Tough working women / tough women working
Top: A member of the Chinese Staff and Workers Association beats the drum for labor rights at a New Year celebration in a high school gym in New York City’s Chinatown. Last year, the mostly female home care workers launched a week-long hunger strike to “stand up against racism and abusive powers.” One of the group’s key demands is fair pay for long, hard work: Home care workers put in 24-hour shifts, but are paid for only 13 hours.
Below: As chilly rain falls, a determined worker walks a UE picket line in St. Johnsbury, in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. The union members were striking against Fairbanks Scale Company’s unfair contract terms for wages and working conditions.
It's so rare to see women celebrated, or even pictured, for something other than being good-looking or fashionable. Men are also celebrated for being good-looking and fashionable, but they are just as frequently acknowledged for other qualities, as we all know. I can imagine the woman in the black-and-white photo being criticized as "plain." Would that adjective be applied to a similar man? No. Because men aren't assumed to be decorative. They're assumed to be actors in the world.
I do not remember the Fairbanks strike and did not hear about the Chinese Staff and Workers strike. Recent renovation of the Old Labor Hall in Barre, Vt has brought back awareness of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike by textile workers mostly women and children in Lawrence, Massachusetts and that Vermont, particularly Barre accepted caring for many of the strikers' children who were going hungry during the strike. The conditions were still horrible compared to today after the strike but some gains were made. Although I suspect that some of the slaughter house conditions now probably mimic those conditions. Not to be confused with a recent documentary of the same name about Taliban women.