Florence Kelley was a social reformer and political activist who championed government regulation to protect working women and children.
Kelley was born into a Pennsylvania Quaker and Unitarian family with a strong commitment to abolitionist and women's rights activism. After reading through her father's library and graduating from Cornell, Kelley studied law and government at the University of Zurich, joined the German Social Democratic party, and translated Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England into English. In 1884 Kelley married a socialist Russian medical student and the couple had three children. After returning to the US, she divorced in 1891 and joined Jane Addams and other reformers at Hull-House, the Chicago social settlement. In 1892 the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics hired her to investigate the "sweating" system in the garment industry, and the federal commissioner of labor, Carroll Wright, asked her to survey Chicago's 19th ward, her findings appearing in Hull-House Maps and Papers. She was soon appointed chief factory inspector by Illinois Governor John Peter. Kelley earned her law degree from Northwestern University in 1895.
In 1899 Kelley became head of the National Consumer's League (NCL), a position she held for over 30 years, and she moved to Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement in New York City. Working for the NCL, Kelley organized local leagues and lobbied for better working conditions and minimum-wage and shorter-working-hours legislation. She helped Josephine Goldmark, director of research at NCL, to prepare the successful "Brandeis brief" defense of 10-hour workday legislation for women in the 1908 US Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon. The following year the NCL launched a minimum-wage campaign, which eventually succeeded in obtaining the passage of 14 state laws for women. Kelley later helped extend such state legislation to male workers.
In 1909 Kelley also helped organize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was a founder of the National Child Labor Committee, and her efforts contributed greatly to the creation in 1912 of the US Children's Bureau, the only government agency run by women, In 1912, Kelley provided presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt with facts and figures to substantiate his call for a minimum wage, pensions, and health insurance, as she became part of his "Female Brain Trust" and a significant supporter of the Progressive Party. Many of Kelley's ideas were later incorporated into New Deal programs.
Roosevelt and Kelley parted ways during World War I, when Kelley, a pacifist, helped to create the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and led the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (from 1913 until 1920). For several years she served as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Kelley spent her final decade defending herself from attacks during the "red scare" of the 1920s and stressing the concrete gains of gender-specific labor legislation to those committed only to laws applying to both sexes. . An icon of labor reform, Florence Kelley died on February 17, 1932, of natural causes in Germantown, Pennsylvania.
Was there a specific event or perhaps an experience that led you to become a social reformer?
"When I was at the age of twelve, my father had me visiting glass factories at night. There, I saw a little boy bending towards a hot furnace, coughing, and everyone besides me were looking at this as if it was something that is seen every day in the daily routine. Which, in fact, it was. I still can’t forget that scenery. In fact, I don’t think I will forget this ever. So yes, there was something that gave me an impact to become a reformer."
Wow, you were against child labor since you were twelve, then.
"I think for many social reformers there are big and little events like this for every issues, or ‘evils’ as they call it these days."
By that you mean?
"I was first known through my work, the translation of ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ by Engels. Then, I guess, someone noticed that I was a member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which I joined when I was back in Cornell. That became an issue, and soon the papers started introducing me as an activist for civil rights movement. I think it was because I was constantly fighting for woman suffrage and African-American civil rights. And having this idea of myself being a well known reformer, now everywhere I go, I noticed something that is to be changed. At this state, it is likely to come across an event or an experience about... anything."
After you came back from Europe, You campaigned for state statistical bureaus and the creation of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. How did you come across that?
"After returning from Europe, I was thinking of writing a book of my own, on the condition of the working class in the United States. But I discovered that there were no adequate statistics. That was the start of it."
You are now living in the Hull House settlement in Chicago.
"Yes,"
The founder of the Hull House, who is also Ja ne Addams' nephew, called you"the toughest customer in the reform riot, the finest rough-and-tumble fighter for the good life for others, that Hull House ever knew." Any comments on that?
"I know I am known for firmness and fierce energy. Merely, I try my best to fighting for the good."
