Labor Movement

By: Jacqueline Castledine

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Labor Movement

Since their first arrival aboard a Dutch ship at the shores of Jamestown in 1619, African American women have resisted exploitation even as they have struggled to control the terms and conditions of their labor. While indentured servants and slaves, black women engaged in work slowdowns to protest their treatment; once emancipated, freedwomen employed strikes and boycotts to assert their demands. Yet although already doubly exploited by gender and racial discrimination, African American women in the United States have also faced bias from an organized labor movement dominated by white men focused on organizing the industrial sector. Shut out of better-paying industrial jobs until the mid-twentieth century, most black women were forced to work as domestics and agricultural laborers. Thus, until recently, the history of black women and the labor movement has been a story of resistance that was organized and supported as often by short-lived black-led collective actions as it was by integrated national unions.

Early History

While the first black women came to America as indentured servants, by the mid-seventeenth century slavery had replaced indentured servitude in the colonies. In the North, where with few exceptions the small slave population was urban, both slave and free black women worked as domestics, with a limited number of free women working in such trades as spinning and dressmaking. Unlike the industrializing North, however, slave labor was not incidental but rather integral to the South's agricultural economy. Therefore, slave women in the South worked not only in city households and on small farms, but also on plantations with slave populations numbering in the hundreds. Plantation work included such domestic labor as cooking, housekeeping, and childcare. Most often, however, women labored in the fields, working alongside men planting and harvesting tobacco, rice, and cotton.

Labor Picketers, c. 1979–1980. These black workers were striking the Memphis Furniture Company, which tried to break their union. The photograph—by Larry Coyne for Press-Scimitar—appears in Michael Keith Honey's oral history Black Workers Remember, published in 2000.

University of Memphis, Mississippi Valley Collection

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Even while working within an inhumane labor system, slaves attempted to control their labor. One way slave women shaped the terms of their work was through task labor. Unlike the gang system where slaves worked from sunup to sundown, the task system, most often used in the cultivation of rice, assigned work by chore or task. With a daily task completed, slave women worked within their own homes, permitting them a limited measure of autonomy. Both field laborers and house workers sought to control their labor by other means as well. Resisting their bondage through collective actions such as work slowdowns and individual acts such as sabotage of crops and theft of equipment, slaves contested their exploitation, even when such protests yielded limited results.

While the vast majority of antebellum African American women performed agricultural or domestic work, a pattern that would continue long after emancipation, a small number of slaves were rented out by their owners to southern industries. The treatment of slaves in industry, where they were frequently used as strike breakers, mirrored the brutality of plantation farming. Cotton and wool mills, food and tobacco processors, and even canal and railroad builders relied on female slaves who were often underfed, poorly clothed, and forced to work twelve- to sixteen-hour days, sometimes seven days a week. Slaves were viewed as chattel by business owners at the same time that white workers in both the North and the South viewed them as a threat to their wages and job security. This was a sentiment black women would encounter time and again from organized labor as they attempted to establish themselves in American industry following emancipation.

The value of slave women's labor was not limited to their productive capacity in the field, plantation household, and factory. Indeed, enslaved women were, as Adrienne Davis points out, “both a mode of production and a mode of reproduction.” Owners looked to slave women to reproduce the labor force, both increasing their profits and perpetuating the institution of slavery. Sexual availability of slaves was taken for granted by many owners and overseers and sanctioned by laws that gave slaveholders full authority over the bodies of their property. Such beliefs about the availability of black women's bodies followed them into the workplace after their legal emancipation. By the eve of emancipation, assumptions about the role of African American women in the labor market had been firmly established.

