1
Unionizing the Movements
More than a quarter-million people turned out for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. There Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his impassioned “I Have a Dream” speech, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chair John Lewis spoke about liberation from “economic slavery.” “Hundreds of thousands of our brothers are not here,” Lewis said. “They have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages, or no wages, at all. . . . What is there . . . to ensure the equality of a maid who earns $5.00 a week in the home of a family whose income is $100,000 a year?” At the time, African Americans had twice the unemployment rate of whites, and those who had jobs took home on average 50 to 60 percent of white workers’ pay.1
The march had been called by the Negro-American Labor Council, an organization founded in 1959 by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in reaction to the AFL-CIO’s refusal to adopt internal desegregation measures. The march was to focus on jobs and economic issues, but later organizers broadened it to include pending civil rights legislation. The nation’s trade union leadership was unenthusiastic about the march: the executive council of the AFL-CIO, led by its president George Meany, refused to endorse it. However, some local, national, and international unions within the federation were active participants and endorsers. One such endorser was the United Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther, the only white labor representative on the march’s coordinating committee.2
This lack of enthusiasm for civil rights among white-led trade unions was hardly a surprise. Since the 1955 merger of the industrial union–based CIO with the trade union–based AFL, the AFL’s conservatism had predominated, especially on issues of race, corroding whatever good relations existed between civil rights organizations and the more racially progressive CIO. Financial contributions from trade unions to civil rights organizations were insultingly small. In 1959, for instance, labor contributions to the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), a major national civil rights organization, amounted to only $1,347, most of it from more progressive unions such as ILGWU and AFSCME.3
The scene at the Negro-American Labor Council’s February 1961 meeting in Washington, DC, was typical: for the eight hundred unionists and community activists in attendance, reported the independent left newspaper the Guardian, “the AFL-CIO was the main target of attack. . . . Nearly every speaker criticized AFL-CIO leadership for ‘dragging its feet’” on rooting out racism within the trade union movement.4 Also in 1961, after years of skirmishes between Meany and pro–civil rights unionists led by Randolph, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) released a scathing report on civil rights in the first five years of the AFL-CIO merger, detailing racist practices in trade unions, apprenticeship programs, and AFL-CIO bodies. “The basic status of workers in the labor movement who are non-white is that of second class citizenship,” proclaimed Randolph, the sole African American on the twenty-member AFL-CIO executive council, to AFL-CIO convention delegates in 1961. But the AFL-CIO’s executive council rejected the allegations, instead blaming pro–civil rights unionists for the “‘gap that has developed’ between organized labor and the Negro Community.”5
All four major civil rights organizations—the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), SNCC, and CORE—had protested union-backed racial discrimination and unfair hiring and had called on the AFL-CIO to organize unrepresented workers of color. Receiving no response, civil rights organizations launched nationwide protests in 1963 calling for jobs and fair employment. A few years later, in 1965, they began to try their hand at organizing “freedom unions” for poor workers unrepresented by trade unions.
In the late 1960s the women’s movement faced a similar dilemma. Becoming aware of how gender relations structured economic oppression, feminist activists saw women workers making an average of fifty cents to each dollar paid to men, not including the unwaged “second shift” in the home. Women who were union members took part in widespread gender activism in the ’60s and ’70s—organizing against the sex-typing of jobs and winning major legal decisions against discriminatory employers.6 But female membership in unions was abysmally low during the ’60s—only about 12 percent of working women belonged to unions, even though women made up 40 percent of the American workforce.7
The male-dominated AFL-CIO’s lack of interest, and in some cases lack of ability, in organizing primarily female workplaces drove women to create their own institutions outside existing trade unions. The solely economic focus of trade unions held little appeal for women workers, whose concerns—including day care, protection against sexual harassment, and respect and dignity on the job—often went unnoticed by trade union reps. Working a “double day” on the job and at home helped form a different consciousness about work—one that was not limited to economic issues in the waged workplace. This conception would become central to movement-based organizing efforts among women in clerical and service sector jobs. An emerging feminist consciousness influenced the formation of scores of organizations for domestics, welfare mothers, and clerical workers—all framing their demands in terms of workers’ rights and civil rights, as well as class and gender solidarity.
Into this gulf of trade union inactivity a new generation of social movement activists launched a wave of economic organizing in which class became central to movement building. While they didn’t necessarily carry the label “labor,” hundreds of campaigns for equal employment and workplace rights flourished amid the civil rights, New Left, and women’s movements of the ’60s and early ’70s. Some were short-lived; others survived to establish a long-term presence in, and an effect on, movements for social change. Most important, these organizations brought the voices of marginalized poor workers into the struggle for economic justice, building consciousness about their experiences and expanding the labor movement in crucial ways. These poor workers—day laborers, low-wage clerical and service workers, welfare recipients, and the marginally employed—would play an increasingly important part in movements for labor and economic justice over the next decades.
Jim Crow Must Go
Following the 1963 March on Washington, civil rights organizations impatient with trade union inaction put fair employment at the top of their agendas from coast to coast. From 1963 to 1964, as CORE historians August Meier and Elliott Rudwick note, “campaigns against job bias were the most common projects among the northern and western chapters—and generally the most successful.”8 Activists in San Francisco captured national attention when a coalition of civil rights groups began organizing for equal employment in response to high rates of joblessness in the Bay Area. Named the United Freedom Movement, the coalition had the goal of confronting de facto employment segregation through confrontation, using militant civil disobedience. Sit-ins, pickets, and boycotts brought the Bay Area into the forefront of the action and marked a new emphasis on economic oppression as a main focus of the growing movement.
