labor movement

Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City

admin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:01:00 +0000

The concept for Jane Latour’s book, Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York, was initially a brochure. While serving as the director of the Women’s Project of the Brooklyn-based Association for Union Democracy (AUD), Latour had the opportunity to interview women who were working in non-traditional blue-collar trades. Watching women who were contesting the inequalities in the workplace, organizing, and supporting each other, the author seized the chance to record their voices and experiences. The idea to comprise the oral histories into a book evolved following the favorable response her paper received at a labor history conference held in Detroit. Latour, a labor activist, not only chronicled this facet of the feminist movement in the last quarter of the twentieth century, she worked on the assembly lines in Philadelphia and Newark and later as a sorter on the night shift at United Parcel Service.

The format of this literary work includes quotes from the interviewees and documentation of the labor situation in the United States during the last thirty years. These women were pioneers on the frontier of the skilled, blue-collar employment. Early in the book, Latour refers to Rosie the Riveter and the encouragement women received to enter the workforce during World War II and fill the vacated positions in blue-collar industries. That climate changed after the war ended. Sisters in the Brotherhoods draws attention to the link between the feminist fight for equality in employment and the similar battle which was being fought by minority males and the double burden which minority women faced. As Latour writes, “The further out one was from that norm, the more resistance it generated.”

The women are diverse in their levels of education, racial background, and choices of occupation but they shared the common threats of sexual harassment, unfair hiring practices, and the corruption of the trade unions. Latour’s documentation of the experiences of these forerunners in notational, blue-collar jobs is a testament to their legacy to the young women of the next and future generations.

The feminist movement of the 1970s was the backdrop of my adolescence. Personally, I knew women who occupied traditional female roles and I chose a traditionally female occupation, nursing. So I found this book enlightening and empowering. Battles have been fought but the war has not yet been won.

Written by: Maryann Gromisch, November 30th 2009

Schmatta: From Rags to Riches to Rags

admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:09:00 +0000

Directed by Marc Levin

HBO Documentary Films

It has become cliche to tell the story of an American going from rags to riches based on their own impassioned journey using a unique and personal form of ingenuity and hard work, but we may be on the path toward establishing a new and unfortunate conventional wisdom that says it is just as common to go from rags to riches and then back to rags once again. It is this new economic reality that Schmatta: From Rags to Riches to Rags explores in ways that are both haunting and saddening. This bracing documentary speaks through the experiences of those in the midst of their own struggles. It asks if the American consumer is willing to continue the "race to the bottom" for the sake of bottomed-out bargains or if they are going to make their choices in the marketplace a powerful tool in the struggle for labor rights around the globe.

Marc Levin's masterful chronicling of the decline of the garment industry in New York City has several stories of challenges and progress that come full circle. One example is the documentary's grave portrayal of the consequences of employee exploitation. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1921—in which hundreds of lives were lost after managers locked their employees in a crowded, unsafe high-rise—was repeated at the end of the century in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The sight of another company repeating the same senseless mistake with the same unnecessary and atrocious loss of life leaves the viewer with a conundrum of cynical proportions: with the decline of unions and authoritative regulatory structures to check global corporate power, what is the future of those that toil in a non-service industry? This is one of the most powerful aspects of the documentary because, through these stories, we witness the fact that while time may move inexorably forward in industry where people may, with time and due diligence, find fortune that lifts them out of poverty, the mainstream middle now find that time and due diligence are simply not enough to sustain wealth.

This acute sense of insecurity is not simply a long-building trend particular to the garment industry; it can also be found amongst manufacturing workers in America's Rust Belt, small farmers threatened by agribusiness, and factory workers in the South. They are the face of a middle class that is squeezed tighter and tighter by the year. Levin successfully pulls out of many stories a common thread that touches on how this singular struggling industry is emblematic of many sectors of the American economy.

** This film is currently airing on HBO**

Written by: Brandon Copeland, October 21st 2009

Gold Dust on His Shirt: The True Story of an Immigrant Mining Family

admin — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:32:00 +0000

By Irene Howard

Between The Lines

When you think about migrant memoirs of North America, stories of moving north from Latin America often come to mind more than those detailing moves east and west. Flipping around that common assumption, Gold Dust on His Shirt tells the story of Irene Howard’s Swedish-Norwegian immigrant family’s tumultuous life in Canada at the turn of the twentieth century.

