In the past, craft unions in the industry had only organized skilled workers, leaving unskilled workers, including women, unrepresented. These cultural attitudes – widely shared by women as well as men – conveniently allowed companies to treat women as temporary workers, keeping wages low and excluding women from benefits like pensions and healthcare where they existed at all. Companies justified this policy by invoking the prevailing notion that women’s real place was in the home, not the workforce. Most companies hired only single women and forced them to quit when they married. Women workers were restricted to so-called “women’s jobs” and those jobs were invariably the lowest paid in the plants. Overall, nearly one-third of the workers were women. Unlike most of the mass production industries, though, the electrical manufacturing industry had always employed a significant number of women workers. Organizing a union was a battle, sometimes violent, and seemed to be most appropriately the province of men. In part this reflected the common prejudice of the time. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, when electrical industry workers first began to organize their shops and joined together to form the UE, the union was decidedly dominated by male workers and their concerns. Women workers at first played a somewhat marginal role in the life and leadership of UE, though a few notable women like Margaret Darin of Local 601 and Ruth Young of Local 475 rank among the pioneers. March each year is Women’s History Month, so this is a good time to reflect on the contributions that UE women have made to their union and to the long, continuing struggle for women’s equality in the United States.
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