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Thoughts on nail salons

Thinking about the 1909 Shirtwaist Strike got me thinking about immigrant women workers today. You may have read these NYT articles about the exploitation and abuse of undocumented immigrant women working in nail salons in New York City. What these exposes have to say is appalling, but not unexpected, to my mind–how did we think all those salons were surviving charging twenty-five bucks for a manicure and pedicure? Pixie dust? Of course they’re getting by through the time-honored method of screwing over women with few options.

I have not seen anything written by the women who work in these salons themselves. Well, that’s not too surprising. As the articles note, most of them are in the country illegally–they don’t want to draw attention to themselves, lose their jobs, and have INS Homeland Security called on them. So I don’t know how the workers themselves would like the rest of us to approach this situation.

I do know that this is a women’s issue, and therefore a feminist issue. The workers are women. The people who go to these salons? Mostly women. And not particularly rich women. So what is a feminist approach to the situation?

I’ve seen many people, sometimes men with an air of superiority to those frivolous women who insist on pretty nails say, well, don’t get manicures or pedicures then, do your own nails. Leaving aside the feasibility of this for any given woman (when I was in my final trimester, after a month of not being able to cut my own toenails, I asked my mother to do it for me because I couldn’t stand it any longer), this is an example what I think of as “purity politics.” It doesn’t actually effect change. It just keeps your own hands clean. If that’s what you want, that’s fine–you are not tainted by being part of the immediate exploitation of immigrant women workers in nail salons. But it’s not sustainable in the long run (try eating food in the US without being part of a chain of exploitation and abuse), which is why purity politics always turns into one-upmanship, and more importantly, it doesn’t actually help the people being exploited. Your personal decision not to get your nails done changes nothing, and even an organized boycott would probably only kill business to the point that these women would lose their jobs. Well, that doesn’t help them. They’d still be an inherently exploitable population due to their undocumented status, and they’d just end up being exploited in another industry.

I return to the Shirtwaist Strike. What about unionization? It’s not as though nail salons are inherently more exploitative environments than, say, coal mines.

And here we see how anti-immigrant, xenophobic policies work hand-in-hand with capitalist exploitation, by creating an underclass of people who have no legal recourse to exploitation. And the established unions have gotten very comfortable working within a legal framework, to the point that if an established union helps these workers organize, they will end up jobless and/or deported again, because established unions require legally registered workers.

So I started thinking about legality. The employers have dived into illegality, of course, by employing undocumented immigrants. Why must the solution be a legal one? What if the workers organized themselves with or without the covert help of the established unions and struck for contracts? How could such a contract be enforced extra-legally? Well…gangs and organized crime seem to do it. Employers who broke a contract could find their windows smashed, for instance. Employers who called Homeland Security on striking employees could find their places of business destroyed (I don’t mean fire, I mean more smashing). Of course, this brings us back to the association between organized labor and organized crime, and I realize there’s a reason for that association. When you are fighting capitalist exploitation backed by the force of the state, as you are in this situation, you need lawyers, guns, and money at the ready. You need to be backed up by force yourself. And who has lawyers, guns, and money to bring to the table? Organized crime does.

Anyway, this is all so much a flight of fancy. I’m not there. I’m not doing the work. I don’t know how the culture and experiences and background of the workers affects what they do or the solutions available to them. I just know that unless, say, amnesty and residency is offered to nail salon workers involved in organizing a union, which is unlikely, those workers are caught in a terrible bind and I don’t see a good way out. At this point, all I can really suggest is that if you are someone who goes to nail salons regularly, tip really really well, tip in cash, tip directly to the person doing your nails.

Feministe Book Review 2: The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker

If you are a leftist, a feminist, or an enthusiastic lover of NYC history, the 1909 Shirtwaist Strike is or should be an event of major importance on your historical radar. If, like me, you’re all three, it’s practically one of the most important events of the twentieth century.

