The Political Economy of Domestic Work

St. Louis stood at the crossroads of multiple and competing forces as a confluence of northern, southern, and western-frontier racial politics. A border city, it was both “the gate city to the Promised Land” and “traditionally southern” with its “uneven” mix of racial liberalism and Jim Crow practices. Most public accommodations and leisure sites, including theaters, restaurants, ballparks, and swimming pools were racially segregated, yet black commuters could sit where they pleased on public streetcars. African Americans in the Gateway City did not confront the large-scale disfranchisement projects of Deep South states and so influenced election outcomes and held political office. A veneer of racial politeness defined the social order, masking a hostile climate for black residents and stark racial disparities in all major quality-of-life indicators. The eighth largest home for African Americans in 1930 attracted migrants who, if initially wide-eyed with “Promised Land” daydreams, quickly met the sobering realities of low-wage jobs if there were any at all, no adequate health-care facilities, poor housing, no recreational facilities, segregation, and limited educational opportunities. By the early 1930s the African American population reached fully eleven percent of the total population, marking a five percent increase in the total population of African Americans in St. Louis since the dawn of the new century. African American women migrants outpaced their male counterparts when both groups were of prime working age.Footnote ⁴

Like most cities at the time, St. Louis's labor market for women workers had a sharp division of labor along race and gender lines, with native white women earning the highest wages working under relatively better working conditions. The top two categories of work for native white women, clerical and manufacturing, had nearly equal percentages while seventy-nine percent of black women worked in domestic and personal service, only thirteen percent were in manufacturing, and a meager two percent were in the clerical field. The overwhelming majority of black women in St. Louis, as across the nation, worked as maids in private homes and hotels, elevator tenders, and waitresses. Of the total number of women workers in St. Louis's domestic and personal service industry in 1930, roughly forty-four percent were black, fifty percent were native white, and only seven percent were “foreign-born white.” The concentration of black women in the domestic and personal service sector and their high rates of labor force participation in a city whose politicians, business leaders, and urban boosters boasted that women workers “performed … at [a] lower cost than those in other cities” formed the basis for black women workers to address some of the most pressing labor relations issues of the day.Footnote ⁵

African American migrants shunned live-in work because of its Old South baggage. Freedom, indeed modernity, meant sustained detachment from white domestic spaces. As one organizer put it, the ultimate goal of a legitimate domestic labor reform program was to break the “harness of household slavery.” Like many domestic workers arriving into the urban Midwest and North during the early twentieth century, Luella Webster specified that she wanted work that will honor her “desire to go home at night” and an employer who “will pay me enough.” Of all the migrant women who constructed meanings of “African American working womanhood,” Mary Young, a newly single mother of five living in Mississippi, put it best when she insisted that her northern trek afforded “something after working,” or a steady, stable, and respectable income sizeable enough to make ends meet. For Young and many others, migration to the urban Midwest promised recognition not simply as workers, but as breadwinners.Footnote ⁶

Domestic labor reflected the very worst aspects of economic collapse. The Depression brought worsening conditions to an already embattled employment field, intensifying the main grievance that domestics across the United States long had aired, namely that employers refused to set clear expectations, wages, and boundaries. There was a decline in job offers for “live-out” work, or the arrangement whereby a domestic worker returned to her own home after workday's end instead of remaining on the employer's premises. As early as the final months of 1930 as many as fifty percent of domestic jobs compensated in the form of room and board only, according to one employment bureau. Before the stock market crash, employers made live-in arrangements during the winter, but a July 1931 UL report found that such a configuration became year-round practice as the Depression wore on. “There is yet the tendency to reduce wages,” read Jennie C. Buckner and Marie C. Smith's (later Wilburn) monthly report. “Many household employers want girl to stay on the place nights. This custom is usually enforced more in winter than in summer seasons, but now it is given as one way to reduce expenses and save time.” Living out meant greater expenses paid on the employers’ part since most domestic workers could not afford transportation. Living in, by contrast required carfare but at a reduced rate, and in many cases excluded cash as a form of payment. Because employers themselves financed live-out arrangements by covering transportation costs, this “perk” was among the first to go. The cheapest method, the live-in arrangement, was typically unaccommodating, as it was common for workers to sleep on a cot in a kitchen, a living room, a child's bedroom, a cramped room where all servants slept, or in “a basement room unfit for human occupancy.” Some employers used not only room and board but also clothing as a form of payment: One asked the St. Louis UL for a domestic worker who was willing to accept “$5.00 per week—no carfare and not to be paid in cash but clothing from her ready-to-wear store.” Clothing-as-compensation was hardly sufficient, and the family wage ideal was largely unattainable for most families regardless of race or ethnicity.Footnote ⁷