Free Labor

Upon emancipation, expectations about the labor of freedwomen became a battleground between southern black families and both northern and southern white society. While the Victorian middle-class ideal placed white women in the private sphere of the home, freedwomen's attempts to engage in full-time domesticity laboring for their own families were met with considerable hostility. Eager to reunite the nation and its markets, northern leaders saw in freed black women a cheap labor source whose work in southern fields supported northern manufacturers such as textile mills. Southern leaders also expected freedwomen to labor outside their homes to help to rebuild the southern agricultural economy. Just as important, many southerners looked to African American women's labor to maintain a social barrier between black and white women. With freedmen earning far less than white laborers, often for the same work, African American women were forced into the wage labor market to support their families. Therefore, following emancipation black married women established a precedent of working outside their homes in larger percentages than their white working-class counterparts, a pattern that continued until the 1990s.

Choices for employment for African American women remained largely limited to physically demanding agricultural and domestic work. In both of these occupations, workers encountered difficult barriers to organizing. Black women performing domestic work in private homes as cooks, maids, child-nurses, and laundresses remained isolated from one another, making union organizing nearly impossible. Long hours, including twelve- to sixteen-hour days, and close supervision by their employers further discouraged unionizing efforts. Yet poor pay and long hours were not the only workplace issues facing domestics. The threat of physical abuse by employers, including sexual assault, remained a concern of freedwomen and their families. Efforts to escape the close scrutiny of white employers led African American domestics to seek work in hotels and as laundresses working from their own homes.

“Taking in” laundry allowed black women to work within the autonomy of their homes while building and maintaining community networks. It also allowed for association with other workers in the community, the first step in organizing collective actions. As Tera Hunter writes, between 1866 and 1881 southern washerwomen organized mass labor protests in an attempt to set the terms of their labor. Workers in Jackson, Galveston, and Atlanta struck for the right to determine their wage rates. Parading through the cities, the striking women not only withheld their labor but also attempted to prevent nonstriking white laundresses from undermining their efforts by crossing picket lines. The most dramatic of these uprisings was the Atlanta strike, where on 19 July 1881, the city's newly formed Washing Society demanded the right to set their prices at a uniform rate. Eventually number-ing several thousand striking women and supporters, the strike encouraged laundresses, cooks, maids, and nurses to join in what threatened to become a general strike. Newspaper coverage of the strike suggests African American workingwomen in the Reconstruction South recognized the importance of organizing, even if their actions were short-lived and local. Machine-run steam laun-dries eventually replaced southern washerwomen, forcing African American women into industrial settings. Yet, these strikes proved the first of many attempts by black workers to organize their ranks and improve their wages and working conditions.

Like domestics, agricultural workers in the Reconstruction-era South struggled to establish control of their labor; and like domestic work, the isolation experienced in tenant farming hindered collective action. Under the sharecropping system, freedmen and women worked on former plantations, farming the land in return for a percentage of its yield. Landowners supplied the tools and seed needed for cultivation, subtracting their costs along with housing expenses at the end of the growing season. Many owners took advantage of the system, keeping farmers in debt by overcharging them for basic needs and claiming nearly all of their production. By keeping land ownership in the hands of whites, and allowing them to set housing rental rates as well as the rates paid for crops, sharecropping significantly limited the opportunity for black families to achieve self-sufficiency.

Yet, as Jacqueline Jones writes, sharecropping also offered black women's opportunities and protections not enjoyed by domestics living in the homes of their employers. By living on the land they worked, mothers of sharecropping families were better able to balance the demands of field and housework. Sharecropping also kept African American women out of the homes of whites, eliminating black families' fears about physical and sexual exploitation. Finally, the ability of black families to labor away from the close scrutiny of white supervision helped to blunt the effects of the often harsh and unfair labor practices of white landowners. Only with the passage of New Deal labor legislation did southern tenant farmers find the government and community support necessary to establish unions to fight the exploitative practices of white southern landowners.