The United Freedom Movement campaign harked back to earlier “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the 1930s, when African Americans in several cities successfully boycotted exploitative white-owned businesses located in their segregated communities.9 But the strategy also strongly borrowed from community-based labor organizing techniques. Activists presented employers with demands for fair hiring and insisted that an agreement be signed directly with the United Freedom Movement. If an employer refused, they would commence civil disobedience. This bore striking similarities to union organizing drives—but in this case, a local civil rights coalition acted as the collective bargaining agent, and an employer’s failure to sign a contract would be answered with civil disobedience by community members instead of a strike by workers.
San Francisco’s United Freedom Movement first targeted Mel’s Drive-In, a local restaurant chain that relegated African Americans to bottom-wage dishwashing and janitorial jobs. As historian Larry Saloman describes, daily picketers carried signs with messages such as “I’ll have a freedomburger please,” or entered the restaurant and placed orders for “freedom and jobs for Negroes.” After nearly one hundred arrests and with the threat of more demonstrations to come, Mel’s management signed a fair hiring agreement for all thirteen restaurants in the chain. Buoyed by the victory, San Francisco activists picked new targets. Merely the threat of a 1963 Christmas boycott of downtown department stores compelled the stores to sign hiring agreements. And the Lucky supermarket chain, with an atrocious record of minority hiring, became the testing ground for the “shop in.” CORE picketers had found that shoppers in predominantly white neighborhoods crossed their lines, limiting their impact on the stores’ business. So protesters entered the stores, filled their grocery carts, lined up to check out, then left saying, “I’ll have more money to pay when you hire more Negroes.” The Lucky action lasted nine days, and management finally signed an agreement with CORE guaranteeing that only people of color would be hired at Lucky stores for an entire year.10
In March 1964, the Bay Area civil rights struggle landed right in the middle of the San Francisco’s elegant Sheraton Palace Hotel, glimpsed in this book’s introduction. After a series of pickets and arrests, some fifteen hundred protesters surrounded the hotel, and according to historians Natalie Becker and Marjorie Myhill, “before long, the picketing turned into a walk-in, the walk-in into a moving, chanting serpentine, the serpentine into a sit-in, and the sit-in into a sleep-in,” paralyzing the hotel’s business. The spectacle of an interracial group of activists sleeping in the ritzy hotel lobby was splashed across San Francisco’s newspapers. Demands included increasing the number of African American workers at the hotel; at the time there were only 19 Black workers out of 550 employees, and they worked in the “back of the house,” out of sight of the hotel’s wealthy clientele. After two days, activists emerged with a fair hiring agreement not just for the Sheraton Palace but also for thirty-three of the city’s other hotels, many of whose owners feared they would be the activists’ next targets.11
Civil rights activists also besieged San Francisco’s auto row, lying in cars or on desks to press their demands for equal employment. “Young Negroes and whites slipped into shiny new Plymouths, Valiants and Furies,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported, while “the showroom resounded almost continuously with chants, yells and songs.”12 Demonstrating crowds as large as five thousand virtually shut down business during March and April 1964, winning an industry-wide jobs agreement modeled on the Sheraton Palace victory. Activists moved on to the powerful Bank of America, which faced huge pickets in thirteen California cities and demands that it hire at least thirty-six hundred people of color within a year. In one demonstration, some ten thousand people surrounded a downtown San Francisco branch; in another, activists defied a court order by sitting in at a San Diego branch. Other tactics were smaller but effective: civil rights workers would ask a teller for pennies in exchange for bills, then circulate to a new teller to change the money back to bills. Months of such tactics, along with continual demonstrations and bad publicity, forced the bank to promise to increase its Black employment by nearly 40 percent.13
In all, the San Francisco jobs campaign produced over 375 equal employment agreements promising thousands of jobs to African Americans and other people of color.14 This was classic grassroots labor organizing, and it was not limited to a single employer or even a single industry. Through direct confrontation, activists forced employers to bargain directly with civil rights groups and sign binding agreements with them. Civil rights groups became, in effect, bargaining agents for the Black community as a whole. In direct contrast, San Francisco’s unions, for the most part, represented white workers in the industries targeted and did not participate in the demonstrations. One exception was the city’s left-leaning ILWU local, which pressured the mayor to settle the Sheraton Palace dispute.
Young activists dominated San Francisco’s multiracial CORE chapter, including eighteen-year-old Tracy Simms, an African American high school student who acted as spokesperson during the Sheraton protest. She’d gotten interested in civil rights at Berkeley’s Woolworth’s boycott at the age of fourteen. Writes historian Jo Freeman, “Newspaper accounts implied that it really stuck in the craw of the hotel association and the city leaders to have to negotiate with an 18-year-old girl.”15 Early on, some 70 to 80 percent of CORE’s activists were young white college students, about half female. As the struggle wore on, participants were decidedly more racially diverse—over half were African American at the time of the auto row protests, with many more older nonstudents lying down to be arrested.16
CORE chapters across the nation attacked a wide range of discriminatory employers. Jobs campaigns in Seattle, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, Columbus, East St. Louis, Berkeley, and Washington, DC, met with some success, though not as dramatic as San Francisco’s. Such campaigns were notable for their emphasis on economic justice: in contrast to the South, segregation in northern cities was achieved through economic oppression, not laws.17
From the Freedom Movement to Freedom Unions
Civil rights activists also made the leap from organizing for jobs and fair hiring practices to encouraging the formation of independent community unions. In Mississippi, workers from SNCC helped residents of the Delta town of Shaw to organize the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union (MFLU). Shaw’s main employer was a sewing plant that refused to hire Black people; most were relegated to poverty-wage day labor in the cotton fields. In 1965, angry residents decided to act and, an anonymous observer wrote, forty-five of them—“cotton day laborers, tractor drivers, haulers, domestic servants, part time carpenters, mechanics, handymen, former sharecroppers and renters”—met in a tiny church to form a union.18
Nineteen-year-old George Shelton was elected the union’s chair. The group’s draft constitution stated that its purpose was “to organize the poor people” and allowed any person over fourteen years old “who works, whether employed or not,” to join. In a 1965 fundraising letter, Shelton told potential supporters that most farm workers in Mississippi made only thirty cents an hour, and “some workers, particularly the maids, don’t even get this.”19 Even the highest-paid workers made only $3 for a ten-hour day at a time when the federal minimum wage was $1.25 an hour.
