My tendency as a labor historian has always been to look at life beyond the workplace. Life taught me that working people are multi-dimensional. They care about many things in addition to work and unions, they bring multiple concerns and aspirations.
It’s been a long time since a strike in the US directly targeted sexual harassment. But on Tuesday, women workers took direct action against their bosses and brought the #MeToo movement to McDonald's.
We continue our conversation about California’s incarcerated firefighters with a look at the women fighting the state’s climate change-fueled blazes. We speak with Amika Mota, a former prisoner firefighter.
Women hold the kinds of jobs that are central to the economy and are poised to be the majority of union members by 2025. They are expanding the range of the workers’ movement’s demands and are raising expectations about our nation’s social compact.
This paper focuses on an important subset of workers who provide homecare and early care and education services to the very young, people with disabilities, and those who are frail due to age or illness. We explain the need to raise these workers’ wages and the unique structure of their industries.
A year before #MeToo erupted in the United States, women in Argentina were fighting against an epidemic of violence against women in which, on average, one woman is killed every 30 hours.
On September 3, 1991, the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, North Carolina burst into flames. Twenty-five people died, trapped behind the locked doors of the red-brick factory. Most of the victims were women; many were women of color, most were single moms. Another sixty people were injured, and the blast left more than fifty children orphaned. Local officials called the fire an accident, but the women and men who worked at Imperial had been made vulnerable by the factory’s owners as well as public policy.
A novel set in the context of the historic Gastonia strike of textile workers in 1929 and featuring labor songwriter and indigenous strike leader Ella May Wiggins, the book, based as it is on an actual struggle uniting black and white workers, speaks to contemporary concerns through a vivid portrayal of struggle against historical injustice.
On average, Latina workers are paid only 67 cents on the dollar relative to white non-Hispanic men, even after controlling for education, years of experience, and location.
During the 1970s women and people of color were organizing their workplaces at impressive rates — they just weren’t winning. Lane Windham in her new book recounts that history and its consequences.
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