Household workers unite
Subtitle: the untold story of African American women who built a movement
By: Premilla Nadasen
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780807014509
Subjects: African American household employees; Women labor leaders; Household employees; Women household employees; African American labor leaders; Labor unions; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Labor & Industrial Relations; History; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies; HISTORY / United States / 20th Century
Description: "Premilla Nadasen recounts in this powerful book a little-known history of organizing among African American household workers. She uses the stories of a handful of women to illuminate the broader politics of labor, organizing, race, and gender in late 20th-century America. At the crossroads of the emerging civil rights movement, a deindustrializing economy, a burgeoning women's movement, and increasing immigration, household worker activists, who were excluded from both labor rights and mainstream labor organizing, developed distinctive strategies for political mobilization and social change. We learn about their complicated relationship with their employers, who were a source of much of their anguish, but, also, potentially important allies. And equally important they articulated a profound challenge to unequal state policy. Household Workers Unite offers a window into this occupation from a perspective that is rarely seen. At a moment when the labor movement is in decline; as capital increasingly treats workers as interchangeable or indispensible; as the number of manufacturing jobs continues to dwindle and the number of service sector jobs expands; as workers in industrialized countries find themselves in an precarious situation and struggle hard to make ends meet without state support or protection--the lessons of domestic worker organizing recounted here might prove to be more important than just a correction of the historical record. The women in this book, as Nadasen demonstrates, were innovative labor organizers. As a history of poor women workers, it shatters countless myths and assumptions about the labor movement and proposes a very different vision"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: "Conversations" about domestic labor; title: Women, civil rights, and grassroots mobilization; title: A new day for domestic workers; title: Intimacy, labor, and professionalization; title: Space, place, and new models of labor organizing; title: Social rights, feminist solidarity, and FLSA; title: Women, work, and immigration.