Severe wage cuts reduced options. “In many instances pay for general work has reduced fifty percent,” read one mid-1931 report, while the following year wages plummeted with the typical pay dropping to one dollar per day. African American women under the age of twenty-one had few opportunities since employers preferred experienced workers because they could now afford them. Instead of reducing wages, some families shrunk workforces, forcing domestics to do “double work for same pay.” Attempting to avoid leaving employees jobless or implementing a hiring freeze, a small minority of employers reduced hours and wages to keep their current workforce in place and continue to hire new workers. In a rare instance, a company employing elevator operators cut wages by fifty percent, reduced the ten-hour day to five hours, and doubled its workforce. Most employers, however, reduced or eliminated jobs, slashing wages and compensating experienced workers at a rate significantly less than the value of their labor.Footnote ⁸

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that domestic workers deployed the language of familial need and claimed breadwinner status in letters to the UL and even refused such arrangements during the Depression's worst years. Henryetta Makins, a twenty-six-year-old widow, asked for a housekeeping position that would “keep my child as near as possible.” Less than a year later, twenty-year-old Jane Story complained, “Wages are not enough to support one—save four.” Providing for herself, mother, a younger sibling, and another relative, Story appealed for inclusion in Executive Secretary John T. Clark's plan for “increasing the number of opportunities for the heads of Negro families to earn an adequate and regular livelihood.” She pressed Clark to recognize African American women workers as deserving household heads. Casting their labor as valuable precisely because men, children, and extended kin depended on it, these women exposed the family wage model of a dependent wife and children and wage-earning husband as a myth. Legitimating their right to suitable employment, African American domestic workers used community institutions to portray themselves as critical financial caretakers in ways comparable to the impact of men's work.Footnote ⁹

Black Women and the UL

Black women domestic workers who aligned themselves with the UL did not gravitate toward community institutions naturally; they did so deliberately. Few, if any, early-twentieth-century community organizations in St. Louis were more systematically focused on black working-class issues. While the UL wished to offer a comprehensive set of programs in the early 1930s “because the question of making a living has been the worst problem Negroes have met and is growing more critical,” staffers focused on “attempting to increase and improve the working opportunities for Negroes.” They located job opportunities to give black newcomers a sense of whether a move to the city was feasible. An “agency devoted to social service work among Negroes” with “a board which includes men and women of both races,” the St. Louis UL was a comprehensive resource for black workers. Rising onto the scene a year following the notorious East St. Louis Race Riot of 1917, the well-staffed local chapter maintained a wide-reaching network, including white community leaders and a comprehensive database of economic, residential, and social information about black residents. It comes as little surprise that union membership for black male workers was one of the UL's priorities since its leader earned a nationally recognized prolabor reputation as former director of the Pittsburgh UL. Shortly after starting his post in St. Louis, John T. Clark created three independent black unions, all under the auspices of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). He also helped to organize building service, hotel, and building trade workers. Under Clark's leadership, the St. Louis UL promoted racial progress by seeking to build a solidly employed black working class. The agency took upon itself the Herculean task of inserting black workers into the labor force, serving as a quasi union for workers denied access to white labor organizations, forming partnerships with the few unions that permitted blacks to join, and challenging discriminatory laws and customs in hiring and state economic policies.Footnote ¹⁰