A brief look at the life of Florence Kelley, a social and political reformer who founded the National Consumers League and worked tirelessly to set the minimum wage, limit the hours in a work day, and remove children from the workplace.
Do you and Florence care about the same things?
Have you ever been a 'first' at something?
How do you overcome obstacles?
Saturday, October 19, 2013
MARGARET HALEY
Margaret Haley (1861-1939)
LADY LABOR SLUGGER
Through her leadership of the Chicago Teachers Federation, Margaret Haley became a voice in national education politics. She promoted a more professional approach to teaching, including improved teacher education and teacher involvement in school management. But Haley also fought for traditional bread-and-butter issues: pensions, salary increases and other benefits for teachers. The first woman and teacher to speak from the floor at a National Education Association meeting, she delivered the influential speech, "Why Teachers Should Organize" in 1904. In this speech, she introduced issues that continue to be debated by teachers' unions and the public today.
Margaret Haley was born in Joliet, Illinois, on November 15, 1861, to Irish immigrant parents. Growing up, she was influenced by her father, an active member of several labor organizations. After attending a progressive normal school, she moved to Chicago to teach sixth grade in the infamous stockyards district, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. There she taught classes of 50 to 60 students, in deplorable conditions, according to a rigid curriculum imposed by educational bureaucrats. Over the next 16 years, she observed the unchanging poverty of the community in which she taught. She also discerned a constant decline in the conditions of the schools for teachers and students.
Haley came to understand that it was up to teachers to fight for change, both in the schools and in society. She was influenced by the philosophy of John Dewey, who believed that schools should be microcosms in which students learned the process of democracy through participation in a community. According to Haley, the tendency of schools to treat teachers as "automatons, mere factory hands" was in direct conflict with the principles of democracy.
In 1897, Margaret Haley joined the fledgling Chicago Teachers' Federation (CTF). The CTF grew out of intense teacher dissatisfaction: most of the nation's city teachers earned less than unskilled workers. Unlike other teachers' associations of the time, the CTF earned the distinction of being dominated by women teachers instead of male administrators. Because high school teachers (who were then mainly men) were subject to different guidelines and received higher salaries, only grade school teachers were invited to join the CTF. In 1900, Haley became the district Vice President of the CTF and soon gave up teaching for full-time union work. Under Haley's leadership, the CTF fought for higher salaries, pensions and tenure, better school conditions, and, in Haley's words, the right "for the teacher to call her soul her own." The union also fought against the "factorization" of the schools and the increasing constraints placed on teachers by rigid bureaucracies.
The earliest teachers unions lacked any real legal authority. Without collective bargaining rights, the CTF relied on lawsuits and political campaigns to effect change. Haley's first action for the CTF was to file suit when the Chicago Board of Education refused to honor a promised pay raise for the city's grade school teachers. Haley cleverly discovered that many of the city's corporations were not paying their fair share of taxes, which deprived the city of needed funds for schools. The CTF's lawsuit forced the corporations to pay their taxes and the city's teachers won their raise. But equally important to Haley was the fact that the corporations were forced to assume their civic responsibility to the public schools.
At the turn of the 20th century, the CTF was the most prominent and most militant of the teachers' organizations. In 1902, Haley led the CTF to join the Chicago Federation of Labor. She understood that teachers had much in common with manual workers, especially in light of the increasing "factorization" of the schools. The CTF's affiliation with labor shocked the Chicago establishment -- and many teachers. But it ultimately helped the CTF gain political power and an important victory regarding pensions. Eventually, political pressures forced Haley to renounce her alliance with the CFL.
Haley ardently believed that school reform was fundamental to social reform. She saw the struggle for teachers' rights as intrinsically linked to other social struggles and she used the union to back progressive causes, among them, woman suffrage and child labor legislation. Under her leadership, the teachers union became a political force for both school and social reform. Haley and her cohorts were so successful that they acquired the nickname "Lady Labor Sluggers."
"Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today: one the industrial ideal, dominating thru the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machine; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life. If this ideal of the educators cannot be carried over into the industrial field, then the ideal of industrialism will be carried over into the school. Those two ideals can no more continue to exist in American life than our nation could have continued half slave and half free. If the school cannot bring joy to the work of the world, the joy must go out of its own life, and work in the school as in the factory will become drudgery."-Excerpt from a speech she gave at the NEA convention in 1901, "Why Teachers Should Organize."
Emma Tenayuca (December 21, 1916 – July 23, 1999) was an American labor leader, union organizer and educator. She grew up in a family of eleven and began living with her grandparents at an early age in order to ease the burden on the rest of her family. Emma and her family were hit hard by the Depression, and all around her Emma Tenayuca began opening her eyes to see the suffering of low class workers. She became interested in activism and was a labor activist even before graduating from Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. Tenayuca’s first arrest came at the age of 16, in 1933, when she joined a picket line of workers in strike against the Finck Cigar Company.
After high school, Tenayuca obtained a position as an elevator operator, but she made a career out of her passion for labor rights. She founded two international ladies' garment workers unions, and was highly involved in both the Worker’s Alliance of America and Woman’s League for Peace and Freedom. She organized a protest over the beating of Mexican migrants by United States Border Patrol agents. In her early adulthood she was arrested for a second and third time: once on a charge of "disturbing the peace" during a nonviolent protest, and again for her leadership role in a labor strike in 1938.
Organizing large scale strikes against the injustices in the labor sphere was also one of Tenayuca’s vocations. Tenayuca was instrumental in one of the most famous conflicts of Texas labor history–the 1938 Pecan Shellers Strike at the Southern Pecan Shelling Company. During the strike, thousands of workers at over 130 plants protested a wage reduction of one cent per pound of shelled pecans. Mexicana and Chicana workers who picketed were gassed, arrested, and jailed. The strike ended after thirty-seven days when the city's pecan operators agreed to arbitration. In October that year, the National Labor Relations Act raised wages to twenty-five cents an hour.
"I was arrested a number of times. I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms of justice."
Emma Tenayuca standing inside jail, June, 1937. Photographed in San Antonio, Texas.
In 1939, as Emma was giving a speech, an enraged mob attacked the San Antonio´s Municipal Auditorium. Fearing that she would be lynched, Emma was led away through a secret passageway. The mob threw bricks, broke windows, set fires, ripped out auditorium seats, and later that night, together with the Ku Klux Klan, burnt the city’s mayor in effigy for having defended Emma’s right to free speech. This event is still on record as the San Antonio’s largest riot.
Black-listed, Emma left the state for many years, suffering poverty, unemployment, and personal threats against her own safety. A voracious reader, she put herself through college, and never stopped searching for an answer to the injustices she saw around her.
In the 1960s, Emma returned to San Antonio and began a different phase of her life-long community service, becoming a reading teacher for migrant students. Emma always focused on empowering people in the most basic and humane ways: the ability to work, to eat, to feed one’s family, to read, to vote. The things she fought to achieve in our society -- social security, unemployment benefits, minimum wage, equal access to education, disability benefits -- were in her days called communist. Today, they are called social justice.
Yet among the people for whom she fought and spoke and went to jail, her name was whispered with a respect reserved for no other leader. They called her "La Pasionaria". And they kept her story alive, even when so many others tried to erase it from history.
MAIDA ROSENSTEIN
Today in #LaborHistory : October 13 -- via -- www.unionist.com
More than 1,100 office workers strike Columbia University in New York City. The mostly female and minority workers win union recognition and pay increases – 1985 PHOTO BY Thomas Altfather Good - Maida is pushing the stroller.
Sharing from an interview by Gerrie Casey in the Fall of 2003
Non Traditional Organizing A Conversation With Maida
Maida Rosenstein has been a leading UAW organizer among university teaching and research employees as well as clerical workers,and is now the President of UAW Local 2110, based in New York City. Last April, she spoke with Gerrie Casey.