In 1909, the mostly immigrant, mostly Jewish and partly Italian, almost entirely female workers in the shirtwaist manufacturing industry went on strike. They were a group that had to fight and advocate for themselves. Established Americans didn’t much care how these immigrant workers were treated, and the labor unions weren’t interested in organizing women–girls, they thought, didn’t have the grit it took to go out on strike and hang tough in the face of deprivation. The exploitation and sexual harassment in the industry was appalling, and after a workers’ meeting at Cooper Union on November 22, 1909, 15,000 women walked off their jobs. Within hours the number had grown to 25,000 (depending on whose numbers you read, the strike has also been known as the “Uprising of the 20,000”). It also spread outside of NYC, as women walked off the job in Chicago, Cleveland, and Rochester. The strike did not end until February 15, 1910. In the meantime, dozens of employers settled, and their employees were able to return to work victorious (the Triangle company held out and never settled; their name was destined to be written in NYC and labor history in letters of fire and blackened bone). The workers put out and sold a special edition of the New York Call, a local newspaper, to spread the word about their situation and demands. They picketed ceaselessly, despite the fact that they were regularly brutalized by cops and antagonized and set on by gangsters and sex workers paid by the shirtwaist bosses. They were sent to the workhouse and came back and picketed again. Amazingly, wealthy women became interested in their cause and came downtown to walk the picket-line alongside of the shirtwaist workers, where they were also attacked and arrested. Of course, this alliance did not last, as the workers did not appreciate the condescending attitudes and stingy contributions to the strike fund of the “mink brigade,” as they were called, and the wealthy women were alarmed and horrified by the heavy socialist bent of many if not most of the workers. Still, there was a brief moment when gender solidarity crossed class lines.

Theresa S. Malkiel, who wrote The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker was one of the socialists. She was a Jewish immigrant who had been one of the workers in this industry before she married out of it (she married a lawyer who also bought and sold real estate). She wrote a pretend diary of a striker who is radicalized by the strike and converts to the socialist cause (at the time it was originally published, I don’t believe that it was known to be fake), and in turn is able to convert her previously unsympathetic boyfriend. If you’re me, which I am, it was practically required reading once I found it.

The edition I read was published by Cornell University Press and has an extensive introduction by Francoise Basch (please forgive me; I don’t know how to do the cedilla under the “c” in Francoise here). It’s a pretty good introduction to the strike, the different streams of history that come together in it, and Malkiel herself. Basch does make some questionable choices, in my view, as when she portrays the strike as largely a failure–dozens of employers settled! Every other source I’ve read portrays it as a success if not a triumph! It demonstrated to the established labor unions that women were indeed tough enough to take on a huge industry and stay true to the cause! What more does Basch want? What strike would she consider successful? But OK, she makes a case. It’s not one I agree with, but it’s a reasonable case. In another place, she goes on and on about why Malkiel made her narrator a “native-born” American rather than a more representative Jewish worker, blathering about how this enables the reader to learn about radicalism along with Mary (the narrator) (Jews were more likely to have already been radicalized prior to immigration), allows her to have her narrator talk about how “noble” the Jewish women were, and tells labor leaders not to give up on the established American workers before finally admitting, in one sentence, that hey, Malkiel just might have been trying to garner sympathy for the strike by circumventing the anti-Semitism of the non-Jewish reader. Y’think?

Nonetheless, Basch establishes the context of the strike and the major players in it, and doesn’t forget to include my favorite piece of the strike lore. When, at the Cooper Union meeting, Clara Lemlich leapt to the stage and called for a strike (depending on the source, she either said “I’m tired of all this talk! Strike, strike, strike!” or “I am tired of listening to speakers….What we are here for is to decide whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike shall be declared–now.” I prefer the first version, but I am given to understand she was speaking in Yiddish, so it might just be a matter of translation.):

The Souvenir History of the Strike tells us that “the chairman then cried, ‘Do you mean faith? Will you take the old Jewish oath?’ and up came two thousand right hands, with the prayer, ‘If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither away from the arm I now raise.'” (31)

Anyway, the “diary” itself is fascinating, in my opinion, as Mary learns about the living conditions of her worse-paid immigrant co-workers, becomes a socialist, is arrested, goes to the workhouse, falls out with her family and her boyfriend, and reunites with her boyfriend as he is inspired to become a better socialist sort of person. It’s particularly touching if you have a soft spot for traditional leftist rhetoric, which I do. Mary comes to the realization that the socialist fervor must cross all lines in the interest of class unity, “man, woman, Jew, Gentile, dark and white alike” (137). She also experiences a feminist awakening, rebelling against her father telling her that unions were a good thing but never meant for the ladies, and noting that she and other women were carried under a mother’s heart, just as men were, and “What’s the difference between men and women when it comes to work? I walk under the same sky and tread the same earth as men do” (68).

This awakening to commonality makes the two instances of flat-out racism all the more jarring when they occur; they don’t come until late in the book, after more than one proclamation of the sort I describe above. The first concerns lynching, when the newly converted Jim is deeply upset at the way Mary and the other workers are being treated and says “In the South they put a noose around a man’s neck for insulting a woman. Here we’ve grown so callous and cold-blooded that we take it as a joke” (164). One could argue that this is mere ignorance on Malkiel’s part of what lynching really was, but why should she have been ignorant? Ida B. Wells had been active and on the lecture circuit in NYC, though it’s true she was first speaking in the years just active Malkiel’s immigration to the US, when Malkiel was working in the factories and unionizing her workplace in her spare time, but Wells’s activism continued for decades. Malkiel seems to be making the white feminist move of gesturing toward inclusion without actually paying attention to what black women are saying (though Malkiel would not have qualified as white at the time, of course, which is no excuse for that sort of behavior, anyway).

