Labor Day Monday is a new weekly Labor update on Blog for Iowa.by Tracy Kurowski
By unanimous consent, the delegates at the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh elected Liz Shuler as the AFL-CIO’s first woman Secretary-Treasurer on Thursday, September 17, 2009. Sister Shuler is not only the first woman to hold that position, she is also the youngest officer ever elected to head the nation’s largest labor federation.
The other newly elected leaders now at the helm of the AFL-CIO are President Richard Trumpka, a mineworker and son and grandson of mineworkers, and Executive Vice President Arlene Holt-Baker, AFSCME organizer, African-American, and daughter of a laborer and domestic worker.
Both Shuler, who hails from the IBEW, and Holt-Baker follow in the footsteps of Linda Chavez-Thompson who was elected as Executive VP in 1995, the first women ever elected to leadership of the AFL-CIO.
It is significant that two out of the three union leaders are women considering how few women hold leadership positions in business, academia, politics or unions.
Nearly eighty years after women were first given suffrage, they represent only seventeen percent of elected leaders in the Senate and House of Representatives.
Iowa has yet to elect a woman to higher office, despite the fact that this was fantasized about fifty-one years ago in Billy Wilder’s 1948 romantic-comedic film “A Foreign Affair,” in which actress Jean Arthur played a character that has yet to exist in real life: an Iowa congresswoman.
As a guest to the convention on behalf of the Quad City Federation of Labor, I was witness to this election and must note the great strides that the AFL-CIO has taken in recent years to achieve diversity in race, gender and age. Though the delegates were still largely male, white and over the age of fifty (like our Congress), the credentials committee reported that forty-seven percent of delegates were either women or people of color.
Women make up 50.7% of the general population in the U.S. and 46.5% of the total U.S. labor force. However, they still rarely hold leadership positions in the workforce. According to the U.S. Dept. of Labor, the top ten most prevalent occupations for working women are secretaries and administrative assistants (3,168,000); registered nurses, (2,548,000); elementary and middle school teachers (2,403,000); cashiers (2,287,000); retail salespersons (1,783,000); nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides (1,675,000); first-line supervisors/managers of retail sales workers (1,505,000); waiters and waitresses (1,471,000); receptionists and information clerks (1,323,000); bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks, (1,311,000). My own career reflects those statistics all too closely (former waitress, secretary, teacher…).
Because women are most commonly found in these lower-wage positions, their salaries and power that wealth accords are much lower than their male counterparts. The median weekly earnings of women who were full-time wage and salary workers was $638, or 80 percent of men’s $798 in 2008. On average, women in Iowa earn 62% of what men in their same industry earn per month.
Those numbers, though, are changing. When comparing the median weekly earnings of persons aged 16 to 24, young women earned 91 percent of what young men earned ($420 and $461, respectively).
Hopefully, the two out of three leaders of Labor who are women is a sign of changes to come, changes that will benefit not only those in the House of Labor, but women workers everywhere.
Tracy Kurowski is Community Services Liaison, United Way of the Quad City Area