Q: Could you first tell us a little bit about your personal background, your own history in terms of how you grew up and how you became a union organizer? MR: Well, I grew up here in New York and ended up going to college in New Jersey from 1969 through '73. I was an art major there so I graduated very well-prepared to earn a living! I wanted to get a job that wasn't in the corporate world. I came from a pretty progressive background. And I thought maybe I would go to graduate school.
So I got a job as a clerical worker at NYU, as a University secretary. One day I was walking through Washington Square Park and I saw a notice posted that said "We are trying to organize a union. Come to our next meeting." I already had a very positive viewpoint of unions because of my family background. I grew up where unions were a good thing, even though I had no experience with them. And I thought the initial strategy of secretaries and clerical workers having a union was really strange. But I responded to this sign and walked into a club. I was also coming off the sixties view where being an activist was a good thing and not a bad thing. And so, going to a meeting was a good thing not a bad thing. So I went this meeting and it turned out people were trying to organize a union for the clerical workers at NYU. That was my first sort of contact with union. The union was District 65, which later on became part of the UAW.
It was probably around 1975. That campaign really never took off. We didn't know what we were doing. We had an organizing committee and we spent a lot of time writing very long leaflets. But, we didn't really give them to anybody, and we didn't talk to anybody. But, basically that was the first contact that I had. And I remember going over to 13 Astor Place, where the union's headquarters was, and being very impressed. My parents knew about District 65 s and they had been to the union headquarters in the old days. So I felt like, wow, this is really a place that had some history to it. I was kind of going to graduate school at the same time. I was trying to be a painter and I was sort of fumbling around with my life and my identity. Not unusual for those times. And I decided that I ought to get my act together and get a professional degree, a real job. So I thought I would go to library school. And I applied to library school at Columbia. And then I decided to get a job up there so that it would cover tuition. And -- you know, get some tuition benefits. So I got a job as a clerical worker at Columbia.
Well, I was working for a while when the woman who was the [District 65] union organizer said, "You know we might be organizing up at Columbia. So can I call you if we do?" And I said, "Sure, of course." So, a couple of years later, she did call me. Maybe it was in '78 or '79. She did call me and we had a little house meeting. She said they were going to start a campaign at Columbia. And it took a long time to get off the ground. I mean, I think we had that one meeting and then I didn't hear from her again for months. Then a campaign started. I wasn't real involved with it at first. I was very supportive but I was probably a little wary of getting involved. In the meantime, my pursuit of graduate school was not going all that well. And I was, you know, chugging away at the 9 to 5 job.
Eventually I did get more involved in the union and joined the organizing committee. In 1981, we actually filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for an election at Columbia. And I've got to say I was on the organizing committee but I wasn't super active in it. I was probably more peripherally involved. But when we got to that point where we filed the petition, I got more involved in it and made more of a commitment to it. The petition was caught up in litigation so this campaign went on for a long time. I became a regular on the organizing committee for several years. Soon it became really the most important thing that I was doing in my life. Far more important than trying to go to graduate school, a lot more real than trying to be an artist. And certainly more consuming and of greater interest to me than the office job that I had.
I drove my office crazy too because I was so involved in the organizing. You can imagine -- they would've loved to have gotten rid of me. And they actually seized the opportunity to do so when in 1983 we had an election. We won the election but there were a huge number of challenged ballots. So we went back into litigation at the Labor Board. And the union at that point decided they were going to bring on a couple of people from the committee to continue the organizing so that we wouldn't lose ground given the turnover among the workforce. So I was asked to go on staff.
I was really scared to become a union organizer. First of all, I didn't see myself as having the organizing personality at all. And second, I was just so afraid of being stuck into that hole, you know, totally consumed by the organizing campaign. So, I -- so there was a part-time job available -- openings in the office that I work in at the School of Social Work. And I asked to be transferred to the part-time job and I said to the union that I would work part-time on the union campaign and I would still work part-time at Columbia. I think I was just postponing the inevitable. But I did that for a few months and then -- Q: What did you think the personality of a union organizer was?
