Coalition of Labor Union Women

United States 1974

Synopsis

The founding convention of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) in Chicago in 1974 brought together activists in industrial, service, government, and skilled trade unions to advocate on behalf of gender equality. CLUW's origins lie in the campaign for the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the growing demands by rank-and-file women for equality with men in such matters as seniority and job assignments.

The Chicago delegates asserted their identity as feminists and unionists. They called on government, employers, and unions to fight sex discrimination in employment and develop effective comparable worth and pregnancy leave policies. Their alliance with feminists in such groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) was weak in the mid-1970s, although the disparate groups united to support the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). CLUW members defended union grievance and seniority systems in the face of NOW's position that affirmative action should override union practices.

Timeline

• 1955: African and Asian nations meet at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, inaugurating the "non-aligned" movement of Third World countries.
• 1965: Power failure paralyzes New York City and much of the northeastern United States on 9 November.
• 1969: Assisted by pilot Michael Collins, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin become the first men to walk on the Moon (20 July).
• 1972: On 5 September, Palestinian terrorists kill eleven Israeli athletes and one West German policeman at the Olympic Village in Munich.
• 1975: Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge launch a campaign of genocide in Cambodia unparalleled in human history. By the time it ends, with the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, they will have slaughtered some 40 percent of the country's population. Cambodia is not the only country to fall to communist forces this year: the pro-Western governments of South Vietnam and Laos also succumb, while Angola and Mozambique, recently liberated from centuries of Portuguese colonialism, align themselves with the Soviet Bloc.
• 1975: U.S. Apollo and Soviet Soyuz spacecraft link up in space.
• 1975: Two assassination attempts on President Ford occur in September.
• 1978: Terrorists kidnap and kill former Italian premier Aldo Moro. In Germany, after a failed hijacking on behalf of the Red Army Faction (RAF, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang), imprisoned RAF members commit suicide.
• 1980: In protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter keeps U.S. athletes out of the Moscow Olympics.
• 1985: In a year of notable hijackings by Muslim and Arab terrorists, Shi'ites take a TWA airliner in June, Palestinians hijack the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in October, and fundamentalists take control of an Egyptian plane in Athens in November.
• 1995: Bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, kills 168 people. Authorities arrest Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.

Event and Its Context

Toward Chicago: Union Women Organize for Change

The founding convention of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) in Chicago in 1974 marked the establishment of the first bona fide national feminist organization of union women in the United States. The origins of CLUW date back to the early twentieth century, when women workers and reformers came together in such organizations as the Women's Trade Union League to work for passage of protective laws for working women. Beginning in the 1940s the focus of women's issues shifted away from agitating for measures to limit women's working hours and providing them with special employment conditions to attaining equality in the workplace. Union women's embrace of gender equality was a slow, uneven, and often painful process. As a greater number of women moved into the paid workforce, their expectations changed: they sought higher pay, equity with men, and a greater role in their unions. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was a tangible sign of this changed consciousness; Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964's ban on sex discrimination provided women workers with the legal tool to protest their unequal treatment by employers and their own unions. Some women unionists, such as Myra Wolfgang of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees, never accepted the goal of gender equality but sought to improve women's status in employment and unions.

As a result of their continuing dissatisfaction with union practices, working-class women organized into feminist groups. By the early 1970s women were already meeting to form interunion coalitions. Workers from meatpacking, mining, and Teamster locals in northern Virginia, for example, created Labor for Equal Rights Now, a group founded by Lizzie Corbin, an African American woman. In 1970 a National Rank and File Action Conference attended by 600 unionists drew up a "Declaration of the Rights of Women" and "Proposals for Action." Having pushed their unions to support equality, rank-and-file women joined with older women union leaders who backed gender equality in transforming their unions.

Cross-racial support for gender equality strengthened the emerging feminist movement. Dorothy Haener of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) credited Dollie Lower Robinson, an African American, lawyer, and U.S. Women's Bureau member, with giving her the idea of forming an organization of union feminists along the lines of a civil rights group. African Americans such as Addie Wyatt of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union contributed valuable political sophistication gained from their civil rights, community, and church-based activism to working-class feminist organizations.

The immediate steps leading up to the founding CLUW convention was a series of regional workshops across the country in 1973. Union activists organized these workshops in preparation for the Chicago meeting. The 1974 convention was a well-planned event. Organizers, however, did not anticipate the large number of delegates: they expected 500, and more than 1,200 unionists crowded into the hotel ballroom on 12 March 1974 to debate and approve CLUW's policies.

The election of CLUW officers in Chicago set the pattern for the organization's first decade of leadership. Veteran industrial unionists such as Olga Madar of the UAW, CLUW's first president, filled the top spots. Although industrial unions were slowly declining in both their representation of the total work force and their political power, seasoned activists such as Gloria Johnson (International Union of Electrical Workers), Joyce Miller (Amalgamated Clothing Workers), and Caroline Davis (UAW) continued to carry the social unionist banner into battle for gender equality. Younger women workers, energized by second-wave feminism, filled CLUW's ranks. Many of these women were responsible for convincing their labor organizations to back such feminist measures as the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Having pushed the older leadership cohort to change their thinking on gender relations, they now joined with them in Chicago to form CLUW.

CLUW as Labor's "Loyal Opposition"

CLUW members criticized organized labor's policies but also rejected solutions that bypassed unions. They displayed admirable agility in maintaining a critical stance toward a union movement to which they were committed by both reminding women unionists of the value of the collective bargaining agreement, union grievance procedures, and union elections, and educating women members on the federal equal employment opportunity (EEO) laws.

