A long-overlooked group of workers and their battle for rights and dignity

Like thousands of African American women, Charlotte Adelmond and Dollie Robinson worked in New York's power laundry industry in the 1930s. Jenny Carson tells the story of how substandard working conditions, racial and gender discrimination, and poor pay drove them to help unionize the city's laundry workers. Laundry work opened a door for African American women to enter industry, and their numbers allowed women like Adelmond and Robinson to join the vanguard of a successful unionization effort. But an affiliation with the powerful Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) transformed the union from a radical, community-based institution into a bureaucratic organization led by men. It also launched a difficult battle to secure economic and social justice for the mostly women and people of color in the plants. As Carson shows, this local struggle highlighted how race and gender shaped worker conditions, labor organizing, and union politics across the country in the twentieth century.

Meticulous and engaging, A Matter of Moral Justice examines the role of African American and radical women activists and their collisions with labor organizing and union politics.

| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. "We Win a Place in Industry": Black Women and the Birth of the Power Laundry Industry Chapter 2. A Miniature Hell: Working in a Power Laundry Chapter 3. The 1912 Uprising of New York City's Laundry Workers Chapter 4. The Rise and Fall of Local 284: Black Women Laundry Workers' Activism in the Era of the Chapter 5. "It Was Up to All of Us to Fight": Communist Laundry Organizing during the Great Depress Chapter 6. Aristocrats of the Movement: The Uprising of Brooklyn's Laundry Workers Chapter 7. "It Was Like the Salvation": New York City's Laundry Workers Join the CIO Chapter 8. The "Democratic Initiative": Fighting for Control of the Laundry Workers Joint Board Chapter 9. "Putting Democracy into Action": The Laundry Workers' Double V Campaign Chapter 10. "Everybody's Libber": The Laundry Workers' Civil Rights Unionism in the Postwar Era Chapter 11. "We're Just Not Ready Yet": The Ousting of Charlotte Adelmond and Dollie Robinson from Epilogue: Building a Democratic Initiative in the Twenty-First Century Notes Index Back cover |"Even progressive organizations like the ACWA actively participated in the reproduction of racial and gender hierarchies within labour markets and within their own organizations. It is a sobering finding, albeit one tempered in Carson's account by extraordinary heroism of the laundry workers themselves." —Labour
"Grounded in recent scholarship, A Matter of Moral Justice combines structural analysis of the industry with deft mini-biographies and astute assessments of industrial feminism, left organizations, and the CIO itself." —Labor: Studies in Working-Class History
"An engaging book on a workforce that has received surprisingly little attention from labor historians. Carson provides a highly readable analysis of how racialized and gendered were job assignments, union organizing campaigns, and labor politics."—Dennis Deslippe, author of Protesting Affirmative Action: The Struggle over Equality after the Civil Rights Revolution
|Jenny Carson is an associate professor of history at Ryerson University.