Jane LaTour, a union activist and author who chronicled the lives of girls in historically male labor unions, documenting their battles with each their employers and their unions, died on Monday within the Bronx. She was 76.
Her husband, Russell Smith, mentioned her loss of life, in hospice care at Calvary Hospital, was brought on by lung most cancers that had unfold to different organs.
Working as unions had been declining in power, Ms. LaTour usually criticized labor leaders, whom she accused of not representing the wants of their rank and file. She was the writer of the 2008 e book “Sisters within the Brotherhoods: Working Girls Organizing for Equality in New York Metropolis,” and her writing received a number of journalism awards.
She additionally taught, managed labor historical past archives, helped create maps of labor historical past websites in New York Metropolis and State, and ran a nonprofit program supporting democratic reforms inside unions.
“She’s actually an establishment,” Priscilla Murolo, a labor historian, mentioned in an interview. “Everybody across the New York labor motion knew Jane LaTour. And outdoors the motion she actually was invisible.”
Ms. LaTour obtained her begin in labor unions when she left faculty in her first yr to earn cash. She labored as a spot welder, drill press operator and warehouse employee, amongst different jobs, an expertise she later in comparison with that of “a visiting anthropologist attempting to grasp the unusual folkways of the individuals I encountered.”
What she encountered, usually, was sexual discrimination and harassment, the “giant and small day by day indignities” that drove her to union activism and in the end again to Rutgers College. She earned a bachelor’s diploma in historical past there in 1971, graduating with highest honors, and a grasp’s in labor research in 1977.
All through her work, her husband mentioned, “she had two traces of pursuit.”
“One was equality for ladies: Girls needs to be allowed to turn out to be plumbers and electricians and firefighters,” he mentioned. “And unions should turn out to be democratic. The survival of organized labor was at stake until labor managed to scrub its home.”
For this work, he added, “she obtained a number of pushback from individuals who mentioned, ‘Don’t criticize unions, they’ve sufficient hassle, we’ve got to assist our management.’ She mentioned no.”
Jane Ellen Latour (she capitalized the T in her surname after she began writing professionally) was born on Could 3, 1946, in Burlington, Vt., the third of 5 kids of Irene (Fisher) Latour, a former mannequin, and Ransom Latour, who bought insurance coverage and managed jewellery shops.
She was a bookish little one who fell asleep most nights studying beneath the covers, her sister Mary Butler mentioned. Ms. LaTour mentioned her Roman Catholic upbringing had led her to imagine that reform — whether or not in workplaces or inside unions — needed to come from the least highly effective.
She had a son, Richard, in 1966, whom she put up for adoption. She married Jim Kowalski, a school pupil, the subsequent yr. The wedding led to divorce after a couple of years. She later developed a bond together with her son.
In October 1991, Ms. LaTour struck up a dialog on an uptown Manhattan A practice with Russell Smith, a union tour information and store steward. He recommended they exit for espresso. “She mentioned, ‘Let’s go for a beer,’” Mr. Smith mentioned. They moved in collectively in Higher Manhattan two years later and married in December 2012.
“We lived a life glued to information providers and media,” Mr. Smith mentioned. “We didn’t personal a automobile or have property. We had been extra individuals of books and concepts.”
Her work concerned each telling ladies’s tales and serving to to enhance their working situations. A stint as an organizer for New York Metropolis’s District 65 of the United Car Staff of America, a famously left-leaning union, left her disillusioned with the way in which higher-ups within the union handled the rank and file.
“Fairly than everybody being on the identical crew,” she mentioned, “the members would usually be preventing towards the union.” She was fired after three years, as a result of, she mentioned, “I favored staff over the union.”
So she centered on reforming unions from the surface, and on telling the tales of their members. She labored for the Affiliation for Union Democracy, a nonprofit reform group, the place she ran the Girls’s Challenge; for the New York Labor Historical past Affiliation; and as an archivist for the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York College. For the final 20 years, she labored as a journalist for Public Worker Press, the official publication of District Council 37 of AFSCME (the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers).
“Jane noticed within the tales of those tradeswomen a common story and an opportunity to point out people who these ladies within the trades — Black, brown, white, homosexual, straight — had been feminists,” mentioned Brenda Berkman, who efficiently sued the New York Fireplace Division to get it to scrap a bodily check that excluded her and different ladies. (Her story was instructed in Ms. LaTour’s “Sisters within the Brotherhoods.”)
“They may not consider themselves as feminists,” Ms. Berkman added, “they won’t even know the right way to outline their feminism, however they had been saying a number of the identical issues that the feminist motion had been saying because the Sixties.”
For Veronica Session, a carpenter profiled in Ms. LaTour’s e book, the eye gave her validation at a time when tradeswomen weren’t very seen.
“It gave a voice to our tales and our plight,” Ms. Session mentioned. “It meant that every one your strife was not for naught, that it meant one thing. It gave me vitality to maintain on, realizing that in some way this could matter to individuals. And in addition, that somebody would possibly see themself in me.”
Ms. LaTour’s final days in hospice drew a vigil by the form of ladies she had commemorated: pioneering firefighters, ironworkers, carpenters, plumbers and union dissidents. She remained optimistic that unions have a future, her husband mentioned — in the event that they reform.
Along with Mr. Smith, Ms. LaTour, who lived within the Inwood part of Manhattan, is survived by her son, Richard Heber; her sisters, Mary Butler and Susie Morin; and three grandchildren.
Her second e book, provisionally titled “Rebels With a Trigger: An Oral Historical past of the Battle for Democracy in New York Metropolis Unions,” is scheduled for publication subsequent yr.
Supply: NY Times
