101 YEARS after the first TUC Women’s Conference in 1925, nearly 350 women from across the trade union movement are gathering in Bournemouth today for this year’s conference.

As always, there will be moments of celebration, emotion, solidarity and robust debate about how we campaign and organise to ensure women’s voices, experiences and priorities are central to the trade union and political agenda.

We will celebrate securing the Employment Rights Act, the biggest upgrade of workers’ rights in a generation. All workers suffer when jobs are insecure, low paid and low quality. But when power and agency is unfairly skewed towards bad employers, it is often women who are at the very sharp end. The Employment Rights Act will tackle that unfairness.

It will ban exploitative zero-hours contracts, introduce sick pay from day one, and enhance protections from dismissal for pregnant women and new mothers.

It will enable a fair pay agreement in social care. It will strengthen protections against sexual harassment and harassment from third parties. And it will introduce mandatory equality action plans.

These are just a few of the measures in this historic Act that directly benefit women.

But we know our work is not done. And the agenda for conference makes that very clear.

Sisters, this year our debates will range across women’s health and safety at work, reproductive rights, violence against women and girls, supporting unpaid carers, equal pay, pensions, flexible working, better maternity and paternity rights, the impact of Artificial Intelligence, and fighting back against far right and populist right attacks on women’s rights globally.

The far right present themselves as the so-called protectors of women and girls to stoke racism and division, and to scapegoat entire communities. But Reform is promising to rip up the Equality Act and tear up any progress the Employment Rights Act delivers.

And the likes of Trump, Milei in Argentina, Meloni in Italy and Orban in Hungary are creating global instability, violating international law and undermining international conventions that promote rights for women and girls globally.

Alongside this is the misogynistic rhetoric from Reform – “biological reality checks” for young women, an “unregulated sexual economy.” When Nigel Farage says that increased time limits for abortions are “utterly ridiculous,” women know what they are really trying to say: that our bodies, our boundaries, our choices should not be our own.

Women are all too familiar with these narratives. We’ve been here before, and that’s why we know that the best way to push back against division is through a message of collective hope, underpinned by real, tangible action to make people’s working lives better.

As the priorities of the women’s conference and the TUC show, we need the Employment Rights Act delivered in full and as quickly as possible. We need ambitious plans to reform our parental leave and childcare systems to support working families. We need grown-up conversations about how we build a sustainable and inclusive economy to raise living standards and deliver the decent work and public services that people desperately need and can be proud of.

Faster progress is needed on pay discrimination. Clementina Black moved the first ever motion on equal pay at the 1888 TUC Congress, and yet TUC analysis has shown it will take another 30 years to close the gender pay gap at the current pace of change.

The message from TUC Women’s Conference is clear — we must resist the backslide, smash the status quo, and win for women. And when we win for women, we win for all workers.

Nikki Pound is TUC policy lead, women and equality.