The next incident occurs just a few pages later and has even less relevance to the plot or the issues of the strike. Mary is on a train to somewhere-or-other for Reasons, and she goes to use the ladies’ room but gets lost:

…[I] landed in the porters’ quarters instead. It gives me a chill even now when I think of the half a dozen dark grinning faces. In anger I rushed back to my seat. (171)

Why is she angry? Why is she chilled? Because black working men have the temerity to smile in their own rooms? It’s a bizarre interlude: it make no difference to the action or plot, and if anything should have been an opportunity for Mary to expand on her previous realization that dark and white makes no difference in the eyes of socialism (obviously, this is untrue, but this is the ideology of the book). Instead, it’s a gratuitous insult. Why is it there? Well, I think it’s there specifically because of those earlier musings on socialist brotherhood. Don’t worry, it’s saying to its white readers. Mary and her Jewish and Italian sistren, they’re good white girls. They’re disgusted by black people. In other words, I think it’s an unconscious move to make sure no white readers are put off by the putative racial equality the book suggests.

Other choices Malkiel makes are interesting as well: Jim, Mary’s beau, becomes a socialist and devoted to the strike despite utter intransigence for the first half of the book. Basch convincingly argues that this is because Malkiel is ultimately a traditionalist when it comes to relations between men and women and doesn’t want readers to think that becoming a socialist means losing the opportunity to wed. I buy that, but I’m still unsure why she chose to have Jim come around rather than to have Mary meet some other nice young socialist man, maybe while she was canvassing the established unions for donations to the strike fund. It’s as though Malkiel is playing out a form of “the divine feminine urging man ever upward” vis-a-vis socialism. Mary’s pure example and steadfastness changes Jim’s heart. The transformation is quasi-divine–she doesn’t give him anything to read and think about, they don’t have a reasoned debate about it. He just one night randomly sees that it’s wrong for children to have to beg in the street (NYC was full of homeless children at the time).

Mary is dismissive of the mink brigade and listens for a while to suffragist speeches before concluding that the class war is more important than the ballot, and the latter will have to wait. Heartwarming, if you’re into it, which I am.

All in all, I’m very glad I read this book; it’s been on my list for a while. If you’re interested in labor history, women’s history, Jewish history, NYC history, it’s work getting a hold of. If you are interested in reading more about the strike, I recommend Triangle, by David von Drehle, which uses it as context for the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

Welcome back

For U.S. readers who had a long weekend, welcome back to the grind. For everyone else — those who don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, those who don’t get holidays off — welcome back as well. To start your Monday, here’s a piece on raising the minimum wage, which we absolutely need to do.

Support Striking Fast Food Workers

Today, fast food workers across the United States are striking for higher pay. Paltry minimum wages mean that workers are paid as little as $7.25 an hour — not nearly enough to live off of, let alone raise a family. More than 13 percent of fast food workers rely on food stamps to make ends meet, and a disproportionate number of fast food employees are women of color. Willietta Dukes is one woman who will be striking today. She writes:

America’s Prisons are a National Disgrace

This week at the Guardian (and in the national news media) there’s been much attention paid to the role of private contractors in our intelligence and military operations, after an NSA employee leaked classified documents about U.S. spying to Glenn Greenwald. I’m using my column this week to talk about a different kind of privatization in American security: The privatization of our prison system, which turns the building and management of prisons over to corporate entities. Of course, even non-privatized prisons in the U.S. are rife with abuses. But privatization creates strong financial incentives for increased incarceration; the actors who are incentivized are particularly powerful, politically connected and monied. There’s also little oversight and regulation of private prisons, as attempts to do so are met with significant push-back. A part of the column (content warning: the text below and particularly the linked column include descriptions of violent prison abuses):

Standing with Adria

Adria Richards, formerly of the company SendGrid, was at a tech conference this week when some dudes behind her made a series of inappropriate and sexual jokes. Annoyed by the pervasiveness of misogyny in the tech world, she snapped a photo of them and put in on Twitter with a complaint. One of the conference organizers spoke to the men and they apologized. Totally reasonable! Good response, PyCon. Later, one of the dudes got fired. Instead of getting mad at the company that made the choice to fire him, the internet hoards descended on Adria. She was on the receiving end of rape and death threats. Her address and phone number were published. Her blog and her company’s website came under DDoS attack. Oh and then her company, SendGrid, fired her (I’d be careful reading the comments on that Facebook post — there’s a whole lot of racism and sexism).