By the late nineteenth century, black workers were still largely excluded from the labor movement in spite of notable attempts at both integrating white industrial unions and at forming their own unions. Organizations such as the Colored National Labor Union, founded in 1869 by workers not included in the all-white National Labor Union, proved no match for the forces arrayed against them. Although the small northern black population faced discrimination in the labor market, it could not compare with the violent southern hostility to the labor movement. Attempts by both northern and southern Blacks to integrate such organizations as the Knights of Labor also failed when, despite its rhetorical commitment to integration, the Knights continued to segregate many of its local chapters. The decline of the Knights in the late 1890s and the rise of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which had little interest in either black or female workers, presaged continued struggles for African American women laborers as they entered the twentieth century.

The Great Migration and World War I

Black women's desire to escape the social and economic oppression of the Jim Crow South led them to migrate first to southern cities, and then to join their fathers, brothers, and husbands in the Great Migration northward. Between 1916 and 1930, over one million African Americans moved North, with between fifty and seventy-five thousand settling in Chicago alone. Washington, DC, proved another popular destination for migrants, especially young women seeking jobs as domestics, as did Philadelphia and New York City. With the entry of the United States into the First World War, the lives of many black women working in both the North and South changed dramatically.

During the war black men and women found employment for the first time in industry in significant numbers, filling vacancies left by young men serving in the military. It was even more common, however, for black women to fill the jobs of white immigrant domestics moving into industrial jobs in northern cities. Still, one manufacturing industry that opened to black workers in both the North and South during the war was the textile industry. War-induced labor shortages not only forced southern mills to employ more African American women, but also forced northern mills to recruit them as well. Although black women already worked in the southern textile industry, they had most often been consigned to low-paid janitor-ial work; labor demands of the war allowed them access to more lucrative jobs running machines. In other industries, such as munitions, meatpacking, metalworking, and food processing, newfound access to skilled and semiskilled jobs did not change black women's relegation to the most physically demanding and low paying jobs available. As in prewar days, even those performing the same work as white women took home significantly lower wages. Efforts to integrate unions during the war made little headway. Even the AFL-affiliated Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) largely failed at their attempts to fill positions opened by the promotion of white women with black workers.

Demobilization at the end of World War I reversed many of the temporary gains made by both black and white women during the war. Returning servicemen reclaimed the industrial jobs held by both black and white women. In 1920, 80 percent of employed black women still worked as agricultural or domestic workers. Whites' resistance to working beside blacks continued the prewar segregation of the work force. Following a now-familiar pattern, racism impeded attempts at building worker solidarity.

Nonetheless, the labor shortage produced by World War I also provided opportunities for black women outside of industry to organize themselves. Under the guidance of middle-class activists including Mary Church Terell, in 1917 the Women Wage-Earners' Association headquartered in Washington, DC, led the domestics, waitresses, nurses, and tobacco stemmers of Norfolk, Virginia, in a strike for increased wages and improved working conditions. Like the washerwomen strike in Atlanta over thirty-five years earlier, working black women stood poised to disrupt white society by withholding their labor. White unions refused to support the strike, however, and many in the community attacked its timing as unpatriotic. Accusations of interference with the war effort led to the strike's failure and ultimately to the demise of the Norfolk union. While black women had failed to win their immediate demands, they had proven their resolve to fight for economic justice.

Throughout the 1920s, black working women continued to organize. Though most domestics still worked not in hotels and restaurants but in private homes, domestic workers affiliated with the AFL's Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union and established ten locals in the South. The International Ladies Garment Workers' Union's ill-fated attempt to organize blacks in the late 1920s alongside the discriminatory practices of most AFL unions, however, left African American women more comfortable with black-led organizations.

The founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) by A. Phillip Randolph in 1925 proved a far more successful vehicle for organizing black women. Believing the backing of porters' wives would influence the success of his organization, Randolph relied on women to help build the union into the most influential black labor organization of its time. In spite of the reality that most African American married women had to work to support their families, BSCP leaders held the middle-class view that women hired by the railroads were temporary workers, only employed until they married. Thus, the BSCP leadership looked to the wives of workers rather than women laborers to organize. Women's auxiliaries were integral to the success of the union, as women lectured on the importance of union membership and collected union dues. They worked not only for economic equality but social and political equality as well, uniting the goals of the nascent civil rights and labor movements. In the process, they helped to establish a black middle class at a time when occupations considered middle-class gateways, such as clerical and sales jobs, as well as nursing, remained all but closed to black women. The economic crisis of the next decade, however, would limit the opportunities of black families struggling to work their way out of poverty.

The Great Depression

The competition for jobs created by the Great Depression meant the further marginalization of black women workers, as employment that white men and women hesitated to take in better economic times became far more desirable to whites. Moreover, New Deal legislation intended to ameliorate the effects of the economic crisis, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act, did not extend coverage to those occupations dominated by black workers, such as agricultural and service work. Even those working in occupations covered by New Deal legislation suffered from discriminatory implementation of the laws. Despite their exclusion from most labor, entitlement, and welfare programs, black working women found inspiration in a revitalized labor movement attributable to the Roosevelt administration's support for the right of workers to organize.

The impracticality of government regulation of work performed in private homes hindered attempts at setting labor standards for domestic workers. Still, black women lobbied to include their work in the Fair Standards Act that set maximum work hours and minimum wage requirements. With between 30 and 40 percent of African American adults unemployed in some areas of the country, intense competition for jobs meant that attempts by the white-led National Committee on Household Employment and the black-led Domestic Worker's Union of New York City enjoyed limited success. The popularity of New York City's “slave markets” possibly best reveals the desperation of domestic workers in the depths of the Depression. In street-corner markets, domestics stood on sidewalks waiting for middle-class housewives to drive by and negotiate wages for a day's work. Such conditions left black women vulnerable to exploitation by white employers who could easily replace workers with daily trips to the market.

With the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935, black women employed in industry enjoyed far more success at organizing. Unlike the AFL, which organized by trades, the CIO organized workers, both skilled and unskilled, by industry. Recognizing that business had often used black women as strikebreakers, the CIO set out to forge worker solidarity by integrating such unions as the newly affiliated International Garment Workers Union (IGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), the latter of which helped to establish the United Laundry Workers (ULW). With a significant number of its leaders influenced by the racially egalitarian ideology of the American Communist Party, the CIO not only encouraged integrated unions but also brought black women like Mary Sweet of the ILGWU and Evelyn Macon of the ULW into leadership positions.

In the mid-1930s, the CIO took its organizing strength South to agricultural producers such as the tobacco industry, a leading employer of black women. Since the late nineteenth century, the weak AFL-affiliated Tobacco Workers International Union (TWIU) had organized the industry, but virtually ignored the needs of its black members. By the late 1930s, such CIO unions as the Food, Tobacco, and Allied Workers of America (FTA) competed with the TWIU to represent black women, who since slavery had labored in gender and race segregated factories performing the dirty and physically demanding work of stripping tobacco leaves of their stems. Like other CIO unions, the FTA offered organizers such as Moranda Smith the opportunity to lead unionization efforts.

Attempts to organize African American workers in integrated unions during the Depression were perhaps nowhere more dramatic than among sharecroppers in the South, where the Socialist and Communist parties dominated organizing. In the Socialist-led Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU), founded in Arkansas in the mid-1930s, black women like Carrie Dilworth led strikes protesting sharecropper evictions, common during the Depression, and demanded federal legislation to aid tenant farmers. The STFU is probably best remembered for leading nearly two thousand black and white members in a 1939 sit-down strike on Missouri public highways to protest farmer evictions. During World War II the union sent southern black women to northern farms to fill food-processing jobs, and following the war affiliated with the AFL, changing its name to the National Farmer Labor Union.