Demanding their right to that minimum wage for their work, as well as free health care, Social Security, and “equal employment practices in wages, hiring and working conditions,” the MFLU spread to eight Mississippi counties and grew to over a thousand members, the majority of them cotton choppers or pickers, within just two weeks. The union’s new members in three counties went on strike to end the “slave wages” of area cotton mills, such as the Delta Land and Pine Corporation, a former plantation that employed day laborers to chop, pick, and haul cotton. Members’ dues provided a small strike fund, and community support was high. To raise funds, “women promised to sew aprons and bed quilts and some people planned to hold fish fries,” wrote organizers, and to get by on less, “everyone agreed to enlarge the size of their garden plots, and plant one large plot in common.”20
While ultimately the strike failed in its major goals—partly because higher-paid delivery drivers were not as willing to strike as the day laborers, partly because the young union lacked resources—it did succeed in raising wages in some areas from thirty to fifty cents an hour—constituting a 60 percent pay increase. Heartened by the partial success, strikers planned for another action in the fall, and sharecroppers in Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana formed their own Freedom Union locals.21
These southern Freedom Labor Unions had a northern urban sister, the Maryland Freedom Union (MFU), founded in January 1966 with the help of CORE’s Baltimore chapter, to represent Black workers in small white-owned businesses located in segregated Black communities. CORE had backed AFL-CIO union campaigns since its inception but found that traditional organizing techniques—petitions, elections, and strikes—failed in poor communities where turnover was high and employer power was strong. Community support was needed to tip the balance in the workers’ favor. “We saw the MFU as a combination of labor and community organization,” wrote organizer Mike Flug in 1970, then chair of CORE’s Columbia University chapter. It pursued a strategy similar to that of the United Farm Workers (UFW) in California. CORE activists had responded to UFW leader Cesar Chavez’s call to help organize the boycott of table grapes and wines in urban Black and Puerto Rican communities in the north during the 1965 grape strike. The strike’s success showed CORE that a community-based union might work in urban areas as it had for California’s rural farm workers.22 CORE proposed organizing low-wage workers in Baltimore.
Any worker, no matter his or her job or skill, was eligible to join the MFU. As soon as the union was announced, workers flocked to it—from workplaces throughout the city, including stores, laundries, hospitals, and nursing homes, they asked for help with organizing.23 The new union’s members were almost entirely African American women earning less than minimum wage. In February 1966, when one group of workers formed an organizing committee, only to be fired in retaliation a few days later by their employer, Lincoln Nursing Home, other nursing home workers walked out in support.
“Startled [CORE] organizers were told by the workers that Lincoln was ‘on strike,’ that the workers had named the union ‘Maryland Freedom Union Local #1,’ and that the CORE organizers had better come down . . . to show the workers how to ‘run a proper picket line,’” recounts Flug. Workers compared their conditions to slavery, with wages of thirty-five cents an hour for up to seventy-two-hour work weeks. Many also cited, as a reason for striking, the undignified treatment of their elderly indigent patients, who suffered under terrible conditions in the understaffed nursing home. Less than two weeks later, after seeing the struggle covered in the city’s Black newspaper, the Baltimore Afro-American, the staff from a second nursing home went on strike and called the CORE office to say they’d like to be “Freedom Local #2.” Strikers’ tactics included picketing the employer’s home and breaking into one nursing home to show local journalists the conditions under which it operated. Though neither strike produced a contract, the high-profile tactics and the threat of more paid off: wages tripled from just 35 cents an hour to over $1 after the strikes.24
National CORE officials were proud of the union and in April 1966 announced that the Maryland Freedom Union would expand “to organize people in all areas not covered by the minimum-wage law as well as the marginal workers and the unemployed.” The MFU began organizing retail store workers in downtown Baltimore, winning union recognition at a chain of clothing stores after a community boycott in support of the workers. The workers’ wages more than doubled (from 70 cents to $1.50 an hour for full-time work), and they were guaranteed time-and-a-half for overtime, paid vacation, sick leave, and holidays. Recognition at two other stores followed.25
Trade unions suddenly began paying attention. Prior to organizing the retail workers, the MFU had approached the Retail Clerks’ International Union to explore affiliating. The local’s president responded that “he didn’t organize ‘those kinds of stores,’ didn’t want ‘those kinds of workers.’”26 As MFU’s successes mounted, and as groups of workers already represented by AFL-CIO trade unions began asking the MFU if they could affiliate with it instead, Baltimore Central Labor Council officials accused the MFU of intentionally raiding the jurisdictions of AFL-CIO unions and of “dual unionism”—undercutting one union by forming another to compete with it. “So new were both CORE staff members and MFU officers to the disputes of the union movement,” writes Flug, “that several weeks passed before they learned what the term meant.” The UAW’s Walter Reuther, a major contributor to CORE, complained “about CORE ‘becoming a union’” and pressured CORE to stop the MFU. CORE complied, withdrawing the MFU’s financial support.27
But this was not the end of the MFU. Cut off from CORE, MFU members elected rank-and-file officers in the five MFU-represented shops to oversee the union. With fewer than one hundred workers under contract and paying dues, the MFU began canvassing Baltimore’s steel plants for donations from ordinary workers, who donated funds generously to keep the union afloat. However, by the end of the ’60s, the continual financial crunch had weakened the local, and those workers still under MFU contract affiliated with a predominantly Black painters’ union local in Baltimore.28
This became a recurring theme in economic organizing initiatives of the ’60s and ’70s: abundant energy and militant members willing to take direct action against their employers, but with few financial resources to draw on for the long haul. Organizers knew this was a weak point and often sought out wary trade unions with which to affiliate for financial support. But these small organizing projects, infused as they were with activist energy, frightened most trade union leaders, who were used to operating in a more legalistic and controlled framework. This dynamic would begin to change slowly over the next decades, as independent community-based organizing became stronger and trade unions began to rethink their organizing outlooks.