After the death of her first husband in Norway, Howard’s mother Ingeborg immigrated to Canada. She left her young daughter Inga behind with the child’s grandparents, promising to send for Inga as soon as she was settled. Instead, once she arrived in Prince Rupert (in current day British Colombia), she met and married a Swede, Nils Alfred in 1913. Only seven years after Norway had gained its independence from Sweden, the couple felt—and was—thousands of miles from the political controversies of their homeland. Six months later, Ingeborg gave birth to their first son, Swedish-Norwegian-Canadian Arthur Ingemar. Over the years, Ingeborg and Alfred had several more children—Verner Erik, Nels Edwin, Irene—and were uprooted from their home several times. Alfred’s job working on the railroad demanded that the family relocate as work became available. As Alfred became involved with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and began mobilizing other immigrant workers, his job prospects were often limited due to his radical organizing.

Reading about language barriers, death by tuberculosis or mine collapse, police raids, and workers’ struggles against mining companies is a sobering experience. Living a reverse tale of sorts—an American in Denmark, mostly unable to speak Danish—I have a lot of empathy for the characters in this story. I also suspect that my own Norwegian background and my adopted Danish family made this a more interesting tale for me. I didn’t mind reading about characters named Sigurd Ullstreng, Olav Trygvasson, and Elling Erikssen Aarvig. For me, it was a bit comforting and homey—or “hygge,” as we say in Danish.

Howard’s history is fascinating, though her presentation is a bit dry. At times, the book reads like a genealogy scrapbook instead of a memoir, listing people and events in a factual if uninspiring way. For history buffs, this is no doubt enjoyable. I will admit to struggling at times to wade through the details of a time and place with which I have no real familiarity. Yet Howard’s story is valuable and often untold, and her objective storytelling—in which she often removes herself entirely from the narrative, even though she lived through the same events—is a refreshing departure from the self-centered account most memoirs provide. I suspect I will revisit this book for years to come, perhaps as my roots deepen and spread among the Nordic states and North America.

Howard was born in 1922 amidst her father’s career change from mining to fishing. That she has survived the last eighty-seven years—three less than my own still-living Norwegian grandmother—with her story intact, now fully documented and published, is no small feat. In Norwegian, we say, “gratulerer”—congratulations.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, July 11th 2009

Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America

admin — Mon, 11 May 2009 23:52:00 +0000

By Louis Adamic

AK Press

Originally published in 1931, Dynamite hearkens back to an era of American capitalism a little less glossy, a little bloodier, and with striking parallels to today. In this account, Adamic provided one of the first overviews of U.S. labor history to that point, although his narrative is clearly not intended to be comprehensive, but rather focuses on the role of violence in the movements. Jon Bekken’s introduction helpfully contextualizes Adamic as a would-be Socialist, and the writing within a slew of other labor books that would provide more comprehensive analysis. Bekken also makes the important parallels to contemporary capitalism, in light of recent government bailouts for the rich and powerful, a revitalized labor movement may be exactly what we need. Adamic’s book certainly imbued me with a new sense of urgency, history and power.

Written in short chapters that capture different groups, movements, and strikes chronologically, Dynamite is easy to read casually and at your own pace. Adamic makes the overarching point that violence in the labor movement emerged because of violence at work and from the capitalist class. Many famed episodes of violence have in fact been misrepresented, including episodes wherein laborers were framed for what was perpetrated by capitalists.

There are, of course, plenty of examples of laborers using violence as a strategy for their cause. My favorite example were the Molly Maguires, an Irish immigrant group that settled in the Pennsylvania and West Virginia coal mines, led by Molly Maguire herself, but was made up largely of young men, who used assassinations of owners to demand complete control of all work and rent in the area. While unimaginable today, Adamic does a terrific job of painting the conditions of life in industrializing America that makes one understand how so many could be driven to violence to improve their situation.

While Adamic purports to center the immigrant in labor history, his focus on western European immigrants largely ignores race or gender as important lenses of analysis. To be real, this was 1931 so such an analysis from a white guy may be a bit much to ask, and Jon Bekken does address this in the introduction.

All in all Dynamite is entertaining and informative, and probably best for labor and social movement nerds who may have some of the background information already.

Written by: Katrina Forman, May 11th 2009