In 1976, members of the union SEIU Local 150 went on strike at St. Luke’s Hospital in Racine, demanding higher wages and better staffing for support services.
Images from a local newspaper showed Black and brown women at the picket line with white United Auto Workers members lined up behind them. That’s according to Rutgers University Assistant Professor Naomi R. Williams.
“Those images were so different than the stories that we typically hear about labor in the 1970s,” Williams explained.
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Williams is the author of the new book, “A Blueprint for Worker Solidarity: Class Politics and Community in Wisconsin.” In the book, they chronicle decades of labor activity in the Racine area — from strikes at the agricultural equipment maker Case in the 1950s to manufacturing plant closures and mass layoffs of the 1980s.
Williams recently told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that the labor community in Racine built an inclusive union during that period, crossing racial divisions.
They shared some of the people and teachable moments from the history of Racine’s labor community.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Kate Archer Kent: You write about Local 180: the members of Racine’s United Auto Workers chapter. At the time you wrote the book, it was the largest union in the city in the post-war period from the 1960s through 1980s. What made this chapter so special?
Naomi Williams: They all worked at Case. What was really exciting is they always had to fight with Case for what other UAW locals were getting at the bargaining table. Case management was really resistant to give up anything of what they called “management prerogative.” The workers at Case — bargaining session after bargaining session — had to fight for what was at the time in the 1950s, just basic, standard contract language.
There’s a great quote from William Jenkins in his interview from the 1970s where he says, thinking back on what made the energy in Racine so intense, he said, “It was the workers at Case. They had to fight, and that labor strife that they dealt with year after year, really kept (them) motivated, kept (them) focused on making gains and holding onto those gains.”
They were really involved in the community. In this time period, they talked about it as a total-person unionism: your responsibility to your co-workers, your union members, but also to your community. How are you getting involved in local politics? How are you getting involved in charity? And what’s your responsibility as a union member?
KAK: What was it like for women in this labor community?
NW: One of the things that really impressed me about labor organizing in the city is the wide breadth of organization — or businesses and workplaces that were unionized. There was a really active garment workers union and a lot of women were there. A lot of women were in bookbinding. And there were women spread out in different industrial workplaces.
There were so many organized working women in Racine that during the 1930s and 1940s, they actually had softball teams that they could play against each other. Just the sheer volume of organized women in the city really opened the door to understanding that everybody belonged in the union movement.
Women went to very early AFL-CIO conventions demanding to have a voice in decision-making. When there were statewide conventions, women workers would make sure that their voices were heard in those spaces as well.
It wasn’t perfect. But women actively said, “This is what we need, and this is what we’re looking for,” … Just having a seat at the table makes a big difference.
KAK: In your conclusion, you write that the Racine labor community and the broader labor labor movement lost. That felt jarring. It felt so final. What are you trying to say there?
NW: Maybe I should have worded that a little bit differently. They did everything, right, but this isn’t something that we as workers can do by ourselves. We need an active, engaged government that is going to help keep our bargaining playing field level. Right now, corporate interests have the bar tilted toward them.
But it’s also super inspiring to me — the ways more and more people are returning to this idea of class solidarity and getting involved with unions. Folks are coming together and seeing themselves in common cause with each other and really celebrating all of the ways that we are different, and how those differences can help us unite and have a real multi-racial working class movement for economic justice.
The conclusion is a call to policymakers and to scholars to really narrate the stories of the past differently and to not take away people’s power. To really showcase what does work at a local level and how that can transform at the national level.