The St. Louis Urban League's employment bureau became one of the largest and most comprehensive placement agencies for African American workingwomen in the St. Louis area. As the hub of the UL's “industrial placement” program, women clients legitimated the organization's service to the local community. Across 1933, UL workers estimated nearly 100,000 residents—male and female—“came in and out of our headquarters,” with two-thirds of that number seeking employment. The Women's Division of the UL's Industrial Department saw the most traffic since women formed the majority of black workers who perused job notices, completed applications, and underwent preliminary interviews. “During the depression 30's fully 90% of the [job] placements” fell into the “domestic and personal service field,” read a survey of St. Louis UL services from the year of its founding to the early 1940s. African American women had more jobs available to them than did men, but women, too, faced an employment shortage because so many of the largest subgroup of new black migrants sought work. The UL office felt firsthand the brunt of this economic and demographic shift. A backlog of thousands of unemployed and underemployed women faced consecutive months with no job prospects in sight because of the large number of women job seekers, shrinking job openings, and white employers who were reluctant to, or refused to, hire black women. Between 1929 and 1933, the abundance of temporary work, the overwhelming number of prospective employees, and the poor quality of job assignments meant that for any given month, only between one hundred to two hundred African American women were new applicants, while those who fit the “re-applicant category” typically numbered between eight hundred and twelve hundred. UL Executive Secretary Clark told a Sunday radio program audience that his placement agency “always [had] a larger number of women [applicants] than men.” With a municipal employment agency that operated under the assumption “that white girls could be had very reasonably and were much more desirable in homes,” the St. Louis UL's Industrial Department rose to prominence. Swamped daily with requests from white employers for “Negro help” and demands from African American women for employment worthy of respect, the UL devoted considerable time and energy to its Women's Department. After the summer of 1933 these efforts intensified when the UL's industrial committee agreed to take over the employment bureau of the YWCA's Phyllis Wheatley branch after budget constraints threatened its program. In the worst years of the Great Depression, the uplift agency found itself deeply enmeshed in the lives of the predominant group of black workingwomen in the city.Footnote ¹¹

The indefatigable efforts of the UL's black women staffers who lead the Women's Division, including Jennie C. Buckner, Zenobia S. Johnson, Marie C. Wilburn, and Valla D. Abbington, account for why so many of the more than eighty-five percent of black women working “in the domestic line” selected the St. Louis UL as a primary resource. From the late 1920s through the mid-1940s, Buckner, Johnson, Wilburn, and Abbington all led the “women and girls” wing of the Industrial Department, which began handling women clients after March 15, 1929. Establishing an employment wing as early as 1919, UL staffers later housed its female clientele under a separate department ten years later. The women staffers’ meticulous reports reflected deep commitment to and concern for domestics’ well-being; they scrupulously attended to black women's labors, locating avenues to express their own labor feminist and antiracist inclinations.Footnote ¹²

In addition to confinement to low-wage work, the rampant sexual abuse of black women by white men, often facilitated by the domestic work arrangement, made the “protection of women” a priority for Johnson, Wilburn, and Buckner. In the 1930 report, “Orders from Bachelors,” they detailed sexual harassment, rape, and solicitation for sex work, revealing an active sex work industry whose clients and providers depended on employment bureaus for referrals and hiring. Black and white men requested and likely demanded sex behind the mask of the domestic help order. In some cases, like the solicitor of “a girl to entertain,” orders were “plainly given, so that it is possible to see what the motive is.” Other “[requests] are more crafty, and give the usual order.” More veiled notices typically requested cleaning and cooking services with a wage of the “usual price,” or about three dollars per day. With this sort of announcement it often took the UL three or four referrals to “extract the real story” by “read[ing] between the lines.” For example, staffers referred four women to a job advertising a seven-dollars-per-week wage to manage a two-person home. On their first day, the four met a white man who “impose[d] himself” and welcomed “couples to drop in from the street.” Two other women accepted an order for a “nice looking girl” between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Upon their arrival, the “employer” offered the women makeup, perfume, a house shared by “transients,” and money should they “entertain the men callers.” The employer of recently married twenty-three-year-old Gertrude Simmons “carried her into the living room to talk about the work and immediately began to make overtures to her, putting hands over her body.” “Orders from Bachelors” reveals the political commitments of UL women staffers and their impact on UL practice. Fighting for the “protection of black womanhood,” Buckner and others argued, or organizing for black women workers’ “bodily integrity and personal dignity,” was indispensable to the UL's mission to fortify the economic prospects of black workers.Footnote ¹³