CLUW feminists placed most of the blame for inequality with employers who, they charged, gained the most by dividing workers along lines of race, gender, and age. Although they informed women in general terms about Title VII, CLUW leaders did not promote the filing of charges against unions. Male union leaders had little to worry about from activists regarding disruptive and sudden challenges to union practices. Coalition leaders decried sex discrimination in the building trades, but few members belonged to such unions. They backed efforts by industrial unions such as the International Union of Electrical Workers, Communications Workers, and Automobile Workers to institute Title VII compliance programs and endorsed the filing of supporting briefs by these labor organizations on behalf of their women members. They did not, however, demand the establishment of a counterpart to the AFL-CIO's Department of Civil Rights in providing legal redress to women complainants.

As had women union activists in the 1950s, CLUW members for the most part acted as loyal opposition to organized labor. They challenged labor leaders, but they were not threatening. Most of their platform was predictable. They called on Congress to back school desegregation, childcare funding, national health insurance, and the ERA. On employment issues, they advocated guaranteed collective bargaining rights, improved health-and-safety coverage, an increased minimum wage, and extension of protective labor legislation to all workers. AFL-CIO convention participants in 1975 echoed many of these same demands. Although only 2.6 percent of the convention's delegates were women (women made up around 15 percent of the federation's membership), delegates applied strong pressure for feminist issues. This pressure resulted in the adoption of a six-point program for women that bore a striking resemblance to the coalition's demands. In addition, CLUW members galvanized the federation's executive board to use its clout in backing the ERA. Joyce Miller, CLUW president following Madar's retirement, for example, pressured AFL-CIO president George Meany to change the location of the AFLCIO's 1977 convention from Florida, where legislators had not ratified the amendment, to Washington, D.C.

CLUW and the National Organization for Women

Since the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, men and women union leaders had criticized NOW's efforts on behalf of women workers. They charged that NOW did not expend enough resources on economic issues that concerned lower-paid working women. When they did—for example, by advocating strong EEO enforcement—they ignored the valuable role played by labor in educating its members on equality and offering the grievance procedure as a tool to fighting discrimination. The debate over seniority and affirmative action points to the fault lines among CLUW and NOW leaders in the mid-1970s. With the massive layoffs during the economic recession, the EEO Commission, NOW, and other liberal and civil rights organizations proposed that the traditional collective bargaining guarantee of "last-hired, first-fired" be suspended so as to preserve the recent hiring gains of women and minorities. This plan met with scorn from male and female unionists both in leadership and in most rank-and-file positions as undercutting labor's already diminished strength.

NOW and CLUW averted a damaging break over the issue of the Supreme Court's Franks v. Bowman Transportation ruling in 1976. The ruling left the traditional seniority system intact but ordered that measures be taken to provide a "rightfulplace" remedy (i.e., retroactive seniority to the date of discrimination) for victims of unequal treatment. CLUW and NOW worked together on the ERA and comparable-worth campaigns. For their part, CLUW delegates supported abortion rights at their 1977 convention. With a growing number of women in the workforce, NOW leaders devoted increasing attention to work-place issues such as minimum wage legislation and National Labor Relations Act reform, two items of key importance to organized labor.

CLUW's basic program and relationship to the labor movement changed little in the 1970s and 1980s. Its membership increased steadily, from around 6,000 in the late 1970s to 18,000 members in the mid-1980s. CLUW members tended to be activists, staff members, and office holders within their own international unions. By the late 1970s they could look back with pride over the transformation of the labor movement from that of support for protective laws to a full backing for gender equality. Women comprised an ever-growing share of both the total workforce and its organized sectors, especially in the areas of educational services, medical services, and public administration. In 1956 women had comprised 18.6 percent of all union members; by 1978 they claimed 24.2 percent of total membership. That figure climbed to 37 percent by 1990. Title VII-inspired bans on discrimination increasingly appeared inthis period. In 1965 only 28 percent of a representative sample of 400 collective bargaining agreements contained antidiscrimination clauses. In 1970 the figure had jumped to 46 percent; by 1975 it had risen to 74 percent. Although female activists were long accustomed to being marginalized in the feminist and union movements, CLUW's founding marked another step in the transformation of labor's support for protective laws for women to pursuit of gender equality. CLUW further promoted the need of the feminist movement to recognize the central role of workplace concerns and the role of unions in the wider struggle for equality.

Key Players

Johnson, Gloria (1927-): After graduating from Howard University, Johnson found employment in the U.S. Department of Labor and then worked as a staff member of the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE). She worked for equal pay and pushed the IUE to address "women's issues." Johnson held many leadership positions in CLUW, including serving as president in the 1990s.

Madar, Olga (1926-1996): Madar was the first woman member of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) executive board and the first president of CLUW. She maintained close ties between CLUW and the AFL-CIO.

Wolfgang, Myra (1914-1976): Wolfgang was an international vice president in the Hotel and Restaurant Workers (HERE) union, a founding member of CLUW, and an opponent of the ERA. Although other union activists came to embrace gender equality and mend relations with middle-class feminists, Wolfgang was wary of such goals and alliances, arguing that women workers should defend protective measures.

See also: Equal Pay Act; Equal Rights Amendment and Protective Legislation; National Organization for Women.

Bibliography

Books

Deslippe, Dennis A. "Rights, Not Roses": Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-1980. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Gabin, Nancy F. Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935-1975. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Milkman, Ruth. "Women Workers, Feminism, and the Labor Movement Since the 1960s." In Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History, edited by Ruth Milkman. New York: Routledge & Kegan-Paul, 1985.

O'Farrell, Brigid, and Joyce L. Kornbluh. Rocking the Boat: Union Women's Voices, 1915-1975. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Additional Resources

Other

"Step by Step: Building a Feminist Movement, 1941-1977."Joyce Follet, producer; Mimi Omer, coproducer. Close-captioned video. Worthington, MA: Step by Step, 1998.

—Dennis A. Deslippe