MR: Oh, you know somebody very outgoing, social person who loves talking to people and was good a public speaking and was a complete take charge person. And I didn't see myself in that way. Q: Looking back on that, what do you think... that perception that you had of yourself?
MR: I think -- I actually think I had mistaken -- I had a mistaken impression about what the important things were about being a union organizer. I thought being a union organizer was -- I don't know -- somehow a... difficult and was great at making public speeches. Q: And how did that shift? What did you learn later about being a union organizer?
MR: Well, I think there are other things that became obvious once you're doing the work that that doesn't tell you. You have to be able to -- it's hard work. It's work that you have to work at very hard and it takes a great deal of dedication and commitment to work through it. And you have to be willing to work though problems and deal with very down side. You have to be willing to work with loses if that's necessary. You have to be willing to push people.
Q: Does being a woman -- did that have something to do with you being a little unsure about being a union organizer in the beginning?
MR: Probably because I don’t think there were too many models for women leadership at the time. And -- I mean union organizers that I've met, men and women seem so knowing and competent. And they knew all about labor movement. And they were sharp politicos. I mean, they knew all about so many of these things.
Q: And so once you went on staff, then what happens in terms of your own history with the union?
MR: Well -- it was so hard. It was so hard. And I think this is true for most organizers. It's like the first year the learning curve on these jobs is long, and the first year was just murder. And I -- first of all, the internal politics of the organization: I didn't know anything about and I was really unprepared for it. And it's a tough atmosphere. The pot is always simmering in a union. And you're consumed with your job, you're consumed with conflict. And it was so hard. But I was primarily doing organizing at Columbia. We had the election behind us but we were not recognized as a union. So we had to continue to organize workers. And I did that and that part was good. It was fun even though it was hard. And I did that for a couple years. Finally in 1985, we got recognition for the union. And we started negotiating contracts.
Q: But this must have been one of the first trade union contracts that stuck hard language on the issue of a spouse equivalent for any kind of rights? So it was trend-setting in a way, right?
MR: Right, right. And we got an equity fund to try and deal with some of the inequities. We did this analysis on the basis of race and gender which we looked at the back across pay rates to see whether there was a pattern whereby white workers and male workers who didn't earn very much earned more than women workers and workers of color. And this was something we tried to grapple with over several contracts. But the first contract we got an equity adjustment. My only experience was in going to the negotiations at Columbia. So I had to kind of learn everything from scratch. Well, we elected stewards. We weren't really a local at that point. I guess you'd call it the Columbia local. We elected stewards and so on. And I was supposed to work with the stewards. And none of us knew how to do anything. None of us [LAUGHS] -- you know, we sort of learned. We kind of trained ourselves. There was a contract. We struggled with it. We tried to figure out how to do things. But none of us knew how to do anything. And then I handled a lot of grievances. It was like a sink or swim situation. So, I'm kind of grateful for that experience in a way because over a period of a few years I just handled hundreds of grievances and I really became immersed in that.
Q: That's great. And you probably went into training to know how to do it too? MR: Eventually I did.
Washington, D.C.— The United States Postal Service announced that former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm will be the 2014 inductee to the Black Heritage stamp series.
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was a woman who was known for her moral character and her relentless ability to stand up for her community and what she believed. A child to immigrant parents, she learned from an early age the importance of an education and the value of hard work, both of which she applied to her political career and her accomplishments while serving as a Congresswoman.
Shirley was born in Brooklyn, New York, to immigrant parents. Her father, Charles Christopher St. Hill, was born in British Guiana and arrived in the United States via Antilla, Cuba, on April 10, 1923, aboard the S.S. Munamar in New York City. Her mother, Ruby Seale, was born in Christ Church, Barbados, and arrived in New York City aboard the S.S. Pocone on March 8, 1921. At age three, Chisholm was sent to Barbados to live with her maternal grandmother, Emaline Seale, in Christ Church; where she attended the Vauxhall Primary School. She did not return until roughly seven years later when she arrived in New York City on May 19, 1934, aboard the S.S. Narissa. In her 1970 autobiography Unbought and Unbossed, she wrote: "Years later I would know what an important gift my parents had given me by seeing to it that I had my early education in the strict, traditional, British-style schools of Barbados. If I speak and write easily now, that early education is the main reason." Chisholm is an alumna of Girls' High School, she earned her BA from Brooklyn College in 1946 and later earned her MA from Columbia University in elementary education in 1952. She was a member of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.