Sowing the Seeds of Resistance
The mostly student New Left also organized around economic grievances in the early ’60s, trying to extend the reach of unionism into the ranks of the poor. Students for a Democratic Society launched its Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) in the fall of 1963, two days after the March on Washington.29 ERAP established what it called “community unions” in ten cities to organize around unemployment, welfare, housing, and other local issues. The first, Jobs or Income Now (JOIN) in Chicago, was “analogous to a trade union” according to its 1966 program, in that it brought community grievances against “policemen, educators, welfare caseworkers, landlords, loan sharks, day labor agencies and the like.” Poor whites—factory workers and the unemployed—were JOIN’s main constituency.30
Published theory to back up SDS’s projects appeared, such as James O’Connor’s “Toward a Theory of Community Unions,” printed in Studies on the Left in 1964. Since the poor lacked steady jobs, argued O’Connor, the community rather than the workplace was the logical place to organize them. This theory would have supported CORE’s activities as well, but unlike the Black-initiated CORE union projects, the mostly white-run ERAP enjoyed wide support from trade unions, churches, and foundations. An ERAP advisory committee formed with mostly left trade unionists, and a local of the United Packinghouse Workers Union opened an ERAP recruiting office near a South Side unemployment office. The AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department’s executive director, Jack Conway, was “especially impressed” with ERAP’s work, and Walter Reuther’s UAW gave thousands of dollars to SDS for the program.31 But ERAP was ultimately a failure, disbanding in 1967 amid conflicts over race, gender, and class—especially the last, as the mostly middle-class student organizers were charged with elitism by the workers they sought to organize.32
Activists in the South, too, were trying their hand at community-based labor organizing, with somewhat greater success. Initiated by former SNCC activists Bob and Dottie Zellner, Grass Roots Organizing Work (GROW) was started under the auspices of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), one of the region’s civil rights organizations. SNCC’s Central Committee also provided a small amount of aid.33 GROW lent its support to a variety of southern labor struggles, including AFL-CIO-affiliated union campaigns in some of New Orleans’s plushest hotels.34 But GROW became most widely known for its work in Laurel, Mississippi, in 1967.
A local of the International Woodworkers of America was engaged in a strike against the Masonite Corporation, the largest producer of hardboard in the world, as management tried to downsize the workforce and automate the plant.35 The Woodworkers local, with roots in both Wobbly organizing and Klan racism, had struck without its national union’s approval. Though the three-thousand-member local had been formally desegregated a few years earlier, the local, the largest in the state, had no Black officials, and a wide gulf remained between white and Black members.36 For months, GROW used the strike to bring Black and white workers together to discuss democratic unionism and community support for the struggle. In December 1967, the national union put the local in trusteeship, removed its elected leadership, and signed a deal with the corporation. Nevertheless, GROW’s underlying mission—undermining racism and laying the groundwork for a democratic and community-based union movement—was advancing. By late 1968, some eight hundred local unionists, who had not been allowed back to work and were still pursuing their jobs through a court case, had a racially integrated strike committee that included both men and women. They held weekly rallies at which “as many as 1,000 people assemble in a cow pasture and talk about how they can organize,” according to one observer’s report.37
At the same time, Black, white, and Cajun pulpwood workers who supplied raw materials to big companies such as Masonite, Scott Paper, Weyerhauser, and Georgia Pacific approached GROW for organizing help. The AFL-CIO-affiliated International Woodworkers Association had already denied their requests for organizing assistance.38 These workers had formed their own nine-thousand-member independent Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association (GPA), which had twenty chapters across six states and was about 80 percent African American. These contingent workers labored for piece rates, hauling wood from the forests for the paper corporations.39 A few years later, in September 1971, when Masonite’s Laurel plant suddenly lowered the piece rate, forty GPA members refused to deliver wood. The strike spread across Mississippi, and Masonite backed down, offering a substantial raise in piece rates to the woodcutters. A second, partly victorious strike was carried out against the paper companies across the South in 1973. Civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the SCLC, organized support rallies and sent material aid to the strikers. At the same time, southern woodcutters discovered that their comrades in the Maine woods had created similar independent unions and traveled to meet with them.40 In 1978, Mississippi woodcutters organized again to fight the timber multinationals, this time as the independent United Woodcutters Association. By 1982, UWA had grown into a statewide organization with forty-four locals and more than twelve hundred members.41
Meanwhile, the seeds of resistance that GROW had planted had taken root. Because of its high-profile work at Masonite, GROW was contacted by workers in other industries who wanted to unionize. It got involved in organizing poultry and catfish plant workers. “A man might have been a pulpwood cutter but his wife worked in the poultry plant,” Bob Zellner recalls. In May 1972, tired of working conditions that they compared to slavery, some sixty Black women walked off their jobs at Poultry Packers, and, with GROW’s help, the independent Mississippi Poultry Workers Union was born. Six months later, the union won a collective bargaining election among the plant’s two hundred workers. Eager for unionization, poultry workers at two other plants also voted in the new union, and organizing spread to plants in neighboring counties.42
GROW’s development shows a striking array of organizing experiments in the antiunion South, across several industries, undertaken by former civil rights organizers in collaboration with poor workers. Like the freedom unions that had come before, these projects raised consciousness, made concrete gains, and laid the groundwork for future organizing. GROW’s philosophy was to educate workers about labor solidarity but direct them as much as possible into the mainstream union movement, all the while helping them be independent and critical. For contingent forest workers battling multinational corporations, food-processing factory workers, and low-wage hotel employees in cities like New Orleans, these successful experiences raised hopes among both poor workers and their advocates that the trade union movement could, and eventually would, broaden its organizing strategies.
