ABSTRACT
The massive organizing drives of the 1930s concentrated primarily on the nation's mass production industries — steel, auto, rubber, electrical manufacturing-in which women were, at best, a minority of the workforce. By the 1930s, most women workers were already concentrated in 'pink collar' sales, service and clerical occupations, where they remain to this day. While unionizing these workers was never a high priority for the labor movement, some important efforts to do so were undertaken under the auspices of the fledgling Congress of Industrial Organizations. In this chapter, Sharon Hartman Strom recounts the previously unexplored history of the most important clerical workers' union within the CIO, the United Office and Professional Workers of America (UOPWA), which existed from 1937 to 1950. Setting her account against the backdrop of the rationalization and proletarianization of clerical work, Strom documents the progress of UOPWA organizing in the 1930s and 1940s in a wide range of workplaces, from publishing houses and direct-mail shops to the offices of small manufacturing firms. She contrasts the willingness of women office-workers to join unions with the limitations of the male-dominated CIO in relation to clerical unionism, in an analysis which does much to explain why most clerical workers, especially in the private sector, have remained outside the labor movement throughout the twentieth century.