From 1953 to 1959, she was director of the Hamilton-Madison Child Care Center. From 1959 to 1964, she was an educational consultant for the Division of Day Care.
Chisholm was assigned to the House Agricultural Committee. Given her urban district, she felt the placement was irrelevant to her constituents and shocked many by asking for reassignment. She was then placed on the Veterans' Affairs Committee. Soon after, she voted for Hale Boggs as House Majority Leader over John Conyers. As a reward for her support, Boggs assigned her to the much-prized Education and Labor Committee, which was her preferred committee. She was the third highest-ranking member of this committee when she retired from Congress.
All those Chisholm hired for her office were women, half of them black. Chisholm said that during her New York legislative career, she had faced much more discrimination because she was a woman than because she was black.
Retail stock brokerage Smith Barney reaches a tentative sexual harassment settlement with a group of female employees. The suit charged, among other things, that branch managers asked female workers to remove their tops in exchange for money and one office featured a "boom boom room" where women workers were encouraged to "entertain clients." The settlement was never finalized: a U.S. District Court Judge refused to approve the deal because it failed to adequately redress the plaintiff's grievances – 1997
Multinational Monitor: What was your experience working as an investment broker?
Pamela Martens: In 1984, I started working as a stockbroker trainee at the Garden City, New York branch of Shearson, which became Smith Barney in December of that year [and more recently has been acquired by Citigroup]. Over the next decade, I experienced a variety of sexual harassment. The branch manager pull a gun on me shortly after I started. He constantly used foul and degrading language, especially toward women. In the sales meetings, for instance, he called the clerical workers "a pack of humps" and told the brokers that if they had to call their wives so many times, maybe they should "go home and lay between their legs." He also used anti-Semitic language such as, "you guys who nailed Jesus to the cross." He also used other language too vile to repeat.
Women were always verbally abused in myriad ways. I learned to grow my business by simply coming in in the morning, going to my private office and shutting the door and leaving promptly at 5 o’clock in the evening.
This was at a Fortune 100 company. The branch manager was trying to create an atmosphere of bravado for the male brokers. He also turned a storage room in the basement into what he called the "boom boom room," a name that was put on the company phone number list.
The first time I went down to the "boom boom room," there was a white toilet bowl hanging from the ceiling, and a bicycle hanging from the ceiling. The branch manager had taken a large garbage can, put a black plastic liner in it, and filled it with bloody mary mix. He was doling out drinks to the workers with a soup ladle. As I walked in one time, he twisted my arm and kissed me on the lips. I exited the room and never came back.
MM: What caused you to file the lawsuit after putting up with 10 years of this type of behavior?
Martens: On August 31, 1994 the branch manager called the 24 low-wage sales assistants, all of whom were women, into a meeting. He told them that if they did not volunteer their personal time for his favorite charity, they would be denied raises, bonuses and time off. If they went outside for a cigarette, they would be docked. If they went to a funeral, they wouldn’t get time off, but would be docked.
Then he called a meeting of the brokers, 95 percent of whom were men, because he was going to demand that they give him a check for his favorite charity. As a matter of fact, he had told the sales assistants, "You women have no money, so you’re going to donate your personal time. The brokers are going to give me a check." Because I had heard of this conduct right after the sales assistants’ meeting, I blasted him at the beginning of the brokers’ meeting before he could speak. I told him I was ashamed that I had not spoken up in the prior 10 years, but now there were 24 witnesses to his egregious conduct. He responded by yelling "We’ll throw you out of the office and throw a party afterwards."
On October 3, I wrote a letter to Jamie Dimon, who was then the president of Smith Barney, laying out the full 10 years of this branch manager’s conduct.
