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Race, Class, and Gender in Los Angeles’s Unions “MAN’S C O M P E T I T O R S ” During a meeting in November 1913, the Los Angeles Business Woman’s Civic Club appointed a special committee to investigate conditions facing unemployed women in the city. Worried about finding work for all the new arrivals, Jane Neil Scott, head of the Vocational Department of the ywca, told a reporter, “The only way I can sleep at night is to stop thinking. I have been connected with this business for years and have never seen more tragedy than I have witnessed since coming to Los Angeles to take charge of this employment bureau. Understand I most emphatically wish it made clear that I am not knocking Los Angeles. I love the place and enjoy living here. But this office is daily embarrassed beyond words by hordes of women who have come here from the east without money or friends, expecting to find fine positions the moment they stepped off the train.” Scott pointed out that many women who arrived from the eastern United States had trained for jobs that did not yet exist in Los Angeles. Sue Brobst, president of the Business Woman’s Club, reserved her vitriol for the city’s boosters, particularly the railroads and the Chamber of Commerce . She argued that most women could not find work because city boosters continued to advertise that the city offered well-paid, plentiful jobs. “Those organizations represent the employing class and put out literature representing the employers’ side of the question. I know women who earned a hundred and fifty dollars a month back east who are toiling here for five dollars a week,” she complained. Although concerned about what would happen to the women themselves, Brobst also pointed out that such recruitment was “unfair to California, to the working people and philanthropic societies to have constantly to struggle to secure work for untrained women, Race, Class, and Gender in Los Angeles’s Unions 69 or those whose sole training or experience has been in factories, of which we have none. If the Chamber of Commerce insists that there is plenty of work here it should boost not only for workers, but for industries that can give them something to do.” Brobst’s and Scott’s comments reflected a new awareness in Los Angeles that, in spite of the best efforts of women’s clubs and the ywca, Angelenos still needed to confront the conditions affecting the female workforce. For many working women, particularly in new industrial and semiindustrial lines of work, organization into unions seemed to be their best option. The power of collective bargaining, they hoped, would win better hours, better conditions, and higher pay. Unions also filled an important need for working women, becoming a “crucial ‘social space’ necessary to assert their independence and display their talents.” As Vicki Ruiz explains, union participation allowed women to demonstrate that “they were not rote operatives numbed by repetition, but women with dreams, goals, tenacity, and intellect.” This chapter provides a brief history of unionization in Southern California and case studies of unionization in two heavily female professions : waitressing and laundry work. In pre–World War I Los Angeles, both racism and gender segregation kept prounion forces divided. As noted in the previous chapter, such problems were hardly unusual given Greater Los Angeles’s tremendous ethnic, racial, and class diversity. But the difficulty working women had in speaking with one voice often had dire consequences for unions. It prevented them from forming a coherent stance on the need for and benefits of organizing female workers in the city, and therefore often limited their effectiveness. The Challenges to Unionization in Los Angeles Los Angeles’s population growth continued to accelerate as the city moved into the twentieth century. But jobs for both sexes remained scarce. In spite of boosters’ hopes that Los Angeles would develop an industrial economy along the lines of San Francisco or Chicago (but with more docile labor), it remained overstocked with professionals and semiprofessionals. After all, city boosters had long focused their promotional efforts on well-off farmers and sickly bankers. City residents were only just becoming aware of the long-term economic problems such an imbalance might cause. One pamphlet described the city as “probably the least promising city of the size in the United States for persons who are seeking light employment, in the shape of clerks, or bookkeepers, or anything of the...

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