Jane LaTour

LaTour first became involved in labor organizing in the 1960s as a rank-and-file union activist.[7][12] Her experience in industrial action included leading walkouts at a factory in Philadelphia to protest the lack of heating, and participating in a Teamster-sanctioned wildcat strike at United Parcel Service in Edison, New Jersey.[7] She was also involved in union organizing at Revlon.[7]

In 1977, LaTour became an organizer for District 65 of the United Automobile Workers of America.[3] Despite its reputation as a left-leaning union, she soon became disillusioned with internal union politics.[3] While working as a union staff member, she participated in the Coalition for Labor Union Women, but when female union representatives and support staff tried to organize their own District 65 women's group, they were quickly shut down by union leaders.[9] In 1979, after three years as an organizer, she was fired.[3][7][9] According to LaTour, she was told at the time that she had been fired "because [she] favored the workers over the union."[7][3]

LaTour shifted focus to work as a labor educator, and became an advocate for union reform and for women in traditionally male-dominated blue-collar trades.[3][7][9] She was an adjunct instructor at labor education programs at Empire State College, Queens College, and other institutions, and taught classes to electrical apprentices from IBEW Local Union No. 3.[13][10][9] While working as a package sorter on the night shift at UPS in the 1980s, she helped to organize monthly meetings of the female workers, and tried to convince Teamsters Local 177 leaders that changes were required to improve retention of the small number of female truck drivers who worked there.[9] For several years, LaTour worked as an organizer for the White Lung Association, a nonprofit focused on educating the public about the hazards of asbestos exposure in the workplace.[14][7]

In 1989, LaTour became director of the Women's Project for the Association for Union Democracy, an organization in Brooklyn co-founded by union reformer Herman Benson.[9][15][3] LaTour also worked with the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University,[3] where she was initially hired to process the papers of Burton H. Hall, a lawyer who had represented dissidents within unions.[7]

For her first book, LaTour conducted oral history interviews and compiled research on 23 women who entered traditionally male blue-collar trades in New York City in the late 1970s and 1980s.[17][9] The women profiled included carpenters, electricians, plumbers, truck drivers, telecommunications technicians, firefighters, biomedical engineers, and union officials.[1][18] LaTour conducted most of the interviews over two periods: between 1989 and 1994, and between 2004 and 2006.[18][10] When she first started doing interviews, she had envisaged creating a brochure, but was inspired to write a book, after giving a talk titled, "Live! From New York: Women Construction Workers in Their Own Words" at the North American Labor History Conference in October 2000, which was subsequently published as an article in the May 2001 issue of Labor History.[9]

Published in 2008 by Palgrave Macmillan, Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City received positive reviews.[1][17][12]The Oral History Review argued that "By presenting these stories within the context of labor history, Jane LaTour goes far in dispelling misunderstandings of blue-collar women's engagement with the Second Wave Feminist movement", demonstrating that the women themselves were aware of gender politics in the workplace, the historic significance of their employment in their trades, and the need to organize.[18] Writing in The Women's Review of Books, labor scholar Brigid O'Farrell noted LaTour's skills in chronicling "the tensions they faced within the organizations they created: cross-trade groups such as United Tradeswomen (UT); intraunion groups such as Women Electricians (WE); and training programs such as Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW)". She addressed issues of race, class, and sexual orientation, as well as union corruption and hostility toward reform.[17] O'Farrell commented, "Latour is able to show progress, albeit modest, across the three decades of her study."[17]

LaTour's second book is due to be published in 2024.[3] Its provisional title is Rebels With a Cause: An Oral History of the Fight for Democracy in New York City Unions.[3] Based on oral history interviews, the book focuses on rank-and-file activism within unions and the limits of union reform.[13]

• Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008.[1]

• "Putting Labor on the Map: The New York State Project". Labor's Heritage 10 (3). Spring/Summer 1999.[21]
• "Live! From New York: Women Construction Workers in Their Own Words". Labor History 42 (2). May 2001.[22]
• "Looking for a Fire Department That Looks Like New York". Gotham Gazette. December 3, 2001.[23]
• "The Uncompensated Costs of Electricity". WorkingUSA 5 (4). Spring 2002.[24]
• "In Their Own Words: Insurgents and the Limits of Reform in Organized Labor". WorkingUSA 16 (2). June 2013.[25]