Women make up roughly half of U.S. labor union membership, but representation in top level union leadership positions has lagged, even in female-dominated industries and particularly for women of color.
But Black and Latina women are starting to gain ground, landing top positions at some of the biggest unions in the U.S. That has translated into wins at the bargaining table that focus more attention on family-friendly benefits like parental leave and health care coverage, as well as protections against sexual harassment.
Often when people think about unions, “they think of a white guy in a hard hat. But in fact, studies show that about two-thirds of working people who are covered by a union contract are women and/or people of color,” said Georgetown University labor historian Lane Windham.
Indeed, hospitality union UNITE HERE’s membership is majority women and people of color. And last month, more than 12,000 of them across six states went on strike to push for wage increases, fair workloads and more affordable health care under the leadership of Gwen Mills, who in June became the first woman to be elected union president in its 130-year history.
Data from the U.S. Department of Labor shows that Black and Latina women experience a particularly wide gender pay gap. They also face intersectional headwinds of both racism and sexism in their careers, making them even more attuned to inequities in the workplace and motivating them to increasingly step up the fight as union leaders.
Black and Latina women are driving labor union growth in the U.S. amid a decades-long decline in membership. In 2023, Black women’s union membership rate notched a slight bump from 10.3% to 10.5%, while Latinas went up from 8.5% to 8.8%. But that’s still more than white men and women as well as Asian women, whose membership experienced a decrease during the same time period.
Momentum for Black and Latina women rising into labor union leadership has picked up in the last five years. But the work began long before that by “our foremothers who laid this foundation and have been pushing and kicking those doors open for decades,” according to Liz Shuler, who in June 2022 became the first woman in history to lead the AFL-CIO, a federation of 60 national and international labor unions.
“The #MeToo movement, I think, has really emboldened women across the board, including in labor, to say, you know what? I’m not going to be sitting on the sidelines,” Shuler said. The pandemic also put a spotlight on essential workers such as nurses, service workers and care workers, who are predominantly women and minorities.
Today’s examples of diverse union leaders include Becky Pringle, a Black woman who leads the National Education Association, the nation’s largest union; Bonnie Castillo, the first Latina to serve as executive director of National Nurses United; and April Verrett, who in May became the first Black woman to lead the Service Employees International Union, which says about 60% of its service worker members are people of color, and two-thirds are women.
“If we want to build power on those who are perceived to have the least amount of power, then we’ve got to create space for our people of those identities to be able to lead,” Verrett told The Associated Press.
But while female-dominated fields have made strides in union leadership diversity, “there is still a long way to go” for unions in male-dominated fields like building and manufacturing trades, said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign labor historian Emily Twarog. Despite some headway through DEI and apprenticeship programs, “there hasn’t been that kind of culture shift.”
Men still have a higher union membership rate than women — 10.5% versus 9.5% respectively, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And workplace sexual harassment and biases still run rampant in many places, including for Chicago-based Lisa Lujano, a journey-level carpenter and member of Carpenters Union Local 13.
Things might get better, she said, if more Black and Latina women held union leadership roles and were more aware of their memberships’ needs, including safety gear that fits women’s bodies, or parental leave, which Lujano does not have.
“I think we would get more respect out in the field,” she said.
Here’s a look at the impact women union leaders have had at the bargaining table:
Education
Teachers’ unions have in recent years begun to use their collective power to push for wraparound benefits to help their surrounding community in a method known as “bargaining for the common good,” which aims to go beyond wages and benefits at the bargaining table and tackle wider social issues. The Chicago Teachers Union, for example, included demands for affordable housing citywide during a strike in 2019 — in part organized by then-vice president Stacy Davis Gates, who is now CTU president.
Some teachers’ unions are also fighting for racial justice, including the United Teachers Los Angeles, which demanded that the school district stop subjugating students to random metal detector screenings and locker checks without cause, decrying the practice as disproportionately targeting Black and minority students.
“We need to address the inequities that are built into every single social system in this country that determine whether our students come to school ready to learn every day,” Pringle said. “It was our female leaders, particularly our leaders of color, who really leaned into that.”
Hospitality
Unionized hotel workers like Maria Mata have made strides toward fighting the rampant sexual harassment in their profession.
Mata, a Hispanic housekeeper and UNITE HERE union leader at the W San Francisco, helped lead a successful push at her hotel for workers to be equipped with panic buttons in 2018 to summon security help in an emergency, now implemented by several major hotel chains.
“We needed more protection,” especially during night shifts spent cleaning entire floors alone, explained Mata, who has herself twice experienced sexual harassment on the job. “It’s very dangerous.”
It’s also vital for the women doing the work to also sit at the bargaining table, “because sometimes as women, we need something that the men don’t know,” said Mata, whose hotel is currently in bargaining for a new contract.
Flight attendants
Keturah Johnson in 2022 became the first queer woman of color to serve as international vice president for flight attendant union AFA-CWA, which is led by Sara Nelson and represents over 50,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines.
People often think of a flight attendant as “a white woman with hair put up in a bun,” and Black flight attendants frequently face microaggressions from managers about their appearance, Johnson said. “It’s happened to me many times because of my natural hair.”
And for gender nonconforming flight attendants, being able to wear a uniform that reflects their gender identity is important, Johnson said. So she’s leading the fight to update uniform standards to be gender inclusive and permit natural hairstyles, which has resulted in several airlines making changes.
United Airlines, for instance, updated its uniform standards to include gender neutral options in 2021, and Alaska Airlines management adopted gender neutral uniform and appearance standards in 2022, according to AFA. Frontier allowed natural hairstyles for flight attendants in 2021, and this year implemented standardized pricing for all uniforms regardless of size or gender.
“We’re not just there to serve Diet Coke. And so it’s our job to make sure that flight attendants are represented and seen just as they are,” Johnson said. “The world is changed now.”
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