Becky Crocker, our regional Young Members' Officer, was an RMT delegate to the recent TUC Women's Conference. She wrote this report for the socialist newspaper Solidarity. We nicked it from their website, here!

This conference opened my eyes to a different side of the labour movement. Among the 250 delegates, there were some militant trade unionists, but their voice was drowned out by the overwhelming conservatism.

A motion on “women and the economic crisis” from the RMT and PCS was voted down by a huge majority. It called for an end to job cuts, reversing privatisation, companies threatening mass redundancies to be brought into public ownership, pay rises without strings attached, the bank and finance sector to be fully nationalised under democratic control, etc.

In the debate Sue Rogers, National Treasurer of the NASUWT, praised the government for bailing out the banks and accused our call against privatisation of “failing to take account of the world we are living in”. She mocked the idea that no one should be evicted from their homes, calling instead for support for people once they had been thrown on the streets. Other union delegates used similar arguments.

When voting for one motion to go forward to the main TUC conference, I looked in vain for one that would call on the government to do something. But every motion was toothless or called for things the Government is doing already. The successful motion was a tamed version of ours, which called for “tighter regulation” of the finance sector, “a fair tax system” and “support for manufacturing”.

It was new for me to hear this non-revolutionary, only-part-working-class perspective on the crisis voiced from inside the labour movement, who resist fighting for workers because they accept the system that exploits us. It reminded me that we are right to concentrate our efforts and expectations on rank-and-file workers.

A motion in favour of decriminalising prostitution was debated simultaneously with another on “‘the commodification of sex”. Most opponents of the first supported the second and vice versa. The “decriminalisation” motion, proposed by the CWU and seconded by the GMB, argued for women’s safety in the industry, working-class unity, unionisation of women in the sex industry, enforcement of laws against rape and for immigration rights for trafficked women.

Mary Davis of the UCU, prominent activist in the Communist Party, presented “the commodification of sex” motion. It was in my view a deliberately misleading concoction, which confused the demands for legalisation and decriminalisation and wrote off both because legalisation has not worked. Sex worker organisations oppose legalisation while calling for decriminalisation. The motion called for a form of criminalisation: the so-called Swedish model, “to criminalise men’s purchase of sex rather than its sale”, which is opposed by sex worker unions because it would drive the industry further underground and make it more unsafe.

To call for decriminalisation, Davis said, would “legitimise those who control” the industry. In no other situation is it ever argued that a measure that would help workers organise openly against their bosses puts the workers on their bosses’ side! She bizarrely redefined Marx’s theory of exploitation: instead of selling their labour power, sex workers sell their bodies, she said. This manoeuvre cuts the channels of solidarity between sex workers and every other exploited worker.

The grouped debate meant that none of the bizarre and contradictory arguments were challenged. The “commodification” motion also called for “the commodification of sex and the objectification of women’s bodies to be shown to be a contributory factor in violence against women” — a hugely contested idea which would require debate in itself. The opponents of decriminalisation were not forced to justify their opposition to such sensible demands as sex workers’ unionisation. Their method of emotive and illogical argument carried the day. The decriminalisation motion fell while “commodification” passed by a big majority.

It is a step forward to have this debate at TUC women’s conference. But we need to work harder to get the issue debated on a rational level. Decriminalisation is a complicated position that contradicts many women’s basic instincts on women’s rights. We cannot expect this to be overcome by one or two speeches on the day and it would be significant if TUC women’s conference voted to decriminalise prostitution.