In 2022, an independent inquiry found that the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA) had failed in its duty of care to members and staff. The report detailed a culture of sexual harassment, bullying, and misogyny, enabled at the highest levels of the union. Women spoke of being groped, humiliated, and ignored. Senior officers either did nothing or actively dissuaded them from pursuing complaints. The inquiry’s conclusions were damning, but hardly surprising. In the wake of #MeToo, case after case has exposed how the institutions tasked with defending workers have too often protected abusers instead. “Solidarity,” it seems, has its limits.
Ana Avendaño’s Solidarity Betrayed: How Unions Enable Sexual Harassment—And How They Can Do Better is an unflinching account of how the labour movement in the United States has repeatedly failed its women members. The book is US in scope, rooted in Avendaño’s two decades inside the AFL-CIO—but its implications are global. The dynamics she describes are instantly recognisable: male-dominated union bureaucracies; grievance systems designed to contain, not resolve; a culture that prioritises institutional survival over justice. For all the lip service paid to equality, and all the self-organising groups formed by women, migrants, and rank-and-file activists, it is still the white, male, and stale faction that governs the house of labour. Why?
Avendaño frames her book as a “tough love letter” to the movement, but it reads more like a structurally grounded indictment. Drawing on both personal experience—she was fired from United Way Worldwide after exposing sexual misconduct by union leaders—and extensive research, she documents how unions have shielded harassers, silenced victims, and maintained a masculine culture long after such attitudes were supposedly discredited. Her argument is uncompromising: the labour movement’s failure to confront sexual harassment is not the result of a few bad actors, but of the very organisational form unions have taken, bureaucratic, legalistic, top-down.
She traces this legacy from the early exclusion of women in the AFL’s founding unions, through the mid-century defence of “protective legislation” that kept women in low-paid, low-status roles. Then came the outright hostility faced by tradeswomen and miners in the 1970s and beyond. At every turn, women’s entry into union spaces was met with resistance: graffiti, gropes, pornographic hazing rituals, and their unions more often than not took the side of the men. In some cases, unions even grieved the dismissals of harassers while ignoring the pleas of those they had harmed. “It’s my job to protect them from discipline,” one union president says of the men. The women were on their own.
Today’s scandals are animated by the same logic. Avendaño recounts how the AFL-CIO buried allegations against senior staff, how SEIU’s Fight for $15 was rocked by multiple cases involving male leadership, and how even the supposedly progressive SAG-AFTRA initially prioritised liability over safety. Union cultures closed ranks. Survivors were framed as disloyal. The bureaucracy’s first instinct, as ever, was to defend itself. Avendaño herself became a pariah after naming names at a conference plenary; within hours, AFL-CIO officials had called her boss to demand her removal.
What is most striking, and most damning, is how little has changed. Women-led locals like SEIU-USWW in California, or individuals like Karen Kent and Alejandra Valles, offer glimpses of an alternative: survivor-led organising, anti-harassment codes, civil society alliances. But these remain the exception. Across the movement, white men still dominate leadership. The old boys’ club has outlived the old industries.
This persistence demands more than moral explanation. The rank-and-file of many unions today is majority female, in education, healthcare, and social care, overwhelmingly so. Women’s caucuses and committees proliferate. Yet when it comes to power, constitutional, budgetary, disciplinary, men still hold the reins. Why? Avendaño’s narrative suggests the problem is not simply ideological but institutional. Bureaucratic unionism, hierarchical, legalistic, opaque, was never designed to be democratic, let alone feminist. What began as a means to stabilise the labour movement in the mid-20th century has calcified into a defensive apparatus, preoccupied with liability, status, and proceduralism. It is not that women haven’t fought their way in, it’s that the machine was built to absorb and neutralise them.
In this light, calls for “refreshing” labour feminism feel inadequate. What’s needed is a transformation of the form: a shift from bureaucratic unionism to something participatory, open, and militant. Solidarity Betrayed makes the case that unions cannot afford to ignore sexual harassment, not just because it is morally untenable, but because a movement that turns a blind eye to the abuse of half its membership cannot survive. The bureaucratic instinct to close ranks, to follow procedure, to bury scandal, is a death sentence. And Avendaño, for all her anger, is not naïve. She understands the mechanics of institutional self-preservation. “When they can’t challenge your competency,” she was told, “they’ll challenge your loyalty.” They did.
The book may be American, but the critique travels. British unions have had their own reckonings, TSSA and GMB are just the most visible. Australia, South Africa, and Europe have seen similar patterns. But as Avendaño notes, some of the most promising responses have come from the Global South, where feminist organising and labour militancy often walk together. Uruguay and Argentina were among the first to ratify the ILO’s convention on violence and harassment at work. The lesson is clear: when women lead, when rank-and-file democracy deepens, change is possible.
But codes of conduct won’t cut it. Harassment is not a deviation from union culture, it is, as Avendaño shows, inscribed in its current form. Until that form is dismantled, until power is shared, victims are believed, and solidarity becomes more than a slogan, the betrayal will continue. And it will not be the right that destroys the movement, but the bureaucratic logic that eats it from within.
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