Equal Pay for Equal Work
While women were central participants in many of the civil rights–based worker-organizing drives during the ’60s, by the end of the decade an emerging feminist movement was also interjecting gender explicitly into labor organizing. “Contrary to a popular ad . . . we have not ‘come a long way, baby,’” wrote one movement activist in 1969. “We work in every job listed by the Bureau of the Census but as a rule we do mostly underpaid, menial labor, and are paid the lowest salaries with the lowest fringe benefits and the worst working conditions going.” Women were often the last hired and first fired, and made about 50 cents to each dollar earned by men. Among the occupations held by women, the largest number of positions were in clerical, sales, service, and household work. Clerical and sales jobs accounted for 43 percent of employment for white women and 15 percent for women of color. Of service and household workers during this period, the majority were women of color, 54 percent to white women’s 20 percent.43
From its beginning, the feminist movement had incorporated both waged and unwaged work in its conception of labor. Tens of thousands of women turned out for the first nationwide “strike for women’s liberation” on August 26, 1970, some chained to housecleaning equipment or typewriters to make their point, others marching to a chant of “Scrub your own floors!” Socialist and Marxist feminists theorized that women were oppressed as a class through male supremacy or patriarchy, acting both as a reserve army of labor to bring down wages and as unpaid domestic workers in their own homes.“We’re tired of getting the lowest wages and the crummiest work,” declared the program of the Liberation Women’s Union.44
Autonomous but like-minded groups sprouted up in cities around the country, calling themselves “women’s liberation unions.” They used direct action to make demands for equal pay, shared household work, and free childcare. The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, one of the largest, protested against corporations that oppressed women economically or socially. In March 1970, activists from the group sneaked into a business seminar in “straight” clothes to submit a list of demands including equal pay, paid parental leave, free childcare, and “an end to all hiring practices based on age, marital status, physical beauty, pregnancy or style of dress.” When the businessmen refused, the women “hexed” them with a witches’ curse.45 Actions like these didn’t bring contractual protections, but they did advance the cultural struggle for equality by raising the issue of women’s rights in a highly visible and creative way.
Debates over housework, mothering, and women’s “hidden work” in the home occupied page after page in the feminist press. Wages for Housework committees were organized in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland, and Boston.46 In one nationwide contest, thousands of women submitted essays on “practical programs to achieve economic justice for homemakers.” Essayists recommended remedies ranging from the individual (“have a special [compensation] contract made up as part of the marriage ceremony, and sign it before getting married”) to the collective (“have an equal retirement and disability fund for the homemaker, paid by deducting a percentage from the wages of all working people”). “If all housewives went on strike,” predicted journalist Cindy Felong in 1971, “the mess and filth would soon create a national crisis that would stop all production.”47
Were women “the” working class, and was their unwaged domestic labor part of the capitalist commodity system? How did some women’s economic status, race, and ability to find waged work enable them to at least partially buy their way out of this domestic division of labor by sex? Opinions ranged from unashamed biological determinism (like the often-quoted slogan “All women are housewives”) to more nuanced analyses of how race and ethnicity structured both the economy and gender relations.
Many of these early feminist debates came from the point of view of middle-class white women and ignored divisions between women based on race, ethnicity, or class.48 For instance, women of color had often performed domestic labor as paid workers as well as unpaid wives or mothers, and poor women in general had long worked outside the home. Household labor, whether paid or unpaid, was tied to the legacies of slavery and domestic servitude, continuing to affect the status and social worth of such occupations.49
The complexities of unwaged labor were nowhere more apparent than among welfare recipients, the majority of them women. Activism around welfare rights exploded in the late ’60s, as poor people began organizing for the benefits due them in an economy that had marginalized their existence. Some of the feminist movement’s consciousness about unwaged labor came from this struggle. Between 1960 and 1968, the number of public assistance recipients nearly doubled, from 745,000 families to 1.5 million, then doubled again by 1972, to 3 million.50 Spurred by this burgeoning population of recipients, local welfare-rights groups sprang up across the country, demanding higher benefit levels, the right to earn additional income without penalty, childcare for working parents, and medical benefits. As a result of the lack of state-provided or state-subsidized childcare, combined with limited opportunities for living-wage jobs and society’s relegation of parenting to mothers, it was women more often than men who drew welfare benefits, with white women making up the majority of recipients. However, proportionately more African American women were involved in the welfare rights movement as activists.
Representatives from seventy-five welfare-rights groups across the country founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) in 1966. George Wiley, former associate national director of CORE, was elected executive director of NWRO, which sought to promote a multiracial movement of the poor around welfare rights. The group’s blueprint came from an essay by activist-scholars Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, “A Strategy to End Poverty,” which argued that activists should inform poor people of their legal right to welfare and mobilize disruptive protests by which the poor could win the economic relief owed to them. During the late 1960s, tens of thousands of NWRO activists jammed into welfare offices and confronted authorities with demonstrations, picketing, and sit-ins, demanding a just welfare system and a guaranteed minimum national income. Thousands more benefited from NWRO assistance with their individual grievances, which often relied on direct action tactics similar to those being used by activists in the civil rights movement, and which had historically been used in the labor movement.51
While the focus of NWRO was on welfare benefits, the question of work always hovered in the background. But, noted Piven and Cloward in Poor People’s Movements, “it was not clear how activists could, as a practical, day-to-day matter of organizing, mount an attack on poverty by attacking its main cause—underemployment and unemployment.”52 Instead, NWRO organized poor people around their moral right to a sufficient income, largely skirting the issue of employment.
