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From grassroots to global activism, the untold story of the world's first domestic workers' movement. Domestic workers exist on the margins of the world labor market. Maids, nannies, housekeepers, au pairs, and other care workers are most often ‘off the books,’ working for long hours and low pay. They are not afforded legal protections or benefits such as union membership, health care, vacation days, and retirement plans. Many women who perform these jobs are migrants, and are oftentimes dependent upon their employers for room and board as well as their immigration status, creating an extremely vulnerable category of workers in the growing informal global economy. Drawing on over a decade’s worth of research, plus interviews with a number of key movement leaders and domestic workers, Jennifer N. Fish presents the compelling stories of the pioneering women who, while struggling to fight for rights in their own countries, mobilized transnationally to enact change. The book takes us to Geneva, where domestic workers organized, negotiated, and successfully received the first-ever granting of international standards for care work protections by the United Nations’ International Labour Organization. This landmark victory not only legitimizes the importance of these household laborers’ demands for respect and recognition, but also signals the need to consider human rights as a central component of workers’ rights. Domestic Workers of the World Unite! chronicles how a group with so few resources could organize and act within the world’s most powerful international structures and give voice to the wider global plight of migrants, women, and informal workers. For anyone with a stake in international human and workers’ rights, this is a critical and inspiring model of civil society organizing.
Telling the stories of African American domestic workers, this book resurrects a little-known history of domestic worker activism in the 1960s and 1970s, offering new perspectives on race, labor, feminism, and organizing. In this groundbreaking history of African American domestic-worker organizing, scholar and activist Premilla Nadasen shatters countless myths and misconceptions about an historically misunderstood workforce. Resurrecting a little-known history of domestic-worker activism from the 1950s to the 1970s, Nadasen shows how these women were a far cry from the stereotyped passive and powerless victims; they were innovative labor organizers who tirelessly organized on buses and streets across the United States to bring dignity and legal recognition to their occupation. Dismissed by mainstream labor as “unorganizable,” African American household workers developed unique strategies for social change and formed unprecedented alliances with activists in both the women’s rights and the black freedom movements. Using storytelling as a form of activism and as means of establishing a collective identity as workers, these women proudly declared, “We refuse to be your mammies, nannies, aunties, uncles, girls, handmaidens any longer.” With compelling personal stories of the leaders and participants on the front lines, Household Workers Unite gives voice to the poor women of color whose dedicated struggle for higher wages, better working conditions, and respect on the job created a sustained political movement that endures today. Winner of the 2016 Sara A. Whaley Book Prize
"Major political and economic shifts have marked the turn into the 21st century: the collapse of the Soviet bloc; the rise to prominence of ecological issues; social changes generated by globalization; and, most recently, one of the worst world financial crises ever. These developments compel us to examine the capitalist system with a critical eye and to reflect on the need for alternatives. The 150th anniversary of the birth of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) (1864-2014) offers an important opportunity to compare present mainstream paradigms and the political platform developed by the IWA in order to better address our contemporary [crisis?] and theorize solutions. This sourcebook introduces and contextualizes the most valuable notes and proceedings from these legendary meetings, and includes letters and commentary surrounding the events themselves, many appearing for the first time in English. The carefully compiled materials reach beyond Marx's writings through the history of the IWA to include the cooperative movement, trade union reformism, collectivism, and anarchism. In his introductions to these texts, acclaimed scholar Marcello Musto provides accessible critical evaluations and explanations. The text also highlights how certain themes--self-emancipation of the working class versus communist vanguardism and the taking of political power to achieve social ends versus oppressive Soviet-style state control--find sharp discontinuity between Marx's thought as a political leader of the IWA and the tradition of Soviet Marxism. Carefully selected and painstakingly translated, this volume is an invaluable resource for all those interested in the foundations of modern political and labor history"--
A provocative history that reveals how sex workers have been at the vanguard of social justice movements for the past fifty years while building a movement of their own that challenges our ideas about labor, sexuality, feminism, and freedom Documenting five decades of sex-worker activism, Sex Workers Unite is a fresh history that places prostitutes, hustlers, escorts, call girls, strippers, and porn stars in the center of America’s major civil rights struggles. Although their presence has largely been ignored and obscured, in this provocative history Melinda Chateauvert recasts sex workers as savvy political organizers—not as helpless victims in need of rescue. Even before transgender sex worker Sylvia Rivera threw a brick and sparked the Stonewall Riot in 1969, these trailblazing activists and allies challenged criminal sex laws and “whorephobia,” and were active in struggles for gay liberation, women’s rights, reproductive justice, union organizing, and prison abolition. Although the multibillion-dollar international sex industry thrives, the United States remains one of the few industrialized nations that continues to criminalize prostitution, and these discriminatory laws put workers at risk. In response, sex workers have organized to improve their working conditions and to challenge police and structural violence. Through individual confrontations and collective campaigns, they have pushed the boundaries of conventional organizing, called for decriminalization, and have reframed sex workers’ rights as human rights. Telling stories of sex workers, from the frontlines of the 1970s sex wars to the modern-day streets of SlutWalk, Chateauvert illuminates an underrepresented movement, introducing skilled activists who have organized a global campaign for self-determination and sexual freedom that is as multifaceted as the sex industry and as diverse as human sexuality.
