A Matter of Moral Justice
Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
A long-overlooked group of workers and their battle for rights and dignity Like thousands of African American women, Charlotte Adelmond and Dollie Robinson worked in New York's power laundry industry in the 1930s. Jenny Carson tells the story of how substandard working conditions, racial and gender discrimination, and poor pay drove them to help unionize the city's laundry workers. Laundry work opened a door for African American women to enter industry, and their numbers allowed women like Adelmond and Robinson to join the vanguard of a successful unionization effort. But an affiliation with the powerful Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) transformed the union from a radical, community-based institution into a bureaucratic organization led by men. It also launched a difficult battle to secure economic and social justice for the mostly women and people of color in the plants. As Carson shows, this local struggle highlighted how race and gender shaped worker conditions, labor organizing, and union politics across the country in the twentieth century.
Meticulous and engaging, A Matter of Moral Justice examines the role of African American and radical women activists and their collisions with labor organizing and union politics.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. âWe Win a Place in Industryâ: Black Women and the Birth of the Power Laundry Industry
- Chapter 2. A Miniature Hell: Working in a Power Laundry
- Chapter 3. The 1912 Uprising of New York Cityâs Laundry Workers
- Chapter 4. The Rise and Fall of Local 284: Black Women Laundry Workersâ Activism in the Era of the Great Migration
- Chapter 5. âIt Was Up to All of Us to Fightâ: Communist Laundry Organizing during the Great Depression
- Chapter 6. âAristocrats of the Movementâ: The Uprising of Brooklynâs Laundry Workers
- Chapter 7. âIt Was Like the Salvationâ: New York Cityâs Laundry Workers Join the CIO
- Chapter 8. The âDemocratic Initiativeâ: Fighting for Control of the Laundry Workers Joint Board
- Chapter 9. âPutting Democracy into Actionâ: The Laundry Workersâ Double V Campaign
- Chapter 10. âEverybodyâs Libberâ: The Laundry Workersâ Postwar Civil Rights Unionism
- Chapter 11. âWeâre Just Not Ready Yetâ: The Ousting of Charlotte Adelmond and Dollie Robinson from the Laundry Workers Joint Board
- Epilogue: Building a Democratic Initiative in the Twenty-First Century
- Notes
- Index
- Back Cover