As the economy opened up to women a half century ago, one in three working women was an office employee. As the clerical workforce grew by leaps and bounds, so did a sense of injustice among the women, leading to the founding of the 9 to 5 Movement.
Hundreds of service workers from across the South gathered in Columbia, South Carolina, November 17-19 to launch the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW).
Makayla Wahaus and her co-workers are part of a trend in the union movement in which employees at nonprofits including human service agencies, museums, think tanks and other such organizations are starting to look to traditional labor unions as a way of improving their finances and, they say, democratizing their workplaces.
Over the course of the pandemic, the vast majority of essential workers were women. The vast majority of those who lost their jobs in the pandemic were women. And now the vast majority of those organizing their workplaces are women.
Petitions to organize have come faster than even those involved first believed possible, according to Richard Bensinger, union organizer with Starbucks Workers United and a former organizing director of the AFL-CIO.
Since the initial victory in Buffalo, workers at several other Starbucks stores throughout the country have filed for union elections, including in Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Knoxville, Tenn.
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