Depression-era Alabamans fought tenant evictions through the racially integrated, Communist-led Share croppers' Union (SCU), organized largely through the efforts of black women. Robin D. G. Kelley writes that SCU women's auxiliaries, known as “sewing clubs,” were the foundation for the union as women fought to provide for their families in the midst of severe economic circumstances. Yet while the STFU and SCU shared similar goals, long-standing political differences between socialists and communists prevented the unions from uniting in their struggles.

World War II

With the United States's entry into World War II, the job shortages of the Depression abated, and black women were once again called on to fill vacancies created by men entering the military. As white middle- and working-class women moved into defense work, the number of black private household workers rose 13 percent. This meant that in cities like Baltimore, where large numbers of white women worked in the defense industry, the wages and working conditions of black domestics improved as the demand for their work grew. In Baltimore, the CIO-affiliated United Domestic Workers' Local Industrial Union 1283 helped to establish a nine-hour day along with a uniform wage rate for its workers. By the end of the war the union had added paid sick leave and vacation pay to its members' benefits. Demobilization following the war, however, lessened the labor shortage and with it the power of unions like the United Domestic Workers to negotiate favorable contracts.

As in the First World War, during World War II southern black men and women migrated to northern cities like Detroit in hopes of gaining entry to jobs in industries previously closed to them. Yet surveys show that while black males found employment in industrial job classifications during the war, many industries hired black women to fill low-paying janitorial positions. Karen Anderson writes that even a year after the United States entered the war, only 1,000 of the 96,000 war industry jobs in Detroit held by women were held by nonwhites. While service-type jobs in industry paid far better than domestic work, they did not represent significant occupational advancement for African American women.

Management pointed to “hate strikes” conducted during the war by white workers as one reason for denying blacks well-paying jobs. When attempts to integrate the shop floor resulted in white worker walkouts in factories like Detroit's U.S. Rubber plant, managers cited the demands of wartime production as reason to avoid the disruptions precipitated by hiring black workers. Even appeals to the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), established by President Roosevelt in 1941 to combat discrimination in defense and government employment, proved ineffective in bringing about significant changes in hiring practices in many of these industries. As black women were treated like men, given the hard and dirty work rather than the production jobs reserved for white women, they united to challenge the discriminatory practices of defense industries. Besides filing complaints with the FEPC, black steelworkers sought support from the United Steel Workers union. When these efforts failed, they engaged in wildcat strikes. Only after considerable pressure from the FEPC did companies like American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) hire African American women, and even then their employment was concentrated in service work such as elevator operators and cafeteria employees. Although AT&T did employ black women as clerks, only 2 percent of all its clerical workers at the time were black.

Nursing represents one of the few bright spots for long-term gains by black women in the 1940s, with many of the gains attributable to their labor organizing. Since 1908, the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) had fought for parity between black and white nurses. Theirs was a hard-fought battle, however, as black nurses were excluded from employment in white hospitals and from military service during World War I. Yet with the support of white progressives like Eleanor Roosevelt, black nurses gained the right to serve during World War II, and the government's Cadet Nurse Corps trained more than five hundred African American women during the war. These gains led to the NACGN's dissolution and the integration of the white-led American Nursing Association in 1950.

Ultimately, the Second World War ended with mixed results for black women active in the labor movement. While job shortages gave them increased bargaining power in domestic work and limited access to better-paying industrial jobs, these gains for the most part proved temporary. Even CIO-affiliated unions like the United Auto Workers that sought to build integrated memberships had difficulty matching their rhetoric to their deeds, as white members engaged in hate strikes in an effort to maintain the racial status quo. Soon after the war, black women were, in the words of Jacqueline Jones, “demobilized and redomesticated” as they returned to service jobs of the prewar years.

