Portside

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.

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.

Women in migration are not ‘vulnerable,’ in need of ‘rescue’—they are advocates and agents of change. Current migration policies must be changed from being about ‘protecting women’ to ‘protecting women’s rights. The rights of capital to move freely across borders is unchallenged. There must be a commensurate expansion of the rights of migrant workers forced to cross borders.

There is a specific set of behaviors that constitute gender-based violence at work that includes sexual violence, verbal abuse, threats of violence and bullying. A meeting in Brazil sponsored by the International Trade Union Confederation and the Solidarity Center discussed a campaign to shape a worker-driven International Labor Organization standard ending gender-based violence at work, based about successful initiatives by local worker organizations.