Welfare serves as the ultimate safety net for all working people but is used most frequently by the lowest-wage workers—most often women and people of color—who shuttle back and forth from minimum-wage jobs, contingent work, or jobs in the informal economy to welfare grants, food stamps, and housing vouchers. Welfare is the unemployment insurance of last resort. In addition, welfare recipients often do the vital but unwaged and socially invisible work of raising children and other types of care.53 Activists have long argued that welfare is compensation for this labor and point out that even if all recipients were offered jobs at living wages, a fair welfare system would still be necessary for those who can’t work due to such responsibilities.
NWRO’s strategists thought that benefits campaigns would bring greater numbers of recipients into a national network, leading to passage of a guaranteed national income in Congress. Such a measure, if passed, would have amounted to a pay raise for NWRO’s members, the majority of whom were single mothers working in the home. Although framed by the language of welfare rights, the arguments of NWRO members could have come straight out of the labor movement. Johnnie Tillmon, a mother of six from Watts, California, and the first chair of NWRO, spoke of the productive, socially important work that welfare mothers performed. “If I were President,” she said, “I would solve this so-called welfare crisis in a minute and go a long way toward liberating every woman. I’d just issue a proclamation that women’s work is real work. . . . I’d start paying women a living wage for doing the work we are already doing—child raising and housekeeping. And the welfare crisis would be over. Just like that.”54 In voicing demands of this nature to the state, Tillmon and other welfare mothers reframed the debate about welfare around the value of their unwaged work.NWRO was, in effect, their union, though their workplaces were scattered and they had no visible employer. By advocating for “motherwork,” as historian Eileen Boris has called it, NWRO activists “defied the devaluation of caregiving.”55
Indeed, NWRO’s resemblance to a labor union was striking. Wiley, its director, envisioned a “national union of welfare recipients,”56 and NWRO’s structure closely mirrored that of a labor union. This union of the poor, like any other union, was run by its members and attempted to bargain collectively on behalf of all welfare recipients. NWRO usually required members to pay dues before its activists would assist with a grievance. As in a labor union, members elected their peers to national, state, and local policy-making bodies that set the movement’s agenda. And as in progressive, democratically run unions, paid staff contributed their technical skills, but ultimate political control rested with the rank-and-file leadership. Although NWRO was not without internal organizational difficulties, it reflected the dynamism of movement organizing. NWRO and other social movement organizations didn’t have binding contracts to enforce—as did most trade unions—so the parameters within which they operated were less formal, encouraging more experimentation and risk taking.
NWRO lasted nearly a decade, from 1966 until 1975, and obtained benefits for tens of thousands of recipients who wouldn’t have received them otherwise. NWRO members demanded economic justice—in the form of more income, food, and shelter for themselves and their families—from a society that had stereotyped them as unemployable, morally unworthy, and undeserving. Because the welfare rights movement lacked legal protections, it had to mobilize in the welfare offices and on the streets to make gains. These direct action tactics would be taken up by welfare recipients in the ’70s and then in the ’90s, as they were again forced to work in exchange for benefits.
Wages for Housework
Waged domestic workers had a history of unionization attempts stretching back decades. In 1920 there were ten locals of domestic workers scattered across the South affiliated with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees, AFL.57 In the mid-’30s, domestic worker unions started by CIO activists briefly sprang up in Washington, DC, and New York City. In 1968, activists in Atlanta formed the National Domestic Workers Union (NDWU), which they hoped would improve the wages and working conditions of the city’s maids. Dorothy Bolden, a forty-one-year-old maid who had begun her paid work by washing diapers at the age of seven, organized support for the union by talking to other maids as they traveled on the bus to their employers’ homes. The NDWU was initially more of a mutual aid group than a union, Bolden said in a 1985 interview, but “the word ‘union’ gave it clout, and working-class members understood the word.”58
Membership grew rapidly. African American maids in Atlanta were earning only $3.50 to $5 for an entire twelve-hour day. The biggest challenge was the scattered nature of their work, which demanded new organizing tactics. “You can’t negotiate with private employers, private homes,” wrote Bolden. “You have to teach each maid how to negotiate” for herself, by refusing to work for low wages. This sort of “collective bargaining” relied not on industry-wide contracts but on pure solidarity. To be successful, most of the maids in a particular neighborhood would have to take part. They did, and the maids’ wages increased in less than a year to $13.50–$15 a day with carfare.59 This tactic, as we will see in chapter 5, is not unlike that of immigrant day laborers who use “streetcorner solidarity” to organize for higher wages in several US cities.