MM: What kind of response did you get from upper management?
Martens: Over the next few months, they gave the branch manager free reign to try to drive me out of the office. The branch manager told another broker that he was going to snap my neck, and told another broker in vile language I don’t want to repeat that he was going to rape me.
The general counsel of the firm called me and said that I should resign. When I didn’t and tried to stand my ground and be a positive role model for the other women, they decided that the branch manager would retire with full benefits. They threw a lavish retirement party for him at a private country club and two days later they fired me on the pretext that I had missed a meeting.
Along with two other women, I went and consulted with an attorney in New York, where we found out it wouldn’t be so easy to bring a lawsuit against the firm. They had set up a mandatory arbitration system for all employee disputes. The language that supposedly bound us to this was buried somewhere in our employee handbook.
But we also learned that class actions were not bound to end up in mandatory arbitration. So three of us — Judith Mione and Roberta O’Brien Thomann and myself — filed a class action suit on May 20, 1996.
A lot of other women around the country learned from the publicity generated by our case and called to join the suit. By October of 1996, an additional 23 women from 11 states had joined. By the time it was finally settled, 2,000 women had come forward with charges against the firm.
MM: Why did you opt out of the settlement?
Martens: Judith Mione and I opted out of the settlement because one of the purposes of the action was to stop the private justice system, which we felt encouraged sexual harassment and related activities, because if you know these things are never going to see the light of day in federal court, but will inevitably end up in a rigged, private arbitration system, then of course there is no real deterrent against that kind of conduct.
The final stage of the class action settlement agreement sent all the women into this system of private arbitration.
There were many other things wrong with the settlement.
PHOTO- Two plaintiffs in a major sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit against Wall Street brokerage firm Smith Barney, Judy Mione and Pamela Martens, receive 1997 Women of Courage Awards from NOW President Patricia Ireland. Photo by Beth Corbin.
Some 1,700 female flight attendants win 18-year, $37 million suit against United Airlines. They had been fired for getting married - 1986
Bona Fide Occupational Qualification?
Airlines wanted stewardesses – that is, women only – and they wanted the women to be young and single. Most stewardesses were fired or grounded when they got married or turned a certain age, usually 32 or 35.
In 1965, the EEOC responded to a Northwest Airlines stewardess who was terminated when she got married. Aileen Hernandez, later a president of the National Organization for Women, was a member of the EEOC when it found "reasonable cause" that Northwest had discriminated against women by having a marriage ban for women but not men. After this official word from a government agency, the flight attendant took her case to court.
Airlines persisted in hiring only female flight attendants throughout the 1960s. In 1968, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that sex could not be a bona fide occupational qualification of being a flight attendant.
The BFOQ ruling came on February 23, 1968. Airline stewardesses had been among the first to file sex discrimination complaints after the creation of the EEOC, but it took several years for the EEOC to issue its ruling on female flight attendants.
However, the airlines asked for a BFOQ exception: they wanted "being female" declared a job qualification of being a flight attendant. The EEOC ruled in November 1966 that being female was not a BFOQ, but a judge prevented the commission from releasing this ruling. The airlines protested that the 1966 BFOQ ruling would be improper because Aileen Hernandez had been elected to the board of the newly formed NOW. However, she also submitted her resignation from the EEOC before she was elected as a NOW officer.
Finally, with new commissioners and years after the original stewardess complaints, the EEOC issued a BFOQ ruling on female flight attendants in February 1968. Being female was not a BFOQ for the position of flight attendant.
Not many people would associate the stewardesses of yesteryear with unions, strikes, and other kinds of labor activism. But these glamour girls were not the docile bunch that stereotypes would suggest.
In 1945, a group of stewardesses at United organized the first labor union of flight attendants in the United States, the Air Line Stewardesses Association (ALSA). The inexperienced but plucky organizers soon won voluntary recognition of the union from the company, pay raises, duty hour limits, and the right for stewardesses to see their personnel records and file grievances.
Below are just some of the highlights of their activist history.