Taking the Militant Turn: The Household Workers Mass Meeting of September 1933

The Women's Department took a militant turn as the Great Depression worsened: “Evidences of the flagrant exploitation of domestics” who had “no chance of protecting themselves” compelled the group “to take whatever steps we saw fit to help correct this situation.” Just months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) into law in June 1933, the St. Louis UL hosted a mass meeting for household workers. The NIRA marked Roosevelt's early attempt to recover industry through regulating wages, prices, production codes, and business and labor practices. The Act's most well-known section, 7a, recognized collective bargaining as a right of the industrial workforce. Architects created the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to implement and oversee the new measure. Though not included, nonindustrial workers and their allies across the country wrote themselves into the new protection and tailored it to fit their work situations. Applying the NIRA to African American workers in general and domestic workers in particular, the UL organized a September 1933 mass meeting. Advertising at motion picture houses, in churches, and through local newspapers, organizers discovered that, “apparently our meeting is attracting quite a little attention and the prospects are that we will have a good discussion.”Footnote ¹⁴

Between five hundred and one thousand domestics and their sympathizers packed the YWCA's Phyllis Wheatley branch on September 21, 1933. Preparing his staff for potential insubordination on the part of participants, John T. Clark confided to League of Women Voters leader Edna Gellhorn just one day before, “We are trying to use every precaution to see that the meeting does not get out of hand.” With Afro-Christian overtones and narratives of racial ascent, gatherers opened the meeting with the singing of James Weldon Johnson's “Lift Every Voice and Sing” followed by prayer led by a Central Methodist Episcopal pastor and opening remarks by UL staffer Zenobia S. Johnson. The meeting was “to arrive at some code for Negro general household workers, in order that they might be better benefitted by the policies of the N.R.A.” Aiding the effort was the Emergency Advisory Council (EAC), a national UL initiative that worked to “understand the complicated Federal Relief machinery and interpret to Negroes their meaning.” Program leaders urged staffers “to be alert to see that Negroes are not left entirely out of the benefits of this legislation and report to proper authorities all violations of the spirit as well as the letter of the laws’ [sic] and to seek representation on as many federal and city committees as it is reasonable to expect that our problems would justify.” The St. Louis EAC chapter organized “with the hope that some cooperative action will result leading to an improvement in wages, hours of work and general standards of these people (household workers).”Footnote ¹⁵

In organizing the mass meeting, black working-class women exploited a New Deal ethic of government responsibility by applying Roosevelt's program to domestic workers despite their exclusion from labor standards. In doing so, they facilitated women's entry into the ranks of the thousands of workers who responded to the NIRA's passage by fomenting increasing workplace struggles at the local level. The September 1933 mass meeting marked a watershed in the history of domestic worker organizing in St. Louis, setting the stage for changes in local UL employment policy and for expanded militant advocacy by black women clients. Even the phrase “mass meeting” reflects the UL's politicization. Unwittingly, the NIRA helped to facilitate a social revolution in household employment.

Domestic workers used the UL-sponsored program to mirror industrial workers in their increasingly public, militant, and collective claims to economic dignity. Negotiation and appeal to local opinion comprised the women workers’ main tactics. At the mass meeting, attendees made singular contributions, citing multiple indignities and offering suggestions for improvements. Stressing the point that domestics should earn enough to both “live comfortably” and “set aside some money for old age,” one speaker suggested a wage scale equivalent to pre-Depression levels. Inverting the traditional logic of the family wage system, a domestic worker stressed the importance of securing an adequate wage to support husbands, children, and extended kin when she estimated that about one in every five domestic workers was the breadwinner of her household. Echoing the experiences of many, another complained how a worker earned only $1.50 for three full days of work and her employer consistently stopped clocks to force her to do overtime without pay. After some discussion, attendees agreed that local employment agencies should adopt uniform minimum wage scales. “Using her own personal example of success,” one commentator urged women to negotiate directly with employers. Another suggested that the public ought to cover reduced carfare for day workers. Before attendees parted ways they voted to grant “authority” to UL staff “to take whatever steps we saw fit to help correct this situation.” Despite the affair being billed as a gathering for “well trained women experts in the field of Household Economies … [who] argued for higher standards in wages and service,” the move toward standardization was by no means a middle-class phenomenon. Instead, black working-class women had a direct hand in shaping its course.Footnote ¹⁶

