By JANE LaTOUR

The year 2003 marks the 100th anniversary of the Women’s Trade Union League — an organization that fought for women’s rights in the labor movement and for workers’ rights in the women’s movement. It also marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of CLUW — the Coalition of Labor Union Women — which many DC 37 women are active in today.

Speaking at a conference on May 7, historian Alice Kessler-Harris pointed to these milestones as she discussed the many remarkable changes in the lives of working women. But some of the issues that women faced in 1903 and in the 1920s — during the first wave of union feminism — are still with us, she noted.

The meeting on “Women and the Labor Movement: Then and Now,” was co-sponsored by the New York Labor History Association and the Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. As one of three featured speakers, DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts combined personal experience and statistics in her remarks. She noted that of the 56 locals in DC 37, women lead 12.

In AFSCME, DC 37’s national union, there are now more women than men — 53 percent. Like bookends, Ms. Roberts’ career spans a period of dramatic change for women. “I was there at the beginning, organizing new members, many of them women, before we had role models,” she said. “In those days, there were few women union leaders in AFSCME or anywhere. Women were lucky just to have a union to fight for better pay and benefits.”

She noted that even today, it is extremely rare to find two women heading up a union — especially two African American women — as she and DC 37 President Veronica Montgomery-Costa do.

Professor Kessler-Harris pointed out that job segregation still exists in most fields. Although the number of professional women has risen sharply, “80 percent of women are working in ‘female’ occupations,” she said.

Local 23-25 Vice President May Chen of UNITE!, the garment workers union, noted that while a century of garment workers have organized and made historic gains, from the “Uprising of the 20,000” in 1911 to the major strike in Chinatown in 1982, there are more battles to be fought. The sweatshops of New York City still exploit Chinese and many other immigrant women, and the global economy has had a crushing impact on workers in the industry.