Organizing the neglected worker: the Women's Trade Union League in New York and Boston, 1930–1950

Abstract

From 1930 to 1950, the New York and Boston Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) chapters focused on organizing poorly paid female service employees, many of them African American or Hispanic, whom the AFL and CIO largely neglected. Scholars who studied the WTUL generally confined their work to the period before 1920. Drawing on new primary sources, this article challenges previous characterizations of the WTUL as moribund after 1920, revealing the WTUL's vitality and innovative organizing methods. The WTUL maintained that New Deal protective legislation would prove largely unenforceable if workers remained unorganized. The article examines how the WTUL combined energetic organizing and legislative lobbying on behalf of laundry workers, domestic servants, cafeteria workers, hotel chambermaids, textile workers, and teachers, considered among the most difficult workers to organize.