The 1933 mass meeting was the culmination of years of grassroots organizing. Local conferences became a primary means by which domestics inserted the ignored field of household labor into New Deal conversations at local, state, and national levels. At a previous 1930 conference sponsored by St. Louis social welfare organizations—the Phyllis Wheatley Branch of the YWCA, the Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, and the League of Women Voters—domestic workers “bravely and intelligently” “state[d] their side of the case,” wrote T. Arnold Hill, the National UL Director of Industrial Relations. Following a morning session on “the household employment situation in St. Louis” with leaders at various employment placement centers speaking on the subject, the afternoon session featured domestic worker Florence Eldridge who addressed the topic “Dignifying and Standardizing Household Employment.” Other domestics had a chance to speak during a session in which they aired their grievances. Keeping tabs on black workers’ activities throughout the United States, Hill featured African American women in the spring of 1930 when he reported his observations in Opportunity, the UL's national organ. St. Louis household workers offered their “point of view,” he wrote, when they directed their comments to employers who complained that they were “socially unfit” and “technically inefficient.”Footnote ¹⁷

Critiques such as these, common during the period, reveal the means by which African American women resisted employer authority. “Inefficiency” and “unfitness” were code for slowdowns, thefts, sabotage, and absenteeism—tactics domestics devised to wrest some control over their time and bodies. Speaking after household employers gave their “point of view,” working-class women responded with a litany of abuses they suffered at the hands of housewives. Employers failed to disclose the amount of washing for the day, added responsibilities to agreements, required employees to care for relatives on an overnight basis without overtime, and turned back the hands of clocks to prolong work time. As their testimonies revealed, women cleaned furnaces, built fires, baled ashes, and washed second-, third-, and fourth-story windows from the outside. Hill concluded that domestics “objected to the implication of servility as a racial trait” and hated “the thought of their children following in their footsteps.” The “give and take” approach of the 1930 St. Louis Women's Conference on Household Employment Relations became a “forerunner to better understanding of the problems on both sides and ultimate improvement.” As the UL turned to negotiation to manage employer-employee relations, it was clear that the 1930 conference served as a “forerunner” for future efforts at standardization.Footnote ¹⁸

St. Louis household labor reformers modeled their efforts after national campaigns that gained momentum in the early 1930s. The “Suggested Minimum Standards for the Full-Time General House Worker,” established at a 1931 national conference of the National Committee on Employer-Employee Relationships in the Home, was the product of a coherent and organized effort on the part of middle-class clubwomen, reformers, social scientists, and state-based labor organizations who pioneered the “recent re-discovery of household workers by those who are interested in the welfare of wage-earning women.” Led by University of Chicago home economics professor Hazel Kyrk, the committee drew up what The Literary Digest called a “Magna Carta.” The document called for uniform wages, hours, and working conditions through mutual agreement and cooperation between “adequate” placement agencies and employer and employee organizations. The 1931 report required that live-in domestics work a maximum of fifty-four hours per week, while live-out employees should not exceed a workweek of forty-eight. Overtime pay based on an hourly rate, one free day per week, a one-week vacation with pay, private living space with “convenient access to modern bathroom facilities,” accident insurance, and an employment contract addressed other immediate concerns. Systems that differentiated between skilled and unskilled workers, reference letters from former employers, and tests to measure competency rounded out the list. An early-twentieth-century example of a labor feminist politics sensitive to racial discrimination, the standards stipulated that “the wages of colored workers should be equal to those of white workers of equal competence.”Footnote ¹⁹

