If you haven’t checked the calendar, we are less than a week away from Labor Day. While the holiday unofficially marks the end of summer and the socially acceptable window of the year to wear white, it officially celebrates the labor movement in America and the many victories for better pay and protections that workers have secured over the years.
At Patriotic Millionaires, we like to use holidays to highlight areas of the economic justice space that often get overlooked. If you remember, ahead of the Fourth of July and America 250 this year, we used our Closer Look to share some of the often forgotten—and, not to mention, hypocritical— warnings that the Founding Fathers made about extreme wealth concentration. In keeping with tradition, for this year’s Labor Day, we would like to spotlight the critical role that women have played and continue to play in America’s labor movement. We don’t often discuss the large intersection that exists between gender and economic inequality, but now is as good a time as any given the exciting resurgence in labor organizing that we’re seeing across the country.
We’ll start by highlighting some notable women that played an integral role in the US labor movement in the 20th century. Then we’ll share some present-day, women-led union developments we have our eye on, along with some broader thoughts on the difference that unions make for women specifically. Let’s get started!
Notable women in the 20th century labor movement
Clara Lemlich: An immigrant from Ukraine, Lemlich joined many other immigrant women in early 20th century New York at textile manufacturing factories. At the time, women worked 11-hour days, six days a week, for $3 a week. The horror of this reality led Lemlich to join the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), where she quickly moved into leadership roles in the fight to improve working conditions for women. It was Lemlich who started the strike in 1909 of textile workers that would eventually be called the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, which won higher wages and improved working conditions for textile workers. Over the course of the months-long strike, Lemlich was subject to violence from law enforcement officials and harassers hired by the factory owners, something that only got better when wealthy women helped create a barrier around the striking workers. Some accounts say Lemlich suffered six broken ribs and was arrested seventeen times during the 1909 strike.
Frances Perkins: The first woman to hold a cabinet position in the US government, Frances Perkins was President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor. An early advocate for workers’ rights and their protections, Perkins was a witness to the devastating Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City in 1911, where 146 people died because their employers had locked them inside a building to dissuade the mostly women workers from taking breaks. The impact of that event was felt far and wide as thousands took to the streets to protest the lack of protections for workers, especially women and children, who were killed in the fire. As a young organizer, Perkins helped advocate for new safety standards in New York, even working with then-governor FDR to improve safety conditions in factories and end child labor practices. After becoming Secretary of Labor, Perkins also helped craft the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which established the nation’s first federal minimum wage, created the 40-hour work week, and established the country’s first national child labor protections. We wrote about FLSA back in February too!
Rose Schneiderman: A contemporary of Clara Lemlich and Frances Perkins, Rose Schneiderman was a garment worker in turn-of-the-century New York City. Her success leading strikes in her early twenties led her to become the first woman given a full-time organizing role with the New York Women’s Trade Union League (NYWTUL). She was the first woman elected to a national union leadership role when she was made president of this union in 1917. Her work brought her to the attention of the Roosevelts; she developed a close friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt and acted as a labor adviser to FDR, even being appointed to the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration in 1933. From 1937-1943, she was the secretary of the New York State Department of Labor. She is perhaps best known for her quote: “The woman worker needs bread, but she needs roses too.”
Vicky Starr: Vicky Starr was a Chicago labor organizer who worked under many assumed names after getting continuously fired and blacklisted from meatpacking factories for helping set up strikes and encouraging unionization. She was featured in “Union Maids,” the Oscar-nominated 1976 documentary about women who helped organize meatpacking workers in Chicago in the 1930s. She worked in Chicago meatpacking for a decade both as a worker and union organizer on the heels of the Great Depression, acting as part of the movement that created the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). This union stood out at the time as a multiracial and multiethnic antithesis to earlier unions whose lack of solidarity amongst its members hurt their impact at the bargaining table. After finally getting forced out of the meatpacking industry, she went to work as a secretary at the University of Chicago where she helped organize other clerical workers, this time as part of the Teamsters Local 743.
Dolores Huerta: Dolores Huerta is a lifelong advocate, educator, activist, and labor organizer, and perhaps one of the best known labor leaders of the 20th century. She was the co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) that would later merge with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) to become the United Farm Workers (UFW). Her work as an organizer began in earnest in her twenties when she joined the Community Service Organization (CSO), a civil rights organization in California that advocated for Latino community members, before helping to establish the NFWA with Cesar Chavez and Gilbert Padilla in 1962. The partnership between NFWA and AWOC around the successful Delano Grape Strike helped solidify the creation of the UFW, and it was Huerta who helped negotiate the union contract that resulted from the successful strike and boycott. Huerta’s activism has continued to the present day, where even in her nineties she continues to advocate for workers’ rights, women’s rights, immigrants rights, and civil rights.
Women in the present-day labor movement
Women have helped lead the labor movement in the United States. It was the result of 20,000 women on strike demanding better wages in the New York garment industry at the turn of the 20th century that helped create the foundation for labor reforms. Women helped craft the labor laws that are the foundation of labor protections and standards in the US today. And brave women helped push for unions and organizing across industries, often at grave personal risk.
Their work and critical role continues today. More recently, women have constituted a large part of the increase in union density across the country, as industries that are predominantly female have contributed to greater union membership. One important example was long-term care workers organizing in California in the 1990s. In 1999, 74,000 homecare workers in Los Angeles County voted to join the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). This card check, or process of signing a form indicating a wish to form a union, was the biggest one since United Auto Workers at a Ford factory in Michigan in 1941. The homecare workers who signed up were predominantly women, many immigrants. Now members of SEIU Local 2015, this is the largest union in California, with more than half a million members.
Today we are in an important moment for women in the organized labor movement, where many of the country’s largest and most impactful unions have women at the helm. Unions including the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the National Education Association (NEA), and the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) are just a few of the many unions currently being led by women.
Women have long held a critical role in the workforce, and seeing women elevated to positions of leadership in the nation’s largest unions is crucial. The union difference, especially for women at work and especially as it relates to gender pay gaps, is clear. Put more simply, unions are good for women. Unions help close the gender pay gap for their members. Unions tend to provide greater access to paid leave, healthcare, retirement benefits, reliable schedules, and job retention.
The union difference is clear, and union popularity is only increasing, and recent gains in union membership are being led specifically by women of color.
Conclusion
Women have a long way to go in many respects in America, but particularly when it comes to pay. Women currently earn 81 cents for every dollar a man makes, and this gap is worse for minority communities like LGBTQIA+ women, Black women, Latina women, disabled women, Native women, and more. It’s also not an accident that women make up a smaller share of our millionaire membership than men.
Breaking this “glass ceiling” once and for all will naturally involve more struggles and fights, particularly those led by unions. But if our past is any guide, we have no doubt that, with the current slate of incredible women leading the charge, their success is inevitable. After all, women are made of stronger stuff than glass.
On this and every Labor Day, the Patriotic Millionaires reaffirm our commitment to support them every step of the way. We can’t “pay the people” without them.
PS: One final thought…
For many in the United States, the first time they became aware of the plight of workers was through literature. Classic books like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath brought many Americans their first glimpse of the perils of meatpacking plants or the exploitation of farmworkers. These great American novels highlighted the importance of the workers’ experience, in many ways capturing what it means to be American. To that end, we also wanted to share a great list of resources for folks interested in learning more about the history of organized labor in the United States:
