A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice

Abstract

In writing history, beginnings and endings matter. “I had originally intended to conclude this book on a triumphant note with the success of the union campaign in 1937 and with subsequent achievement of industry-wide agreements that secured higher wages, shorter hours, paid vacation and sick days, arbitration machinery to mediate workplace grievances and a closed shop,” confessed Jenny Carson (6). By moving the time frame forward, she instead offers a sobering study of New York City's laundry worker unionism that accounts for the subsequent purge of communist organizers and the postwar defeat of the civil rights–and community-based “democratic initiative” led by Black women (127). The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), the union where the laundry workers found a home, installed a cadre that maintained white male power while suppressing rank-and-file decision-making and sustaining the racialized gender division of labor in the industry. Nonetheless, Carson finds inspiration in the laundry workers’ long fight for “racial justice, economic dignity, and gender equality” against mobbed-up bosses and self-serving union bureaucrats (9).Grounded in recent scholarship, A Matter of Moral Justice combines structural analysis of the industry with deft mini-biographies and astute assessments of industrial feminism, left organizations, and the CIO itself. While home washing and hand laundries never completely faded away, new technologies allowed for power laundry expansion in the 1920s. The association of Black women with the southern washerwoman and dirty work justified employer hiring of recent migrants into this low-wage occupation. Against standard interpretations that stress the undesirability of laundry jobs, Carson argues that “African American women embraced power laundry work as a rare and coveted opportunity to leave domestic service” (21). Still, they faced a Jim Crow organization of production in which customer and employer preference for white men as drivers and white women as markers and office staff highlighted racialized understandings of skill. Inside work further reflected gendered notions of men as best able to handle machines that were thought to require scientific exactitude. As shakers and ironers, Black women did the most manual labor for the least pay under the worst conditions, including constant sexual harassment. Carson concludes that more privileged male workers sought to maintain their economic advantages, joining employers in stymieing “workplace solidarities, while simultaneously providing opportunities for women and people of color to mobilize in independent and oftentimes empowering spaces where they forged race- and gender-based coalitions with allies in the labor movement” (40). Chinese hand laundries retained a niche and remained an unorganized sector throughout the century.Carson's revisionism extends to the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), which appears more committed to organizing than previously acknowledged. It also stood as the least racist of white-dominated organizations due to the efforts of New York leader Rose Schneiderman, whose own experiences of anti-Semitism and male prejudice generated what today we'd call an intersectional understanding of the “oppression that women of color experienced” (69). However, Carson argues that Schneiderman's gendered lens led her to underestimate the racist opposition of male workers, a roadblock that communist organizers emphasized. Into the Great Depression, the WTUL supported the laundry workers by hiring organizers, influencing New York's new Minimum Fair Wage Advisory Committee, and sending “mink brigade” picketers during the 1934 Brooklyn walkout. Its “political connections” with Mayor Fiorella La Guardia brought the employers to a settlement that was never properly enforced. Despite parallel organizing by communists in Harlem and the Bronx, “employer antiunionism, the workers’ destitution, and the state's unreliability . . . impeded organization” in an environment without extensive solidarity and lacking deep organizational resources (106). After the Wagner Act and the more favorable climate of the Second New Deal, laundry workers were able to transform earlier solidarities into victory under the CIO.Carson prefers the more militant League of Women Shoppers to the WTUL, but she saves her admiration for dedicated women activists: Jewish communists Jessie Taft Smith and Beatrice Shapiro Lumpkin; and Black organizers Charlotte Adelmond, who was a Garveyite nationalist, and Dollie Lowther Robinson. Carson relies on oral interviews with Smith and Lumpkin to recover this history of interracial organizing and to assess various campaigns. She lauds the confrontational actions of the Laundry Workers Industrial Union that Smith and Lumpkin helped to build in 1933, which contributed to racial solidarities, bringing drivers and inside workers together across race and gender. She is partisan but still critical of the communists, especially their neglect of women's issues.Recovering the centrality of Black women is a major contribution. Trinidadian-born “tough lady” Adelmond commanded rank-and-file loyalty (119). Robinson developed a friendship and support network with Adelmond and Maida Springer of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, even as she remained close to the WTUL and especially to Bessie Hillman of the ACWA. Running the Education Department of the Laundry Workers Joint Board (LWJB), Robinson would educate the whole worker to cultivate independence. “With Adelmond taking on the role of public provocateur, Robinson worked behind the scenes to create the space for her friend to continue her advocacy,” Carson observes (148). Neither would survive the consolidation of power in the hands of former driver Louis Simon and other white men in control of the LWJB. Reassigned to a lesser position within the union, Adelmond resigned in 1950, while Robinson would alternate working for unions and government over the next decades.Adelmond was one force affiliating the laundry workers with the anticommunist ACWA, whose interracial social unionism turned out to be less robust when it came to “local autonomy and organic leadership” than when the question was supporting the larger civil rights movement (131). Carson charts post–World War II tensions between “union democracy and union bureaucracy” that won modest gains but continued occupational segregation, worker disengagement, and dwindling membership—even as retail laundries and a reconfigured power laundry sector flourished (212). Despite changed legal and political environments, Carson finds a usable past for today's immigrant laundry workers in this history of “civil disobedience, impromptu walkouts and strikes, community alliances, and social and educational activities to build solidarities” (222). Social justice, she insists, is worth fighting for.