Reformers analyzed the root cause of overlooking domestic work in national labor efforts. The sheer numbers of women in the field alone warranted intervention, not to mention that the field was known as a site for some of the worst forms of labor exploitation. At the 1931 conference, “it was fully recognized that no machinery existed for establishing and maintaining standards either in the form of organizations of employers and employees or of placement bureaus, and that the hope of making desired standards real depended on such machinery.” Reformers understood industrial work as logical, rational, and thus naturally subjected to “scientific” processes. By contrast, household work appeared to be individualistic, decentralized, and “personal” and so posed unique challenges. “Should the problem of household employment be approached as many employers insist as one of right personal relations or of right economic relations?” advocates questioned. Kyrk answered by underscoring the anachronistic image, rejected by actual workers, of the domestic as part of “the family group with the status of the old-time servant whose duties of loyalty, unstinted service and consideration only of the family's need.” Standardization, or the program by which reformers would modernize household labor, aimed not only to regulate hours, earnings, and conditions, but also to give lie to the notion that “any woman can do housework.” Stripping domestic work of the personal dimension, reformers insisted that domestic work required skills learned by training, just like industrial work. This recasting was to strengthen the case for reform.Footnote ²⁰

We should not mistake inclusion of an antidiscrimination clause in the 1931 Suggested Minimum Standards for sustained interest in and long-term commitment to black working-class women. It would not have existed but for the pioneering black women social scientists and radical labor activists struggling nationally and locally who prioritized black working-class women's economic lives. What distinguished black professional women's efforts to prioritize the lives of black working-class women was sustained attentiveness to those largely overlooked in majority white organizations and committees. Johnson, Wilburn, Buckner, and Abbington were local iterations of national figures like Ella Baker, Marvel Cooke, and Dorothy Height, who at the national level drew attention to twentieth-century “slave markets.” The codes that domestic workers and staffers of the Women's Division crafted took shape in the conversations at the 1930 Women's Conference on Household Employment and in the context of the national household labor reform movement.Footnote ²¹

After the 1933 mass meeting, UL staffers quickly mobilized resources and contacts. John T. Clark formed the Committee on Household Service Problems, which leaders later changed to Committee on Household Employment Relations. This internal UL committee of staffers and friends of the organization included Edna Gellhorn, Zenobia S. Johnson, Fannie Cook, and Jennie C. Bucker. In addition, three subcommittees developed to investigate organizing domestic workers with the AFL, connect with the Employment Executives Organization “so that they could discuss and work out a minimum wage that would be satisfactory to the group and to the employers,” and organize “round table discussions among groups of employers of household labor.” The group also committed to publicizing the effort “so that better standards could be had in this area, whether or not these workers were covered under a code.”Footnote ²²

The St. Louis UL's erstwhile concerns about upsetting employers seemed to take a backseat when it came to wages, the issue that most consumed staffers’ time and energy. “Quite a discussion as to hours and wages ensued,” read the minutes of an UL meeting following the 1933 conference. A month later, staffers required employers who used their employment bureau to pay a minimum wage of $1.50 plus carfare for day work and $5.00 and carfare weekly. Staffers took their new requirement to UL board members, urging them “to adopt such a recommendation and put it in practice at once” so that placement officers would no longer send “out persons … on jobs paying less than the standards.” The UL's Industrial Department persuaded the Executive Committee of the need to standardize the wage scale and presented a strong case to the UL board for the same. By the end of October 1933 the new standard was in place, though it amounted to only half of the typical pre-Depression rate and only half of what workers had suggested. Remembered as “the first minimum standard in St. Louis for wages for household service,” the move stabilized the Industrial Department's wage scale after a round of severe wage fluctuations.Footnote ²³

