ABSTRACT
If women workers have missed the boat as far as fair employment is concerned, this is to a large extent because the trade unions wanted it that way. Until a century after the first Trades Union Congress, held in 1868, trade unionists rarely took women workers and their problems seriously; when they did, it was to see female employment as a threat to the interests of male workers. One result of this has been that until well into this century many of the biggest and most powerful unions have either excluded women from membership or from certain employments. Another has been to weaken the organization and bargaining power of women in the industries to which they have secured entry, and to hold down both the level of their earnings, and of their few male co-workers. Not until 1968 did equal pay become a serious political issue, that being the year that a Labour government produced proposals for legislation.
