Working Women

Women Are Taking Over the U.S. Labor Movement

As she considered striking at the grocery store where she had worked for a decade, the dozens of moments that had pushed Ashley Manning to that point flooded back.  She vividly recalled the indignities she endured throughout the pandemic, starting with child care. When schools shut down, no one could watch her 12-year-old daughter. She wouldn’t allow her …

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How Businesses Can Better Care For Their Female Employees

There’s no question that inequality has ruled the workplace for years. Even today, the gender pay gap is holding strong. In 2020, women in the U.S. earned just 84% of what their male counterparts made. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  While things may not be “fixed” at the moment, …

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How to Make the Building Trades Work for Women

The building trades unions are some of the most powerful in the labor movement. Because their members are well-paid, their dues are often higher than in other unions, giving them more resources to influence change. They also hold a certain cultural cachet, exemplifying what many people (wrongly) think the working class looks like: white men in …

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Women in the Workplace: Advancing Your Career Post-Pandemic

Economic conditions during the pandemic took an especially difficult toll on women, with nearly 2.2 million females leaving the workforce between February and October 2020, according to an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center. Of course, this difficult environment doesn’t mean women should shy away from asserting their rights in the workplace or pursuing …

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Women of color suffer as coronavirus takes existing economic inequalities and doubles down on them

The coronavirus economy is crushing women, people of color, and especially women of color. While the economy added 661,000 jobs between August and September, 865,000 women dropped out of the paid workforce. White women have recovered 61% of the jobs they lost in the early months of the pandemic, while Black women have recovered just 39%. As of a September …

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Women will lose big if state and local governments can’t close coronavirus budget gaps

The United States is on track to lose millions of jobs if the federal government doesn’t help state and local governments fill in budget shortfalls. Some of the jobs will be in the private sector as governments drop contracts and as public workers curtail their spending, but it’s a guarantee that government workers will be hard hit. …

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Immigrant women workers on the front lines of meatpacking COVID-19 outbreaks speak out

Coverage of COVID-19 outbreaks in North Carolina poultry processing plants began with an online tip, but soon multiple workers came forward—risking their livelihoods—to talk about the unsafe working conditions they faced inside the plants. All of them were women. One of those women is Luz. The 38-year-old immigrant from Mexico has spent the last four years working …

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Women’s History Month Profiles: Alice Paul

For Women’s History Month, the AFL-CIO is spotlighting various women who were, and some who still are, leaders and activists working at the intersection of civil and labor rights. Today, we are looking at Alice Paul. Alice Paul was born in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, in 1885, the daughter of Quaker parents. Her religious upbringing taught …

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Building Power And Raising Voices Of Rural Women

Here in North Carolina, like many other rural areas around the country, reactionary forces have used trends like the decline of jobs, infrastructure, and public services to consolidate power, advance racist and misogynist narratives, and erode public confidence in the power of government to work for the common good. The impact is real: every day, …

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Madeline Messa

Madeline Messa is a 3L at Syracuse University College of Law. She graduated from Penn State with a degree in journalism. With her legal research and writing for Workplace Fairness, she strives to equip people with the information they need to be their own best advocate.