The emergence of the Urban League's employment bureau in the 1930s and its power to enforce standards because of domestic worker organizing constituted a radical moment for the uplift organization. Despite declining placements that came “naturally, when we quoted our minimum wages to prospective employers,” the UL enforced the new standard. It widened outreach. In early 1934, for example, through a household conference in Webster Groves, a suburb with a sizable black population, the employment office tapped a new pool of employers willing to abide by the new standard. Some domestic workers, however, cared little about the new wage stipulation as they were desperate for work and were “willing to work for less than what we (the UL) were asking for them.” By the end of 1934, UL staffers reported an increase in the number of placements paying higher than the standard. Their efforts bore fruit: “We emphasized sending out experienced, efficient help in cases where higher wages were being sought.” The staff even encouraged other employment agencies to follow suit. For instance, in 1938 the UL persuaded the State Employment Service to accept the standard, but after a change in its administration “this agreement was ignored and emphasis put on numbers placed rather than standards and race welfare.” By 1939, the “[standard] rates hold now and as far as possible are adhered to.” So important were wages that the UL changed one important detail. From initially considering live-in work a special case, after some discussion, the UL reasoned that live-in workers must be included because most domestic workers consistently rejected such offers, and a substantial number of these substandard work offers went unfulfilled. Under staff member Charles Collier, a local leader in the National Negro Congress, it therefore demanded five dollars per week for live-ins.Footnote ²⁴

The militancy of the Women's Division, and that of Collier, was well represented in post-September 1933 efforts. At the 1933 September mass meeting Johnson framed the purpose of the gathering as applying the New Deal to household work, but only a few months after the meeting, staff emphasized the goal of giving power to domestics to shape UL operations. Women's Division staffers’ insistence on enforcing a higher wage scale came as a result of domestic workers’ testimony. “The action [of formalizing the wage scale], a UL report found, “resulted from the expressions that the workers themselves were given an opportunity to make at a mass meeting … for the purpose of learning the sentiment and reactions of the workers.”Footnote ²⁵ The women staffers accorded black working-class women with the authority to devise solutions to their own problems, a tactic also used by national civil rights worker Ella Baker, whose political organizing notably grew in the crucible of Depression-era economic activism. As an incident in late 1933 involving factory workers underscored, the UL's labor militancy assumed the form of support for worker input and, to some extent, workers’ control. After an entire workforce of twenty-four women lost their jobs at a paint company, UL staffers decided that “further action on this matter depends on what the girls themselves decide to do in protest against this unfairness, with whatever cooperation the UL can give them.”Footnote ²⁶

An Expansive Labor Reform Program

In cases regarding employer power over workplace relations and structure, UL staff typically advocated accommodation while workers often pushed for outright defiance. In some cases, what were “petty faults” to UL staff members were serious infractions to wage-earning women.Footnote ²⁷ In their readiness to implement their own sense of the value of their labor and apply aggressive approaches to securing changes that accorded dignity and respect, African American women posed challenges to employers, UL staffers, and even to other labor groups. For example, six maids working at the Roosevelt Hotel found themselves outside of the UL's good graces as they implemented their version of labor dignity. The women refused to accept a rotating schedule whereby a few would work during select weeks and have at least one free Sunday. Unsatisfied, the women demanded all Sundays off for all maids, and, after having been refused such a request, walked off the job. They tried to keep a day reserved for important religious and community work as well as rest and rejuvenation, but their collective resistance did not translate into support. Collier reported, “The girls were not justified in pursuing such action, and had no redress because the policy of all hotels is to keep a minimum number of employees themselves on duty on Sundays.” The UL found the incident an example of how “sometimes Negro employees themselves make unreasonable and unfair demands.” Similarly, wives of personal service workers and women household employees garnered an equal degree of disdain. Organizers formed a Ladies’ Auxiliary in June 1935 to create “some real strength” within the ranks of the janitors group, also creating “a nucleus of the formation of an organization of household workers.” Women members angered workers and UL officials alike when they envisioned “a program not only as an auxiliary of the janitors’ organization but also as an organization of women employed in the building service field.”Footnote ²⁸

Examples of women workers creating their own labor reform program suggest that while employers could and often did circumvent standards and Industrial Department leaders selected which aspects to enforce, domestics carried an enhanced measure of power by virtue of the newly established code to devise and implement their own reform program. Women workers certainly challenged employer authority prior to the UL's intervention, but their resistance assumed greater dimensions during the 1930s as Women's Division leaders began responding in a formal capacity to women workers’ complaints. The 1933 household mass meeting and shifts in UL policy lent moral legitimacy and institutional backing to women's workplace resistance even as UL personnel critiqued women workers’ politics.