The NDWU and other domestic workers’ groups joined an umbrella organization called the National Committee on Household Employment (NCHE). Founded in 1965, NCHE had its origins in the work of labor feminists, such as former Women’s Bureau director Esther Peterson, who sought to infuse household labor with value. In 1971 NCHE formed the Household Technicians of America to organize women across the nation.60 The group sponsored the first national conference of household employees that year and worked for the inclusion of domestics in the minimum-wage provisions of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (a struggle it won, finally, in 1974). It also instituted a “model contract”—guaranteeing wages, hours, conditions and grievance procedures, much like a union contract—that employers signed when hiring domestic workers through NCHE’s referral service.61
There was widespread support for domestic worker organizing in the Black community. Women’s groups with predominantly white membership, such as the National Organization for Women, also supported organizing efforts by Black women, suggests Phyllis Palmer, “partially because white women’s employment—and consequent need for household help—was rising as dramatically as the supply of domestic servants was dropping.”62 Yet Black, Latina, and white women’s attitudes toward housework differed: while some white feminists, such as Betty Friedan, found housework degrading and would not do it even if paid, African American activists pointed out that such an attitude was what made organizing so difficult. “The sad part about domestic work,” wrote Nikki Giovanni in 1975, “is neither the work nor the worker, but the attitude of those who hire the worker.” Other types of domestic work that had moved from private homes into the market—food service, baking, childcare—benefited from increased respect, better working conditions, and sometimes higher wages. However, with a median income of about $1,800 a year, domestics were “still slaves, economically speaking,” wrote Mary A. McClendon, president of the NCHE-sponsored Household Workers Organization (HWO), which had launched a drive to organize Detroit’s twenty-nine thousand domestic workers. “That’s $600.00 less than President Nixon’s proposed minimum income for the unemployed.”63
Household workers’ unions focused on dignity and respect in addition to the more obvious wage issues. As well, domestic workers’ organizations were confronted with a need for consciousness raising similar to that faced by other women’s organizations. Domestic work was—pure and simple—work. But it was work particularly influenced by hierarchy, elitism, sexism, and racism. The contingency of the work placed it in the same category as other poor workers’ livelihoods: employed one season, on welfare the next. “There is no grievance machinery to handle their complaints,” wrote McClendon. “After a nine or ten hour day, spent cleaning two or three large suburban houses, the workers return to Detroit with often no more than nine dollars in their pocket, and no assurance that they will have a job tomorrow.”64
In 1972 McClendon’s Household Workers Organization launched a union drive at Dial-A-Maid, one of several domestic labor companies in Detroit providing maids to suburban employers. Though HWO eventually lost the bid to represent the employees, McClendon expressed hope that the effort was “only the beginning in bringing domestic workers within the mainstream of the labor movement.”65 That mainstream, however, showed no interest in the HWO, so McClendon turned instead toward affiliation with the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), an independent rank-and-file caucus organized by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.66
Organizing for Respect
In the ’60s, public-sector union organizing had swept through federal, state, local, and university workplaces, but as it slowed by the early ’70s, activists called on trade unions to begin organizing women in the private sector. “Unions must begin to make a greater effort to organize the 25 million working women,” wrote activist Judy Edelman in 1970. “More than 1.7 million domestic workers, half a million farm workers, nearly one million retail sales workers, and millions of office workers throughout the country,” many of whom were workers of color, remained unrepresented by unions.67
But trade unions launched few forays into the world of private-sector female workplaces. Like their sisters in domestic employment, clerical workers were obliged to organize themselves, drawing on their experiences in the civil rights, welfare rights, feminist, and labor movements. Nearly two dozen organizations for white-collar women workers formed outside of trade unions during the 1970s. Among the most prominent were 9to5 (Boston), Union WAGE (California), Women Employed (Chicago), and Women Organized for Employment (San Francisco). In some ways similar to earlier civil rights jobs mobilizations and construction trades protests, they focused on fair hiring, equal pay, and protections against discrimination and sexual harassment, and supported both race- and gender-based affirmative action programs. Reflecting the overall composition of the clerical workforce, most members were white, although women of color made up as much as one-third of the membership of some.68
Activists consciously set out to make the women’s movement more responsive to working women, according to Karen Nussbaum, a 9to5 founder. “The women’s movement,” she said in a 1980 interview, “was not speaking to large numbers of women. We [needed] to broaden our base.”69 Starting in 1973 with a newsletter circulated in Boston subway stations, 9to5 went on to win many victories for office workers, often through publicity and policy debates rather than on-the-job organizing. In its 1975 campaign for equal wages in Boston’s insurance industry, 9to5 activists dug up a little-known state law that forbade licensing of discriminatory companies. Demanding its implementation in public hearings before state licensing boards, 9to5 compelled the state’s insurance commissioner to refuse licenses to companies that discriminated on the basis of gender or race. Other campaigns targeted the publishing industry and aimed at obtaining maternity benefits as a disability under company health plans. In 1983, ten years after its founding, 9to5 had grown to twenty-five chapters with more than twelve thousand members nationally. While it did not claim to be a labor union and did not engage in collective bargaining, it did establish a “sister” relationship in 1981 with SEIU District 925, under an agreement that gave it autonomy to pursue organizing plans of its choosing.70
Chicago’s Women Employed operated similarly. In the first two years of its existence (1973–75), it took action against more than twenty employers, winning half a million dollars of back wages for women at a major Chicago insurance company and forcing public officials to enforce fair hiring and employment laws. In 1977 Women Employed joined civil rights organizations in a negligence lawsuit against the Chicago office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, building a collaborative relationship with antiracist organizations while working for gender equity. This laid the groundwork for future coalition building. After ten years of organizing, Women Employed represented some three thousand women nationally.71
San Francisco’s Women Organized for Employment (WOE) formed from a coalition of thirty women’s groups in the Bay Area. It pressed California’s Fair Employment Practices Commission for sweeping reforms and targeted employers such as savings and loan institutions, which discriminated against female job applicants. In “Tales of WOE,” a column in the group’s newsletter, women described their jobs as lacking dignity and a living wage. “We catered to our bosses in ways that went beyond simply doing our jobs well—we ran errands, handled personal matters, served lunches. Sometimes we were treated as though we were inanimate objects, like the machines we operated,” wrote Margie Albert, in a 1974 piece intended to persuade her coworkers to join a union.72
Like domestic workers, activists organizing white-collar workers lamented the difficulty of convincing their colleagues of seeing themselves as workers deserving rights. Consciousness raising about class and gender oppression was necessary to assure them that collective action could make a difference. “Most of us had never been in a union,” one worker reflected during a 1979 interview. “We considered ourselves ‘professionals’ who didn’t need that kind of thing.” Organizers maintained independence from trade unions, because they believed the organizing model used by trade unions was ineffective in reaching white-collar women workers. Instead these activists educated women about exploitation at work, collectively creating workers’ power from the bottom up.73
These women were also fighting what Dorothy Sue Cobble has called “gendered notions of unionism,” based on the assumption that women’s workplace concerns were no different from men’s and revolved solely around economic issues such as wages and benefits. But in some cases they were distinctively different: demands for nonsexist workplaces and respect and dignity on the job were central to women’s organizing. For instance, in 1972 “a group of tired stewardesses tried to explain their concerns to the incredulous male transit union officials who led their union. No, the primary issues were not wages and benefits, they insisted, but the particular cut of their uniforms and the sexual insinuations made about their occupation in the new airline advertisements.”74
Male union leaders often saw such demands as “not deserving of serious attention, let alone concerted activity,” Cobble wrote. These stewardesses, like many female workers, experienced class differently from their male counterparts. Their particular labor experience was shaped by multifaceted gendered oppressions. They wanted not only better wages but also control over definitions of their sexuality and “personhood.” When their union gave these demands cold reception, they created their own national organization, Stewardesses for Women’s Rights, which successfully challenged many exploitive practices through lawsuits and media activism.75
Such independent labor-organizing efforts among women in the late ’60s and early ’70s were, like the civil rights organizing of the period, strongly characterized by solidarity as an organizing principle. Little else protected these poor workers from the employers who hired them, although on occasion legal gains bolstered their rights. Unlike in most trade unions, decision making in these groups remained in the hands of rank-and-file workers—with new workers brought into the struggle—enabling them to create and manage lightweight and flexible organizational structures. This resulted in a dependence on members, as opposed to paid staff, to do the organizing. The flexibility came along with a lack of the stable funding that trade unions typically enjoyed, which could make it difficult to win long battles against wealthy employers. Still, the consciousness raising and on-the-ground organizing had a significant effect: by the end of the ’80s, the level of office worker unionization (16 percent) nearly matched that of the workforce as a whole (17 percent at that time).76
The New Working Class?
