Espresso Shots: Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement, by Premilla Nadasen

Small-sized reviews, raves, and recommendations.

One of the greatest challenges to forming a union is communication. When forces combine to make a labor sector invisible, it becomes imperative to create situations where workers can collaborate and negotiate with management and each other. It should come as no surprise that American labor history has been dominated by narratives about men and centered on the factory floor. In the case of the household domestic servant, race, gender, and space conspired to make this labor cohort invisible. Even the very name of their occupation became a matter of contention: domestic servant contra household worker. Household Workers Unite, by Premilla Nadasen is an important work of revisionist labor history. It focuses on the African American women who had been invisible to both American labor history and the American labor movement in general.

Nadasen offers biographies of important personalities within the household worker movement. She also goes on to explain how domestic workers were shunted off and forgotten within the larger narratives of labor history. It is a history fraught with contradictions and atomization. Since domestics worked, usually by themselves, in a family household, the struggle for labor rights had become that much more challenging. Added to this situation was the demographic handicap of being African American and a woman in the South. Nadasen's work opens with the much ballyhooed news story about a New York City couple who treated their Southeast Asian domestic workers to torture and near-slave-like working conditions. The 2011 film, The Help, is rightfully criticized for its condescending use of the White Savior trope (this time the Southern woman narrator) inspiring her African American domestic servants to rise up against heinous working conditions. (Note: I have not seen the film and I don't really want to. It makes Driving Miss Daisy sound like Malcolm X.) As Nadasen later illustrates, Southern women would go out and become politically active, yet not have a second thought about giving their African American domestic workers pay raises or decent hours. Even hazarding such suggestions to their white families could be grounds for immediate dismissal.

Domestic Workers Unite offers a comprehensive exploration of the African American domestic worker. It shows how the thorny issues of race, gender, and work barred these workers from advancements enjoyed by their male counterparts. She also shows how storytelling become a means of creating solidarity within the community of workers. For long decades, domestic workers were seen as the last frontier of the "non-unionizable" labor in the United States. Yet through difficult struggles and the double-edged sword of racism and sexism, African American women were able to advance their cause, achieve better working conditions, better pay, and better hours. They eventually were able to achieve the leverage of collective bargaining despite the unique nature of their work. (Today home healthcare professionals face the same hurdles.) In its own strange way, Domestic Workers Unite can be seen as a lens to view the current health crisis within professional wrestling, a sport that treats their performers with a casual brutality, especially when it comes to medical bills and an anti-union history as cold-blooded as the Ford Motor Company. To state the obvious, people don't their manufacturing jobs back, they want their union jobs back.

https://driftlessareareview.com/2021/03/08/espresso-shots-household-workers-unit... ( )

I won this book in exchange for an honest review.

Very informative book on the history of the challenges faced by domestic workers, or "Household Technicians" in their journey towards unionizing. This is a topic that I would say is not very widely known about. The author has done her research although I would also like to have seen a point of view from other groups such as Latinas and Eastern Europeans. If is primarily centered around African-Americans and their perseverance in achieving the respect they and their chosen profession deserve. ( )

In this unique narrative the history of African-American women as household labor activists takes center stage, in the context of the political history of the era, to provide a holistic view of domestic labor reform in the US socio-political landscape.
The story describes how African-American women forged the household workers struggle as its own movement through a variety of home help experiences, settings, and opportunities throughout the country to organize and garner individual and collective purpose among domestic workers. As a reader I experienced the story of African-American women depicted with vision and fortitude through an historical account infused with soul stirring proof of the power and effectiveness of community organizing. It was not easy for these women – the price of change cost them something and required personal risk. The book chronicles and describes the conditions that inspired these brave women to drive and influence cultural and economic change within this country that has had lasting influence for decades.
As a historian, Ms. Nadasen skillfully makes meaningful social and political connections and conveys the complex struggle for African-American women to be included in the American dream of work for fair wages, work with dignity, and respect as domestic workers that is afforded other recognized professions. She also describes the systematic changes directly influenced by this movement and ensuing shifts to redesign economic policies that continue US gender, race, and class politics a half-century later.
This historical narrative is an important contemporary read to reinforce historical bonds with generations of previous movements who lived in times and through struggles this generation has yet to experience. The voices of African-American women shared in the book fills in the gaps of African-American women in US history and their important role and influence to drive ethical change for domestic workers in this country. ( )

It's a testament to how little the education system talks about misogynoir and labor right in general that I had few assumptions on this topic to break. For that reason, I didn't find it quite as revolutionary as some, and I remembered few details after finishing, which may be the fault of my reading it in a couple of hours. It is, however, fantastically researched and enormously interesting, and it keeps a spot on my permanent shelf.

This is a meticulously researched scholarly work that recounts the history of domestic service in the US, especially how it was shaped by racial and gender discrimination. A fabulous book for anyone interested in the intersection of race, class, and the role of women in society. While it's attention to detail, with so many names and acronyms makes it easier to digest in smaller doses, the stories of the brave women who fought for their careers and dignity will stay with the reader long after the final page. ( )