ABSTRACT
During the first decade of the 21st century, the most dynamic and successful union organising in the US occurred among low wage women workers: housekeepers, home care attendants, retail workers, food processing workers and childcare workers. This happened concurrent with continuing decline in the traditionally strong union sectors: heavy manufacturing and extractive industries. While union campaigns among low-wage women workers have been chronicled in some detail ever since the 1980s (Boris and Klein 2007), few of these studies focus on women as leaders in their organising campaigns. Recently, a number of campaigns, inspired by older concepts of community unionism, social movement unionism and coalition unionism (Tattersall 2007 have generated different models of women's leadership development and organising strategies. This chapter looks at four of these campaigns and argues that rethinking the concept of women's leadership in organising could provide an important key to labour revitalisation in the US.