Major political and economic shifts have marked the turn into the 21st century: the collapse of the Soviet bloc; the rise to prominence of ecological issues; social changes generated by globalization; and, most recently, one of the worst world financial crises ever. These developments compel us to examine the capitalist system with a critical eye and to reflect on the need for alternatives. The 150th anniversary of the birth of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) (1864-2014) offers an important opportunity to compare present mainstream paradigms and the political platform developed by the IWA in order to better address our contemporary [crisis?] and theorize solutions. This sourcebook introduces and contextualizes the most valuable notes and proceedings from these legendary meetings, and includes letters and commentary surrounding the events themselves, many appearing for the first time in English. The carefully compiled materials reach beyond Marx's writings through the history of the IWA to include the cooperative movement, trade union reformism, collectivism, and anarchism. In his introductions to these texts, acclaimed scholar Marcello Musto provides accessible critical evaluations and explanations. The text also highlights how certain themes—self-emancipation of the working class versus communist vanguardism and the taking of political power to achieve social ends versus oppressive Soviet-style state control—find sharp discontinuity between Marx's thought as a political leader of the IWA and the tradition of Soviet Marxism. Carefully selected and painstakingly translated, this volume is an invaluable resource for all those interested in the foundations of modern political and labor history.
Provides a detailed account of the American labor movement and explores the movements lasting social, economic, and political impact into the modern era.
Do service-sector workers represent the future of the U.S. labor movement? Mid-twentieth-century union activism transformed manufacturing jobs from backbreaking, low-wage work into careers that allowed workers to buy homes and send their kids to college. Some union activists insist that there is no reason why service-sector workers cannot follow that same path. In If We Can Win Here, Fran Quigley tells the stories of janitors, fry cooks, and health care aides trying to fight their way to middle-class incomes in Indianapolis. He also chronicles the struggles of the union organizers with whom the workers have made common cause. The service-sector workers of Indianapolis mirror the city’s demographics: they are white, African American, and Latino. In contrast, the union organizers are mostly white and younger than the workers they help rally. Quigley chronicles these allies’ setbacks, victories, bonds, and conflicts while placing their journey in the broader context of the global economy and labor history. As one Indiana-based organizer says of the struggle being waged in a state that has earned a reputation as antiunion: "If we can win here, we can win anywhere." The outcome of the battle of Indianapolis may foretell the fate of workers across the United States.
The labor movement is weak and divided. Some think that it is dying. But Julius Getman, a preeminent labor scholar, demonstrates through examination of recent developments that a resurgent labor movement is possible. He proposes new models for organizing and innovating techniques to strengthen the strike weapon. Above all, he insists that unions must return to their historical roots as a social movement.
“Riveting and intimate. It is hard to imagine a more humanizing portrait of the American labor movement. A remarkable debut.” —Francisco Cantú, New York Times bestselling author of The Line Becomes a River On the Line takes readers inside a bold five-year campaign to bring a union to the dangerous industrial laundry factories of Phoenix, Arizona. Workers here wash hospital, hotel, and restaurant linens and face harsh conditions: routine exposure to biohazardous waste, injuries from surgical tools left in hospital sheets, and burns from overheated machinery. Broken U.S. labor law makes it nearly impossible for them to fight back. The drive to unionize is led by two women: author Daisy Pitkin, a young labor organizer, who addresses this exhilarating narrative to Alma Gomez García, a second-shift immigrant worker, who risks her livelihood to join the struggle and convinces her fellow workers to take a stand. Forged in the flames of a grueling legal battle and the company’s vicious anti-union crusade, including the retaliatory firing of Alma, the relationships that grow between Daisy, Alma, and the rest of the factory workers show how a union, at its best, can reach beyond the workplace and form a solidarity so powerful that it can transcend friendship and transform communities. But when political strife divides the union, and her friendship with Alma along with it, Daisy must reflect on her own position of privilege and the complicated nature of union hierarchies and top-down organizing. Daisy Pitkin looks back to uncover the forgotten roles immigrant women have played in the U.S. labor movement and points the way forward. As we experience one of the largest labor upheavals in decades, On the Line shows how difficult it is to bring about social change, and why we can’t afford to stop trying.