One can hardly talk about the gains that women have made in the work place without acknowledging that those gains would have never been made possible without the existence of unions and from women’s participation in unions and helping to promote them. From the book Labor’s Untold Story by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais written in 1955 and published by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America:
Fundamentally, labor’s story is the story of the American people. To view it narrowly, to concentrate on the history of specific trade unions or careers of individuals and their rivalries, would be to miss the point that the great forces which have swept the American people into action have been the very forces that have also molded labor.
This is the second installment for the series on Class and Labor.
Issues of class and labor seem to pop up quite a bit on Daily Kos as sidebars or as impacting other topics in important ways, but they don't get their own diaries as often as they perhaps should. Yet work and class have enormous relevance in American life.
Almost all of us must work for a living. Most of us who work owe a great debt to organized labor - even if we are not ourselves members of unions, we benefit from the advances unions have made over the years, in safety conditions, limited hours and overtime pay, benefits, child labor laws. And while a shrinking percentage of American workers are represented by unions, not only do union members earn more than their nonunion counterparts, but nonunion workers in highly unionized industries and areas benefit from employer competition for workers, leading to better pay and conditions. Class issues, too, apart from the question of organized labor, are central in many of the political struggles of the day. From bankruptcy legislation to the minimum wage to student loans, legislation affects people differently based on how much they make, what kind of access to power and support they have.
With this series we aim to develop an ongoing discussion around class and labor issues. Such ongoing discussions have emerged in the
Feminisms and the Kossacks Under 35 series, and, given the frequent requests for more (and more commented-in) diaries on these issues, we hope this series will accomplish the same. Entries will be posted every Tuesday night between 8 and 9pm eastern. If you are interested in a writing a diary for this series, please email Elise or Miss Laura and we will arrange for you to be put on the schedule.
And onto the rest of the diary:
It took trade unions in America a long time to come around to the idea of admitting women to their ranks, and many of the arguments made against it back in the 1800’s sadly are still being echoed by some extremists on the right today as to what a woman’s place is. Again from the Labor’s Untold Story:
Speaking on the subject of women in industry, (William) Sylvis said "As men struggle to maintain an equitable standard of wages and to dignify labor, we owe it to consistency if not humanity to guard and protect the rights of female labor as well as our own. How can we hope to reach the social elevation for which we all aim without making women the companion of our advancement? Nevertheless, most men and most trade unions regarded women workers, whose numbers had mightily increased during the Civil War, as a menace who drove wages down by taking underpaid jobs when they should have remained at home.
Virtually every trade union refused to admit them, despite the fact that they had been pioneers in the labor movement, inaugurating the trade union press with such papers as The Lowell Offering and The Factory Girl. They had, moreover, conducted some of the earliest mass strikes in American history, 5.000 young women striking in September, 1845, for example, in the cotton mills of Pittsburgh and Allegheny City where they received $2.50 for a seventy-two hour work week, and where they broke down the factory gates and hauled out the scabs.
One of the heroes of the labor movement was Labor Organizer Leonora Marie Barry. Born in Ireland in 1849 she immigrated with her family to the United States. They were driven out of Ireland due to the potato famine her story is detailed in this Women of Courage profile.
The Knights of Labor was one of the earlier organizations to welcome women into its ranks along with blacks and industrial workers. Their gains are ones that we still benefit from today as cited in the article:
The Knights of Labor, started by Philadelphia tailors in 1869, had grown into a national organization by 1878, even faster after 1881 when it ceased to be a secret organization. The Knights of Labor welcomed industrial workers, women, blacks (after 1883) and even employers into it ranks. It used education to achieve its goals: an 8-hour day, abolition of child and convict labor, equal pay for equal work, elimination of private banks and cooperation. Under union leader Terence V. Powderly it totaled 702,000 members in 1886, the year Leonora Barry was sent as one of 16 women delegates (out of 660) to the national convention in Richmond, Virginia.
For more information on the Knights of Labor here is their Wikipedia page.
Another leader in the labor movement was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. From the website http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...:
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was born in Concord, New Hampshire on 7th August, 1890. The family moved to New York in 1900 and Flynn was educated at the local public school. Converted by her parents to socialism, she was only 16 when she gave her first speech, What Socialism Will Do for Women, at the Harlem Socialist Club. As a result of her political activities, Flynn was expelled from high school.
In 1907 Flynn became a full-time organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Over the next few years she organized campaigns among garment workers in Pennsylvania, silk weavers in New Jersey, restaurant workers in New York, miners in Minnesota and textile workers in Massachusetts. During this period the writer, Theodore Dreiser, described her as "an East Side Joan of Arc". Flynn was arrested ten times during this period but was never convicted of any criminal activity.
A founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Flynn was active in the campaign against the conviction of Sacco-Vanzetti. Flynn was particularly concerned with women's rights. She supported birth control and women's suffrage. Flynn also criticized the leadership of trade unions for being male dominated and not reflecting the needs of women.
In 1936 Flynn joined the Communist Party and wrote a feminist column for his journal, the Daily Worker. Two years later she was elected to the national committee.
Known as the Rebel Girl she fought for the rights of free speech, and the right to protest, and she defended those rights despite being arrested and accused of trying to overthrow the United States government. She was one of the first American women to lead mass strikes. For more on life of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn check out Rebel Girl: The revolutionary life and work of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
Another of labor’s champions was author and journalist Mary Heaton Vorse. From a 1989 book review in the New York Times of Mary Heaton Vorse: The Life of an American Insurgent:
Mention the coal miners' strike and most Americans will think you're talking about something that happened long ago or in another country, not something that started April 5 and is going on right now in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and seven other states. There has been little coverage, and most of it perfunctory, of a strike in which thousands of miners and their families have been arrested for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. The Reagan-Bush era contempt for labor has contributed to the general ignorance of our own miners' struggle, but so has another factor I had not taken into account before reading ''Mary Heaton Vorse'': the decline of media interest in labor issues. She was the greatest labor journalist of this century, and no one yet has risen to take her place.
There is additional information on her life at http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/... and there is a collection of her writings available on line at http://www.marxists.org/....
We all truly stand on the backs of these brave women and many more which there is not enough time to tell in one diary. We need to retell the tales and struggles of the past to appreciate what we have today. They can easily be lost again if we do not fight to keep them, and do not remember the cost that was paid in lives and blood to attain them to begin with.