Part of the Family? by Sheila Bapat

Author:Sheila Bapat [Bapat, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935439882
Publisher: IG Publishing

7.Collective Bargaining and Beyond: Evolving Organizing Strategies Across Low-Wage Sectors

“We’ve gone to thousands of doors. There’s no shop floor here.”—Karen Connor, communications director, Vermont American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, on organizing home care workers

“Our meetings are nothing like any labor union you can imagine. There’s women of all ages, and there’s always child care, food—and singing—at domestic workers’ meetings.”—Premilla Nadasen, professor, Queens College; writer and scholar on the history of domestic worker organizing.1

The vast majority—more than 90 percent—of domestic workers are women.2 One-third are African American, one-fifth Hispanic, and one-fifth are immigrants.3 Twenty-five percent are unmarried women with young children. An estimated six hundred thousand earn below-poverty wages.4 As Jennifer Klein, professor of history at Yale University and co-author of Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State, points out, “Home care workers are too often thought of as barriers to ‘good care’ for others, not a workforce facing their own barriers.”5 Klein’s statement crystallizes why the domestic workers’ movement is increasingly resonating with people today; namely, these workers’ struggle exemplifies the economic reality so many American workers are facing. The narrative of the average American worker—and, in particular, the female American worker—has taken a troubling turn in recent years, especially with the decline of stable public-sector positions, combined with weakening labor unions.6 In 2013, the percentage of workers who were union members was 11.3 percent, down a half percent from 2011.7 (Women represented 72 percent of this decline.8) This is part of an unraveling that has spanned several decades: union membership is less than half of what it was in 1955.9

Concurrent with the decline in union membership has been an escalating attack on public-sector collective bargaining, which is by extension an attack on women workers. In 2011, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin launched a concerted effort to limit the collective bargaining rights of public employees such as teachers, nurses, child care providers, and workers in other female-dominated professions. Other states proposed similar legislation: Tennessee restricted teacher collective bargaining.10 “In Ohio, a law repealing limits on collective bargaining was defeated in 2011.11 And in Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder stripped the collective bargaining rights of home-based care workers in 2011.12

In addition to the weakening of unions, the number of public-sector jobs is decreasing, while job opportunities in the low-wage private sector—a sector with relatively limited union power—are increasing.13 “The best we can tell, public-sector jobs have been shed recently, and women bore the brunt of that loss,” said Emily Martin, vice president and general counsel of the National Women’s Law Center, in an interview with RH Reality Check. “In the recession recovery what we have seen is loss of good unionized middle-class jobs like teaching and nursing, where women tend to dominate.”14 The women who are losing these stable union jobs are increasingly finding themselves working in low-wage, non-union positions. According to Martin, “lower-wage, service-industry positions in the private sector are seeing an increase in women employees.”15

This trend is confirmed by Brenda Carter,

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