Let’s remember Alice Lord, who sparked the creation of the Seattle Waitresses Union, on this day in 1900 (March 23)
Alice Lord was one of the true, unsung heroes of organized labor in the earliest days of the twentieth century.
As a longform piece in Crosscut says:
When Alice Lord arrived to Seattle from New York around 1892, she and her husband were joining the flood of newcomers drawn to the western boomtown. In the years to come, the Gold Rush would put Seattle on a wave that lasted a decade, as more than 100,000 would-be miners coursed through the city, outfitting themselves, buying meals, hotel rooms, and their passage north. Lord would hold one of the many jobs benefiting from this golden wave, waiting tables at a downtown restaurant.
Waitresses were usually unskilled and single at the time, their “pink-collar” job seen as just one step up from domestic service. Like many of the city’s female typists, store clerks, laundry workers, and more, the waitresses were newcomers far from home, drawn from farms and villages to the bright lights of the big city. Most elite restaurants employed male waiters, and waitresses tended to work in second and third tier eateries. To keep their jobs they did what they were told, walking endlessly, fetching, and often being called to wash dishes and mop floors.
In general, middle-class society regarded waitresses with suspicion — after all, these women were usually single, serving meals to dozens of strangers each day and coming home alone at all hours of the night. Even if the waitress wasn’t a woman of easy virtue or a prostitute, no respectable girl of a good Seattle family would risk the appearance of immorality in that way.
“Look what we (women) have gained,” she continued, reflecting on Lord’s work. “The five-day week, premium pay for split shifts, paid vacations, time-and-a-half for holidays, and more wages in one day than we used to make in seven.”
A single waitress, a woman on her own, could not stand up against the authority of her boss and the censure of her community at the time.
On March 23, 1900, Alice Lord (1877–1940), a 23-year-old waitress, sparks the organization of Seattle Waitresses Union, Local 240 (now Dining Employees Local №2). They have 65 founding members and become one of the first women’s unions to be chartered by the American Federation of Labor.
Were they successful? HistoryLink, again, says, paraphrasing, “hell yeah.”
The union doubled its membership in a year, and in the same year the members tripled their wages.
Power to the people! {fist emoji}
For further reading:
