The motion condemned the summer’s far-right riots, including their impact on working people; recognised the 37% increase in VAWG since 2018/9, highlighted sexual harassment at work that primarily impacts public-facing workers and is disproportionately targeted at young, disabled, Black Minority Ethnic and LGBT+ workers. Conference called for:
- An extension to the Assault on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018 to include frontline transport workers who provide essential services despite threats to their own safety in their workplaces.
- The Labour Government in consultation with unions, to reintroduce explicit protection from third-party harassment and give consideration to how managers and supervisors are trained to ensure proper support for staff.
- Further measures to ensure misogynistic content, or content/users that encourage VAWG, is banned from social media platforms in the UK.
- Measures in schools to address misogyny and VAWG.
Addressing delegates in Liverpool, Nicola Fitzsimmons - Usdaw rep said: “We really welcome the focus that our new Labour Government has put on making women and girls safe. Labour’s Worker Protection Bill will, for the first time ever, require employers to create and maintain workplaces free from harassment. This has been a long-standing demand of trade unions and other campaigners and it means it will no longer be left to individual women at work to try to stop sexual harassment once it has started. Finally, it will be up to employers to create harassment free workplaces. But we need our Government to go further, we need Labour to tackle sexual harassment from third parties.
“We know that for women workers who interact with the public as part of their job, there is a far greater risk of experiencing abuse and harassment from the public. Young women are at particular risk because of their more vulnerable position in the labour market. At present young women are being left to deal with harassment from customers on their own and they are afraid to challenge the behaviour, because this puts you in a very vulnerable position, especially if the customer complains about you. Numerous studies show that gender-based violence, of which sexual harassment is a part, has a huge impact on women and girls and can lead to negative psychological, emotional or physical health impacts.
“Verbal abuse and sexual harassment are the most common forms of third-party abuse that retail workers experience, sometimes the abuse is racist or homophobic in nature and can tip into stalking or physical assault. All too often a third-party harasser is known to women in the store, they will know to try and avoid him and in such cases the union will encourage the employer to ban the customer, but all too often the focus is on keeping the customer happy: ‘keep quiet’, ‘laugh it off’, ‘don’t take it too seriously’, ‘he didn’t mean anything by it’ or the one we hear time and time again, ‘it’s just part of the job’.
“What about women working in non-unionised sectors and companies? Who speaks up for them? We do! We need a clear commitment to banning third-party harassment and for consideration to be given as to how we make sure managers get the training they need to understand their legal duties and to take sexual harassment seriously.”
Notes for editors:
Usdaw (Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers) is one of the fastest growing unions in the TUC and the UK's fifth biggest trade union with around 360,000 members. Most Usdaw members work in the retail sector, but the union also has many members in transport, distribution, food manufacturing, chemical industry and other trades www.usdaw.org.uk
For Usdaw press releases visit: http://www.usdaw.org.uk/news and you can follow us on Twitter/X @UsdawUnion