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“A trade union is like a bundle of sticks. The workers are bound together and have the strength of unity … A worker who is not in a union is like a single stick. She can easily be broken or bent to the will of her employer”.
The bundle of sticks story was often told by Mary Macarthur, the founder and leader of the National Federation of Women Workers, a pioneering all-women trade union that existed between 1906-1921. In 2018, 100 years later, the UK workforce is increasingly comprised of ‘single sticks’.
