In August 1918, as U.S. troops fought in the trenches of France, the ladies of a North Side Red Cross auxiliary club came to shocking realization.
“One of the workers remarked that she now has to pay her laundress $3 a day,” the Pittsburgh Post recounted. “Another one exclaimed that so did she, and wasn’t it awful the way things are going. Then a regular chorus broke out . . . each had received a telephone call from her laundress which was an announcement of new terms,” including higher pay and streetcar fare.
How had low-paid washerwomen across the city simultaneously decided to charge the same rate — a 50-percent increase for many? The answer lay in the Negro Women’s Industrial Labor Union, a unique and seemingly short-lived organization that fought for Black domestic workers’ rights in Pittsburgh.
The founder
The union’s history is murky: Only a few articles in the mainstream press cover its activities between 1918 and 1920. What’s clear is that the Negro Women’s Industrial Labor Union was the work of Frances Riley Bolling (sometimes spelled Francis), a Titusville-born Black community activist.
Married to G.H. Bolling, a prominent physician (and the sister of a noted poet), she had spent decades working to improve local Black women’s working conditions. In the late 1890s Bolling founded the Young Women’s Friendly Institute, a school along Sheridan Avenue that offered music lessons and job training. Contemporary articles suggest she was already considering labor organization for Black women at the turn of the century, although her plan wouldn’t catch on for nearly two decades.
A new union
The United States joined the war in Europe in 1917, and by the next year millions of American men were under arms. Mass conscription shifted the labor force, with many women working for the first time in war industries. The tight labor market led to rising wages and government intervention in key industries like railroads and steel; steel organizers took advantage of the high demand to launch a sweeping (but ultimately doomed) Pittsburgh-based campaign in 1919.
Then, in August 1918, an item in the Afro-American Notes section of the Pittsburgh Press pointed to a new organizing wave:
One of the latest outgrowths of the present war conditions among the colored women is the formation of a Negro Women’s Industrial Labor union which permanently organized and a national headquarters established at 3042 Penn Ave. [Bolling’s home address]. An interesting event was held Friday morning, Aug. 2, and it was decided to hold a public mass meeting Friday evening Aug. 9 at the Shiloh Baptist Church for the purpose of interesting the women of the race, who are engaged in vocations of all kinds. It was also decided that the new union rate an schedule of $3 per day and car fare for nine hours work, and time and a half for overtime for all women doing day’s work should go into effect Aug. 1. . . . Women performing work of any kind can give their applications to one of the organizers and by joining the union become affiliated with a great body of Negro women, who are compelled to resort to honest labor in many new and hitherto unknown vocations in order to eke out a livelihood.
Unity of effort
By accepting Black women in every profession, the union followed the model of industrial unionism — “one big union” for all workers — then popularized by radicals like the Industrial Workers of the World. Members swiftly demanded the new rates and benefits; white workers reportedly joined the chorus. With Bolling as president, the union set a goal of 1,000 new members within 60 days.
The union launched itself into local Black cultural life. There was a “street frolic” on the East End and a September mass meeting at a Baptist Church (the pastor addressed members on “the dignity of labor, the value of unity of effort, and the importance of co-operation,” the Press reported).
The workers’ new demands soon set off a whirlwind in the white employing class. Laundresses scrubbed and ironed clothes in well-to-do families’ basements across the city, and it didn’t take long for their $3 demand to draw attention. In September 1918, less than two months after the union made its demands, an anonymous Squirrel Hill employer announced her plan to form an employers’ union on the Pittsburgh Post society page. The writer said even her current $2.64-per-day rate was too high, and pointed to washerwomen wearing fine fabric blouses. “It would be bad enough if they were creating this agitation because they thought they deserved it,” the unnamed woman wrote. “But, far worse, they are doing it because they can.”
“The power of the organization”
The letter prompted a war of words on the society page. An anonymous laundry worker said some employers “would love to trample under their feet good, honest, upright, hard-working women whose sons had gone to fight for their country and democracy .” At a mass meeting of the Negro Women’s Industrial Labor Union, members debated and ultimately voted against publicly shaming their new opponent. “Most everyone was getting $3 a day now, and why quarrel with a woman who was still defending the $2 scale?” the Post said of the debate. Clearly the union — now claiming some 2,000 local members — had already won a moral victory.
Bolling told reporters she hoped further victories would enable women to keep working as laundresses, where they were safer than in industrial plants. If they could win overtime, car fare and $3 for a nine-hour day, they could next push for eight hours at the same rate, she said. “Mrs. Bolling’s home at 3042 Penn Avenue has been the hub of things nationally for Negro washerwomen, cleaners, hairdressers, waitresses and the others who have seen the power of the organization,” the Post said.
Fading away
It’s unclear what followed for the union. Mentions in the mainstream press drop off after about 1920, with a few public addresses and parties announced in the months after the $3-per-day campaign. Men fighting overseas returned to the U.S., displacing women from industrial work they’d taken up in wartime. A series of defeats in 1919 and the early ’20s led to a dark decade for organized labor; it’s possible Bolling’s work fizzled in those conditions. There appears to be little public record of the union in other cities, although contemporary reporting suggested it was growing elsewhere.
Bolling died in 1940 in Pittsburgh, at 63 years old. She is buried in Titusville. National organization for domestic workers remained difficult for those who came after her, and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 excluded them from protections afforded to other workers. Still, heroic efforts continued in the decades that followed, and to this day.
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