As stated in last month’s article about Black labor leaders, the history of labor unions is tied closely to civil rights. Many of you already know from history class that women were a massive driving force for American civil rights and desegregation, so it shouldn’t be a shock to you to hear that women were also a driving force in the expansion of labor rights and unionization in America.
Early in labor history, women had to fight for equal pay and treatment in the workplace (something that is still happening today). Women were also foundational in the fight for establishing child labor laws and creating a livable wage. Much like the previous article, there are so many amazing figures to learn about, below is an account of a few, along with resources for further reading.
Velma Hopkins
The state of agriculture in 1909—the year Velma was born—was eerily too similar to the state of agriculture before the civil war. Workers were underpaid and unable to escape poverty. The hours spent harvesting were hours that could not be spent learning a trade. The work was backbreaking, dangerous, and altogether soul crushing. These factors were much worse on tobacco plantations, like the ones that peppered North Carolina’s swampland. And at 10, Velma Hopkins moved into the heart of these plantations, a town called Winston-Salem.
Processing tobacco is meticulous and often requires hours of labor. The crop is fickle and prone to disease and is worth less when overripe, meaning farmhands had to take multiple trips through the 8foot high crop searching for leaves or rot.
When the plant is ready, it is cut free and brought to a storage site, where stem cleaners would remove leaves from the plant and then store them to be dried or cured. These storage sites were often intensely hot and reeked of fermenting plants. The air quality was often terrible, due to the tobacco dust being trapped in the humid southern air.
We don’t know much about Hopkins’ early life, other than the fact that she worked as a stem cleaner and that she started at an incredibly young age. Her coworkers were underpaid, and she was paid even less. This paired with dangerous and often volatile working conditions left Hopkins disenfranchised. She worked in terrible conditions for 20 years, no doubt constantly reading about the massive unionization efforts happening all around her.
Then, in 1943, one of her coworkers died while on the job. Heat stroke. An entirely preventable condition in the 40s.
Hopkins then pushed her fellow workers to band together, to unionize. Hopkins and other workers led a strike, mobilizing 10,000 workers to march across the streets of Winston-Salem all to bring unions to the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co.
The union was created a few days later. It was designated Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO and they demanded fair wages, job security, and a safer workspace. And they got it. Hopkins efforts went on to inspire unionization across North Carolina and she is credited with finally giving North Carolinian African-Americans access to the middle class.
Dolores Huerta
Co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America Union and the person who popularized the phrase: “sí se puede,” Dolores Huerta is one of the most important people in the battle for positive change.
Like many women of historical importance, much of Huerta’s success is attributed erroneously to a man. In her case, that’s César Chávez, who is obviously extremely important in the advancement of both California and nationwide worker’s rights. The two worked closely together in order to create the largest famers union in the US. But that’s just the tip of Huerta’s iceberg. She was instrumental in organizing the AFDC (Aid for Dependent Families), popularizing and encouraging the creation of disability insurance in high-risk jobs, as well as the creation of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which paved the way for similar bills to be created in states across the west!
Huerta was inspired into activism in 1955. She was a teacher who was tired of seeing so many hungry children come to school, all of them the children of farmers. In order to fight against it, she founded a local community service organization that focused on voter registration, economic improvements for Latinx Americans, and the unionization of farm workers.
This eventually led to her meeting Chávez, from there they created the National Farm Workers Association which later developed into the United Farm Workers’ Union, which continues to fight for the rights of agricultural workers.
This partnership led Huerta to become a spokesperson and negotiator for unions across America. She was devoted to advocacy and fairness, all through peaceful and sustainable methods.
In the 1970s she became one of the most successful lobbyists of all time, and pushed for female and Latinx representation in politics and union leadership, especially in California.
Even at 89 she continues to work today by advocating for the working poor, women, and Latinx communities. Along with other modern feminists, she aims to help end gender-based discrimination in all fields and to create a world in which representatives actually represent the people they serve.
She currently is working on educating Californians on the laws and agencies that aim to protect the disenfranchised. She is a living representation of the power of grassroots politics—as she travels from county to county to teach communities how to take power and use that power responsibly for sustainable growth and positive change.
Ai-Jen Poo
Winner of the MacArthur genius grant and co-founder of Domestic Workers United and Caring Across Generations—Ai-Jen Poo proves that there is still so much work can be done.
Ai-Jen Poo got her start in 1996 after graduating from Columbia University. She began working with the Women Workers Project at the Committee against Anti-Asian Violence.
Her most recent work, however, is in the field of expanding rights to domestic workers. “Domestic workers” refers to housekeepers, nannies, caregivers for the elderly or disabled. The US estimates that there are over two-million domestic workers in America, and that a large majority of them are women of color or immigrants.
In the 2000s Poo was instrumental in a grassroots campaign that led to organizing these workers across Manhattan. This NY based group became the foundation for the National Domestic Workers Alliance. The organization shined a light on how most domestic workers made under-minimum wage, and were often abused and at high risk for human-trafficking, an issue unfortunately that still runs rampant globally.
Poo is fighting that. She is advocating for and helping design legislation that provides legal protections for domestic workers. This has bled into the realm of independent contractors in general and is airing a problem that has been on the rise along with the advent of the gig economy.
And if that wasn’t enough, Poo also launched and runs Caring Across Generations, a campaign meant to fix America’s care infrastructure. Poo is looking to support both long-term caregivers and receivers. She aims to restore dignity to the elderly and also prepare America for the “elder bloom,” which she explains in her book “The Age of Dignity.”
These two massive undertakings all come back to the idea that there is a gap in America’s care economy. The people who take care of us are being undervalued, and Poo aims to fix that. Her work at unionizing and creating the National Domestic Workers Alliance is one of the most recent examples of labor reform happening in our country, and as inspiring as all the change she accomplished is--it just goes to show that there is more work to be done.