Lisa Phillips spoke to Jenny Carson about her new book, A Matter of Moral Justice, on Black women laundry workers in New York. It was recently published by the University of Illinois Press.
It’s a story with some surprising insights, including about the role of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)
Carson highlights how race and gender shaped worker conditions, labor organizing, and union politics.
LAWCHA will be featuring Jenny’s book for their Pandemic Book Talk on October 21. You can register for that session at this link.
Carson is associate professor of history at Ryerson University in Toronto. She is a historian of twentieth-century American women’s labour history with a focus on the history of service work and women’s organizing in the United States. Her work has appeared in Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society and Labor Studies Journal.
Lisa Wunderlich Phillips is the author of A Renegade Union: Interracial Organizing and Labor Radicalism. She is working on history of labor relations at Disney and teaches at Indiana State University.
