Five areas where intersectionality changes union work

This is where intersectionality becomes practical. It is not an abstract theory but a way of working. It asks unions to look at who their members actually are, identify where different forms of discrimination and disadvantage overlap and adapt their strategies accordingly.

At the 4th IndustriALL Congress in Sydney in November 2025, affiliates unanimously adopted a feminist resolution calling for intersectional policies where gaps exist. Following Atle Høie, IndustriALL general secretary's recent opinion to on the topic, the next question is practical: what does this look like in day-to-day union work?

Intersectionality in one sentence

An intersectional approach asks one practical question: who is being left behind and what can the union do differently to include them?

Here are five areas where an intersectional approach makes unions stronger.

1. Collective bargaining

Most bargaining teams now address the gender pay gap. An intersectional approach asks one further question: which women are furthest behind and why?

The answer is rarely uniform. It may be migrant women in outsourced roles, women on short-term contracts excluded from bonuses, or older women passed over for training that leads to promotion. For example, a collective agreement may secure equal base pay while subcontracted migrant workers remain excluded from bonuses, promotion opportunities or skills training. A pay equity clause that misses them looks good on paper but leaves the widest gaps open.

The benefit: bargaining that reaches the workers most at risk of being left behind strengthens the whole agreement. When members see that collective bargaining delivers for their own reality, confidence in the union grows and so does collective strength.

2. Organizing

Every union knows where its density is weakest. Intersectionality asks why those workers are not joining and treats the answer as an organizing problem, not a membership problem.

Meetings scheduled when shift-working mothers cannot attend. Materials produced only in the majority language. Recruiters who all look the same. Each is a barrier the union controls and can remove.

The benefit: stronger organizing in exactly the parts of the workforce where unions have the greatest opportunity to grow. IndustriALL's Action Plan 2025-2029 commits affiliates to strategies that engage and organize young workers, women, white-collar workers and workers in precarious employment. An intersectional approach helps turn that commitment into practical organizing.

3. Education and training

A shop steward is only as effective as their ability to recognize what a member is facing. A grievance may look like a performance dispute and actually be harassment compounded by a worker's migration status or contract type.

Intersectional union education trains stewards to see the full picture. It also examines access to the training itself: who can attend, in which language, at what time and at what cost.

The benefit: stewards who are better equipped to resolve members' problems and education programmes that develop the union's next generation of leaders from the full diversity of its membership.

4. Industrial policy and Just Transition

Industrial change never affects every worker equally. The transition to a greener, more automated industry is not gender neutral and it is not neutral on age, contract type or migration status either. When a plant closes or retools, the workers least likely to be retrained and redeployed are those in precarious contracts, those with care responsibilities that rule out relocation and those already at the margins of the workforce.

The Action Plan is explicit: a gender-neutral strategy towards technological change and the green transition will set gender equality back. Intersectional industrial policy means asking, in every transition negotiation, who gets the new jobs, who gets the retraining and who is quietly left out.

The benefit: a Just Transition that is genuinely just. By identifying who risks being excluded before decisions are made, unions are better placed to defend every worker affected by restructuring, not only the most visible ones.

5. Union structures and leadership

The feminist resolution calls for a change in power relations, structures and cultures within unions themselves, not just in their demands on employers.

In practice: collect data on who holds positions at every level of the union. Give women's structures and youth structures real mandates, not advisory roles. Look at meeting times, travel requirements and unwritten expectations that filter out everyone whose life does not fit the traditional mould of a union officer.

The benefit: leadership that reflects the workforce the union wants to organize and represent. Workers are more likely to participate in organizations where they can see themselves and believe their voices will be heard.

The objections worth answering

"We don't have the resources to cater to everyone"

This is the objection union leaders raise most often and it deserves a straight answer. A union may have policies that serve the large majority of members well and the rest only partly and no budget for special programmes on top.

The first answer is that intersectionality is not a set of special programmes. It is one extra question asked in the work the union already does. The bargaining round is happening anyway: before the demands are finalized, ask who the package misses. The steward training is running anyway: check whether it is only accessible to workers who are free at certain times and speak the majority language. Asking these questions costs nothing. Separate programmes for every group is precisely the model this approach replaces.

The second answer is that the partly-protected minority is not a separate problem from the well-protected majority. Consider a factory with 450 permanent workers on a strong agreement and 50 subcontracted cleaners and warehouse staff with little or no protection. No employer attacks the 450 head-on. That is a war with a strong union. Instead, a little more is outsourced each year, the cleaning, then the logistics, then part of production, until a cheaper workforce is doing comparable work alongside union members. From then on, every negotiation starts with a threat to move more work out the door. Retiring members are not replaced. New hires come in on worse terms.

The 450 never lose a battle. Their protection is hollowed out from the side and the 50 unprotected workers are the opening that makes it possible.

Reaching the workers at the margins is therefore not charity from the majority. It is the majority removing the employer's cheaper alternative. The resources argument has it backwards: what a union cannot afford is to leave the opening there.

"We don't have the resources to cater to everyone"

Some worry that trying to represent everyone means representing no one. It is an old argument and it mistakes complexity for division.

A union that only fully represents some of its members has already made a choice about who matters. That choice is felt by the members at the margins and exploited by the employers who put them there. Divide and rule is not a union strategy. It is a management one.

Intersectionality does not create divisions, it helps unions remove the barriers that divide workers in the first place. When unions understand the different experiences of their members, they are better equipped to build solidarity across gender, race, age, migration status, disability and employment status. Stronger solidarity leads to stronger bargaining, stronger organizing and stronger unions.

Intersectionality does not ask unions to represent everyone at the expense of anyone. It asks unions to be strong enough to represent everyone at once. That is not a dilution of purpose. That is the purpose.

We are all in for Equality, slogan from IndustriALL's women's conference in Sydney Australia, november 2025