by Tracy Kurowski

By
unanimous consent, the delegates at the AFL-CIO convention in
Pittsburgh elected Liz Shuler as the AFL-CIO’s first woman
Secretary-Treasurer on Thursday, September 17, 2009. Sister Shuler is
not only the first woman to hold that position, she is also the
youngest officer ever elected to head the nation’s largest labor
federation.  

The other newly elected leaders now at the helm of
the AFL-CIO are President Richard Trumpka, a mineworker and son and
grandson of mineworkers, and Executive Vice President Arlene
Holt-Baker, AFSCME organizer, African-American, and daughter of a
laborer and domestic worker.

Both Shuler, who hails from the
IBEW, and Holt-Baker follow in the footsteps of Linda Chavez-Thompson
who was elected as Executive VP in 1995, the first women ever elected
to leadership of the AFL-CIO.

It is significant that two out of
the three union leaders are women considering how few women hold
leadership positions in business, academia, politics or unions.

Nearly
eighty years after women were first given suffrage, they represent only
seventeen percent of elected leaders in the Senate and House of
Representatives.

Iowa has yet to elect a woman to higher office,
despite the fact that this was fantasized about fifty-one years ago in
Billy Wilder’s 1948 romantic-comedic film “A Foreign Affair,” in which
actress Jean Arthur played a character that has yet to exist in real
life: an Iowa congresswoman.  

As a guest to the convention on
behalf of the Quad City Federation of Labor, I was witness to this
election and must note the great strides that the AFL-CIO has taken in
recent years to achieve diversity in race, gender and age. Though the
delegates were still largely male, white and over the age of fifty
(like our Congress), the credentials committee reported that
forty-seven percent of delegates were either women or people of color.  

Women
make up 50.7% of the general population in the U.S. and 46.5% of the
total U.S. labor force. However, they still rarely hold leadership
positions in the workforce. According to the U.S. Dept. of Labor, the
top ten most prevalent occupations for working women are secretaries
and administrative assistants (3,168,000); registered nurses,
(2,548,000); elementary and middle school teachers (2,403,000);
cashiers (2,287,000); retail salespersons (1,783,000); nursing,
psychiatric, and home health aides (1,675,000); first-line
supervisors/managers of retail sales workers (1,505,000); waiters and
waitresses (1,471,000); receptionists and information clerks
(1,323,000); bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks, (1,311,000).
My own career reflects those statistics all too closely (former
waitress, secretary, teacher…).

Because women are most commonly
found in these lower-wage positions, their salaries and power that
wealth accords are much lower than their male counterparts. The median
weekly earnings of women who were full-time wage and salary workers was
$638, or 80 percent of men’s $798 in 2008. On average, women in Iowa
earn 62% of what men in their same industry earn per month.

Those
numbers, though, are changing. When comparing the median weekly
earnings of persons aged 16 to 24, young women earned 91 percent of
what young men earned ($420 and $461, respectively).

Hopefully,
the two out of three leaders of Labor who are women is a sign of
changes to come, changes that will benefit not only those in the House
of Labor, but women workers everywhere.