Women have played a key role throughout history in labor movements and securing workers’ rights in this country. It is a role often completely ignored or at best underplayed.
On today’s episode of WATT we are joined by three woman who have had a profound impact on labor movements in WNY and beyond: Catherine Creighton is the Director of Cornell University School of Industrial & Labor Relations Buffalo Co-Lab; Jaz Brisack is a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, NY, which was the first unionized Starbucks in the United States, and an organizing committee member with Starbucks Workers United; and registered nurse, Debbie Hayes, a founding member and first president of CWA Local 1168 in Buffalo, NY.
Hear their personal story of how and why they got involved in labor justice and specifically the role women have played in this rich history. We’ll discuss the challenges, the victories and where labor movements are going in the future. Are labor movements inherently feminist?
Women and Labor Movements: A brief snapshot
Lowell Mill Women Create the First Union of Working Women
In the 1830s, half a century before the better-known mass movements for workers’ rights in the United States, the Lowell Massachusetts mill women organized, went on strike and mobilized in politics when women couldn’t even vote—and created the first union of working women in American history.
The Washer Women of Jackson Mississippi
In 1866, laundry workers in Jackson, Miss., called for a citywide meeting. The women — for they were all women, and all were Black — were tired of being paid next to nothing to spend their days hunched over steaming tubs of other (White) people’s laundry, scrubbing out stains, smoothing the wrinkles with red-hot irons, and hauling the baskets of heavy cloth through the streets.
The washerwomen of Jackson presented Mayor D.N. Barrows with a petition decrying the low wages that plagued their industry and announcing their intention to “join in charging a uniform rate” for their labor. As their petition read: “Any washerwoman who charges less will be fined by our group. We do not want to charge high prices, we just want to be able to live comfortably from our work.” The prices they’d agreed upon were far from exorbitant: $1.50 per day for washing, $15 a month for “family washing,” and $10 a month for single people. They signed their letter “The Washerwomen of Jackson,” and in doing so, gave a name to Mississippi’s first trade union.
Bread and Roses
The first woman elected to national office in a labor union, Rose Schneiderman transformed the lives of American workers. Schneiderman went to work at thirteen and began organizing for unions at twenty-one. By 1906, she was vice president of the New York Women’s Trade Union League and she helped organize the Uprising of the 20,000 for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in 1909.
She went on to become New York Women’s Trade Union League, president in 1917 and president of the national WTUL in 1926. Her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt and their conversations on labor issues led to FDR appointing Schneiderman in 1933 to the National Labor Advisory Board, where she fought to include domestic workers in social security and argued for wage parity for women workers.
The woman worker needs bread, but she needs roses too,” Rose Schneiderman said in 1911. This most famous of Schneiderman’s lines captures the essence of the political philosophy that guided her long and extraordinary career as an internationally recognized leader of American working women. For nearly half a century, Rose Schneiderman worked tirelessly to improve wages, hours, and safety standards for American working women. She saw those things as “bread,” the very basic human rights to which working women were entitled. But she also worked for such “roses” as schools, recreational facilities, and professional networks for trade union women, because she believed that working women deserved much more than a grim subsistence.
2021
The AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the country, elected Liz Shuler as the first woman to serve as its president.
Buffalo NY Starbucks became the first unionized café in the United Sates, as a result of the organizing efforts led by one of our guests today, Jaz Brisack.
Bios
Catherine Creighton
Catherine Creighton is the Director of Cornell University School of Industrial & Labor Relations Buffalo Co-Lab. Ms. Creighton is also a graduate of Cornell University’s ILR School, and later attended Boston University School of Law. Ms. Creighton’s teaching and research fields are in labor law and labor relations. She directs Cornell University’s High Road Fellowships, an engaged learning and applied research internship for students working with community organizations on economic development in Buffalo. Prior to joining Cornell, Ms. Creighton worked as a union-side labor attorney where she co-founded the firm Creighton, Pearce, Johnsen & Giroux. Ms. Creighton represented individual workers and private and public sector unions in all aspects of labor litigation. Ms. Creighton is a director of the Erie County Fiscal Stability Authority, and has served on multiple boards including the Western NY Law Center, the lawyers committee of the AFL-CIO, the living wage commission of Buffalo, and the Workers Rights Board. Ms. Creighton lectures extensively for Continuing Legal Education programs for the AFL-CIO, Cornell University, and the National Labor Relations Board, has written for legal publications, and was named as a Super Lawyer annually for more than a decade.
Jaz Brisack
Jaz Brisack is a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, NY, which was the first unionized Starbucks in the United States, and an organizing committee member with Starbucks Workers United. Jaz was the University of Mississippi’s first woman Rhodes Scholar, and studied labor history at the University of Oxford. Jaz worked for the UAW during the Nissan campaign in Mississippi and was a Pinkhouse Defender at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the last abortion clinic in Mississippi.
Debbie Hayes
A longtime registered nurse, Debbie Hayes was a founding member and first president of CWA Local 1168 in Buffalo, NY. She led the union through a hard-fought strike to its first contract in 1983 and helped grow its membership to over 4,000 today. She became the CWA District One’s Area Director in 2012 and has since led pivotal contract negotiations with large hospital systems and Fortune 500 telecommunications companies. A titan in healthcare, Debbie played a leading role in the Catholic Health Strike of fall 2021 and the passage of the Clinical Staffing Committee law.”