Samantha Richter has a lot on her plate right now. The 33-year-old is a temp at Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne — where she assembles Ford Broncos — a job she started just three months ago. She’s been struggling to make ends meet. Last Friday, her plant went on strike. This week, her car broke down, and she had to borrow money to have it fixed. On top of all that, she’s a single mom to a 4-year-old girl: Arya. “I was originally working mornings, but I had to switch to the night shift so I can get her to and from preschool,” Richter tells Women Rule in an interview. “So now I only have to have someone to watch her for bedtime.” For that, she has a “team of women” — relatives who help out with childcare when need be. “We’re lucky to have good people to help, because if we didn’t, I don’t know what we would do.” Richter says she currently makes $17.50 an hour — and she’s living paycheck to paycheck. “Like the rest of us all, all we're asking is to not have to struggle. Just wanting enough money to pay my bills, buy groceries, and have enough for extras like taking my kid to the jump park.” That’s why she’s joining the picket line at the Michigan Assembly Plant. She says that a pay raise would mean she wouldn’t have to “depend on everyone so much.” On Monday, she brought her daughter to strike — who held a sign with My Little Ponies which read “Fair Pay! Snacks are expensive!” The Michigan Assembly Plant is one of the locations where the United Auto Workers union decided to strike against Detroit's Big Three automakers: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. The union is pushing for a roughly 40 percent general wage increase for its members, cost of living protections and protections related to the EV transition, which threatens to upend the way that cars are manufactured, potentially putting jobs at risk. Richter might not be the type of person that comes to mind when you hear the words “United Auto Workers union.” But today, the union membership rate for women is almost the same as it is for men. That’s a big difference from 1983, the first year that data is available, when the rate for men was 24.7 percent, compared to 14.6 percent for women. Despite women’s union participation rate, it’s taken until recent years for many unions to welcome women into top leadership ranks. Until roughly a decade ago, the U.S.’ most powerful union federations were mainly run by men. That’s because historically, men had more success unionizing, because their jobs were more likely to be considered “real parts of our economy,” giving them more bargaining power, says Sarita Gupta, the Ford Foundation’s vice president of U.S. programs and co-author of “The Future We Need: Organizing for Democracy in the Twenty-first Century.” Those power structures have proved hard to overturn in some unions. In 2011, the first woman to ever run for president of the Teamsters, Sandy Pope, lost to incumbent James P. Hoffa, who had held the position since 1998 and remained president until 2022. His father, Jimmy Hoffa, served as president from 1957 to 1971. But now, women are breaking through. Union leaders say that, with women in positions of power, it provides an advocate for the issues that affect women the most, like childcare — a key issue for working moms like Richter — as well as reproductive health coverage and equal pay. “There’s a misperception that unions are male dominated, when in fact, we are half the workforce, and we're half the labor movement,” says Liz Shuler, president of AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the U.S. “I think the stereotype comes from the origins of unions being more in industrial settings and hard physical labor, like construction and manufacturing. Those industries were male dominated,” Shuler tells Women Rule. “But over time, unions have grown in all kinds of professions — particularly in the retail, hospitality professional sectors that are more predominantly women.” But women’s involvement in organized labor isn’t new, though it has grown significantly in the past few decades. Women have a long history of organizing — spanning all the way back to the early 1800s, when women in New England working at textile mills staged several strikes to protest wage cuts and poor conditions. Those strikes eventually lead to one of the first women’s unions: the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. Today, two of the largest union federations in the U.S. are now headed by women: In 2010, Mary Kay Henry became the first woman president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents over 1.9 million workers, and in 2021, Shuler became the first woman to lead the ALF-CIO. “What is really heartening is to see the progress that's being made and the engagement of women leaders right now,” says Gupta. Why have women in leadership positions? “To put it quite simply, I think women and men see the world through somewhat different lenses,” says Joan Corey, a leader in the Teamster Women’s Movement and a vice president at-large of the union. In recent years, reproductive health care, abortion and child care assistance have become more prominent discussions in the union world. “Because if you don't have [childcare], you can't work,” says Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs with Justice and co-author of “The Future We Need: Organizing for Democracy in the Twenty-first Century.” “But of course, you need to work to provide. So these are some of the issues that are coming out.” Unionization also helps close the pay gap. The earnings ratio between union women and union men was 89.6 percent in 2022, compared to 82. percent between non-union women and men. Gupta says that women and people of color “have so much to benefit from unions” because they have been historically disadvantaged compared to their white, male counterparts. “If we are going to make lasting transformational change, it means centering those of us who have been the furthest from the center, and those that have been the most marginalized,” says SEIU’s Secretary-Treasurer April Verrett.
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