While the strikes of 1978 and 1979 were instrumental in leading Thatcher to victory, they can also be seen as ushering in an era when women began to transform their collective role in the British labor movement. Therefore, what can one learn about the history of working-class movements from the Winter of Discontent?

The most poignant of all lessons is that any movement can survive only if it constantly evolves along with its membership. Furthermore, the membership should never be taken for granted; instead, there needs to be a continual effort at democratic renewal. The history of women in NUPE has not been a straight line to a quick and dramatic overthrow of undemocratic and sexist structures embedded in the British labor movement, but it has been a history of continual effort to gradually make changes that would eventually affect the overall scope of the movement. To see if such efforts had any lasting effect, one need only to look to 1998. Despite the recently elected Labour Government's overt disavowal of its ties to unions and its refusal to rescind Thatcher's anti-union legislation, the statutory minimum wage was finally passed.Footnote ⁸⁸

Although the number of workers organized in trade unions has significantly declined, those workers formerly left at the margins of trade unions are now key to keeping this movement alive. In 2007, for the sixth consecutive year, women had higher rates of unionization than menFootnote ⁸⁹, and black or black British workers had overall higher rates of unionization than whites in Britain.Footnote ⁹⁰ Finally, UNISON, NUPE's current manifestation after a merger with two other unions, is the second largest union in Britain.Footnote ⁹¹

Linda Perks, now the UNISON regional secretary for Greater London, states,

Perks here outlines the daunting task facing labor movements in the twenty-first century: the need to constantly evolve and work to engage and empower rank-and-file workers.

Therefore, it is a knee-jerk reaction to look back to an earlier time when trade unions wielded more political and economic influences as the “good old days.” Instead, as historian Dorothy Sue Cobble insists, people must “kiss the old class politics goodbye”Footnote ⁹³ and embrace something new. As the example of working-class women in Britain during and after the Winter of Discontent demonstrates, continual renewal in labor movements is not a matter choice, but rather a matter of survival.