Readings: Intersectional Black Activists
Domestic Worker Organizers, 1960s-1970s

http://solidarity-us.org/atc/193/p5252/
Date Written:  2018-03-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2018
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23295

A brief history and suggestions for further reading on 1) Black women fighting for labor rights for domestic workers, 2) Callie Houses's struggle for reparations 3) Sojourner Truth and her fight for emancipation and suffrage for Black women.

Abstract: 
--

Excerpt:

When 1930s New Deal legislation expanded protections for workers, domestic laborers and farmworkers were completely omitted. Since the vast majority of African Americans were employed in these fields at the time, this was an intentional and racist exclusion.

Fed up with their exclusion from workers' protections, domestic labor organizers formed unions and lobbied for the Fair Labor Standards Act, including the federal minimum wage, to be extended to household workers.

The women of the domestic workers' movement also wanted to be able to go to work without being sexually assaulted by the white men in the homes they worked for, and without being forced to do degrading, backbreaking labor for inadequate compensation. They wanted to be treated as professionals, not as "mammies."