“You Have to Fight for Freedom”

Changes in the American economy following the war left fewer African American women employed as agricultural workers. Mechanization of cotton growing in the South resulted in less than 10 percent of employed black women working in the fields. At the same time factory automation reduced the number of manufacturing jobs available. The introduction of machinery to remove tobacco stems in the late 1940s, for example, led to the unemployment of one thousand black women workers in the American Tobacco Company alone. Thus, low-paying domestic work again provided employment for black women pushed out of defense factories, cotton fields and tobacco processing plants. In an effort to ensure that postwar wages would not slide back to Depression-era levels, domestics continued to organize. Nationally, the Women's Bureau's Household Employment Committees, which had integrated leadership, attempted to mediate uniform standards for domestics. Locally, community organizations in cities like Atlanta established services to oversee the placement and fair treatment of domestics.

The CIO's “Operation Dixie” provided the single largest effort to organize black workers in the postwar era. While both the AFL and the CIO conducted campaigns to bolster membership in the South following the war, it was the latter that attempted to unite industrial unionism with a civil rights agenda. Launched in 1946, Operation Dixie represented the CIO's acknowledgment that it could not compete with the larger AFL without the support of black workers. Despite its early promise, the campaign fell victim to cold war tensions. Passage of the anti-Communist, anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 served to create a split between the left-wing faction of the union that was against compliance with the act and the right-wing faction willing to accede. Also undermining solidarity in Operation Dixie was its leadership's reluctance to fully incorporate black and women members by actively recruiting them for leadership positions. The conservative tenor of the cold war, combined with a historic inability of labor to overcome race and gender issues, hampered the CIO's efforts to challenge the status quo through a combined civil rights and labor movement. Seeing the writing on the wall, in 1951 black leaders founded the short-lived National Negro Labor Council, giving women a valuable role in its leadership. The domestic and service workers' boycott of Montgomery buses in 1955 illustrates that, despite setbacks in the union movement, black women continued their fight for social and economic equality, playing an instrumental role in organizing the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Dennis Deslippe writes that “the fifteen years preceding the arrival of federal equal employment opportunity measures in the mid-1960s marked a slow but definitive advance for African-American workers.” Often, however, these advances were attributable to the civil rights movement as much as to the labor movement. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in hiring based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to address worker grievances, cementing the relationship between civil and labor rights. Black women, however, often turned to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and not to labor organizations to guide them in their dealings with the EEOC. Nonetheless, commitment to both movements is evident in the work of women like Maida Springer-Kemp, who, in the decade following the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955, worked to organize laborers in the American South and in Africa as part of the union's international efforts.

While the period between 1930 and 1960 saw a significant growth in domestic work for African American women, following the passage of Title VII, there was a dramatic drop in their employment in private household work, as blacks made sizable inroads into clerical and sales jobs. In the 1970s, black women increasingly entered the clerical field as employees of the U.S. government, where they joined the powerful American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Not surprisingly, these advances were fueled by increases in the level of education among black workers. And although they were still overrepresented in low-paying jobs, by the 1970s the median income of African American women was nearly equivalent to that of white women.

The 1974 founding of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) represented a significant attempt by working-class women to bridge long-established racial divides. CLUW's agenda includes the promotion of affirmative action policies, increased membership and participation of women in labor unions, and the passage of family-centered legislation such as family leave bills. Estelle Freedman writes that “by the 1980s about half of the members in CLUW's seventy-five chapters were women of color,” revealing the organization's commitment to integrated unionism.

Although not a steady road to improvement, throughout the twentieth century African American women gained hard-earned economic advancement through the labor movement, as they organized locally and nationally, in integrated and in all-black associations, with black men and on their own. Despite innumerable setbacks they have not turned away from labor organizing as part of a comprehensive program for securing their democratic rights. As the U.S. economy's base shifted from manufacturing to the service industry in the latter part of the twentieth century, black women were still underrepresented in the well-paying unionized skilled trades and overrepresented in traditionally nonunion service jobs. Yet they entered the twenty-first century with an impressive history of organized resistance to labor exploitation that had taught them, in the words of UAW official Sylvia Woods, how to “fight for freedom.”

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