- Conference
- 2025 National Women's Conference
- Date
- 18 October 2024
- Decision
- Carried as Amended
Conference notes that there are over 80,000 young women members in UNISON – nearly 7% of the total membership. However, young women are under-represented as UNISON activists and may experience a number of barriers in getting involved in their trade union.
Conference believes that it is essential that young women are encouraged and supported to become active, engaged members of UNISON. Issues affecting young women workers are central to the workplace issues that UNISON tackles every day, such as low pay, precarious work, the lack of progression and development opportunities, and inadequate accommodation in the workplace for people with caring responsibilities.
In addition, the cost of living crisis has had a major impact on young women. Research by the Young Women’s Trust highlights the gendered impact of the cost of living crisis. Their 2024 Annual Survey of young women showed that 42% of young women said their financial situation had got worse over the previous 12 months, compared to 27% of young men, and that 55% of young women were ‘filled with dread’ when they think about their household finances, compared to 43% of young men.
Many young women also have childcare and other caring responsibilities. A 2022 survey of UNISON young members found that 7.9% of young women members had childcare responsibilities, and 11.3% had caring responsibilities for an adult relative, partner or friend. UNISON has a number of structures and policies in place to support activists with caring responsibilities and it is important that these are promoted and publicised in order to support young women members for whom caring responsibilities may be a barrier to getting more active in the union. In particular, young single mothers may struggle to become more involved in UNISON.
Conference believes that UNISON needs young women, and young women need UNISON. Conference asks the National Women’s Committee to:
1)Work with the National Young Members Forum to identify and remove, where possible, barriers to young women becoming more active in UNISON, including promoting UNISON’s accommodations for young women with childcare responsibilities, especially young single mothers, and support for low-paid women activists.
2)Encourage Regional Women’s Committees to establish programmes to encourage young women to become more active at a regional and branch level, including jobshares, mentoring programmes, and regional training sessions on issues like confidence building.
3)Consider establishing a UNISON Young Women’s Network, along the lines of the Young LGBT+ Members Network and the Young Black Members Network, in order for young women members to network and informally discuss issues of importance to them.
4)Encourage branches and regions to make available information on how young women can have access to creche for their children or claim back the cost of childcare from their branches and regions when attending UNISON meetings and events to enable wider participation of young women with children.