Substantial differences clearly existed between the workers discussed here: they were waged and unwaged, blue collar or industrial as well as white collar, of different races, ethnicities, and genders. There were also differences in how their economic organizing initiatives took shape and what they aimed to achieve. Some were short-lived but ideologically influential on the left, such as SDS’s Economic Research and Action Project and the Freedom Unions of SNCC and CORE. Others, such as Grass Roots Organizing Work, helped establish some of the first workplace unions for low-wage and contingent workers in the South. Still others, such as the civil rights jobs mobilizations, the National Welfare Rights Organization, and the clerical workers’ organizations, influenced the formation of national, state, and local policy for years to come. A few, such as 9to5, continued to work for social and economic justice into the next decades.
But there were commonalities as well: each group was organized by poor workers who faced neglect, indifference, and even hostility from established trade unions. Many movement organizations made economic justice a priority and began engaging in their own labor-organizing initiatives. Working outside of trade unions, these groups formed a kind of “second front” within the labor movement, advancing concerns shared by the poor, whether welfare recipients, low-wage workers, contingent workers, or the unemployed. These early poor workers’ groups supported each other’s campaigns, built loose coalitions, and viewed themselves as separate from “mainstream” labor. By the end of the ’70s, scores of small, local independent union organizing projects had sprung up—such as the aptly named Poor People’s Union Local 1 in Atlanta, an organization of food service workers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Movement activists formed independent unions representing workers in health care, manufacturing, and restaurant work, as well as Native American workers on reservations, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer workers, and prison laborers.77
Why did these groups develop outside the mainstream? Most poor workers’ unions shared common disappointments vis-à-vis trade unions: queries on cooperative organizing were ignored, and if independent organizing did succeed, trade unions often responded with territorialism. Others asked for financial or organizing help and were turned away. Ultimately, trade unionism’s record of racism, sexism, or simple disinterest in nontraditional workplaces spoke for itself. Race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality often resonated more deeply as organizing motifs for poor workers than did the abstract class solidarity proffered by trade unions, especially when that solidarity was often more rhetoric than reality.
Perhaps more important, the organizing tactics of these independent initiatives differed dramatically from the ossified practices of most trade unions. They were light-years from the bureaucratic trade unionism of the day. AFL-CIO unions did little organizing in the ’60s, and what organizing they did was centered in neat jurisdictions already close to their base and accomplished by routine methods like card counts, representation elections, and unfair labor practice charges. Trade union organizers, usually paid staff with no direct connection to the workers they were organizing, would collect signed “authorization cards” from workers supporting the union, and when at least 30 percent of the workforce had signed, they would turn them in to the National Labor Relations Board with a request to schedule an election. When employers launched antiunion campaigns or fired workers for supporting the union, often union officials’ only response would be filing legal charges that could take years to decide.
Poor workers’ organizations, by contrast, burst forth in a flurry of rank-and-file energy, using direct action techniques grounded in movement experiences. If card counts and elections were used, they were part of a larger, more militant and more visible campaign involving demonstrations, pickets, worker-to-worker organizing, coalitions with sister movements, and media coverage. They were well aware that labor had once been a movement and could be again. CORE activists in particular admired the CIO, and the first CORE sit-ins were actually called “sit downs” in homage to the CIO’s direct action tactics.78 Encouraging democratic decision making, these groups relied heavily on solidarity and community-wide participation rather than on legal strategies, and sought to organize horizontally rather than vertically.
Though many such efforts were experimental and fleeting, they were part of a historical strand that tied the civil rights and women’s movements to later poor workers’ unions. These organizing initiatives showed the complex interrelationship of the labor movement with other social movements, and simultaneously cast doubt on the usual view that “labor” was a single unified movement. Moreover, they made it clear that organizing the “unorganizable” ranks of poor workers—often scattered among various workplaces and performing different types of work—not only was possible but could be highly successful. Voting rights, political struggles, and cultural changes may have made more headlines during the ’60s and early ’70s, but the fight for economic justice was always present—sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes at the forefront. Bouncing from low-wage jobs to unemployment to welfare and back again, and diverse in terms of age, race, ethnicity, and gender, poor workers shared a desire to organize for justice. And organize they did, not only with independent unions of their own making but also against the trade union status quo.