Jane LaTour, Fighter for Women in Labor Unions, Dies at 76

“Rather than everyone being on the same team,” she said, “the members would often be fighting against the union.” She was fired after three years, because, she said, “I favored workers over the union.”

So she focused on reforming unions from the outside, and on telling the stories of their members. She worked for the Association for Union Democracy, a nonprofit reform group, where she ran the Women’s Project; for the New York Labor History Association; and as an archivist for the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. For the last 20 years, she worked as a journalist for Public Employee Press, the official publication of District Council 37 of AFSCME (the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees).

“Jane saw in the stories of these tradeswomen a universal story and a chance to show people that these women in the trades — Black, brown, white, gay, straight — were feminists,” said Brenda Berkman, who successfully sued the New York Fire Department to get it to scrap a physical test that excluded her and other women. (Her story was told in Ms. LaTour’s “Sisters in the Brotherhoods.”)

“They might not think of themselves as feminists,” Ms. Berkman added, “they might not even know how to define their feminism, but they were saying a lot of the same things that the feminist movement had been saying since the 1960s.”

For Veronica Session, a carpenter profiled in Ms. LaTour’s book, the attention gave her validation at a time when tradeswomen were not very visible.

“It gave a voice to our stories and our plight,” Ms. Session said. “It meant that all your strife was not for naught, that it meant something. It gave me energy to keep on, knowing that somehow this would matter to people. And also, that someone might see themself in me.”

Ms. LaTour’s last days in hospice drew a vigil by the kind of women she had commemorated: pioneering firefighters, ironworkers, carpenters, plumbers and union dissidents. She remained optimistic that unions have a future, her husband said — if they reform.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/nyregion/jane-latour-dead.html