In writing history, beginnings and endings matter. “I had originally intended to conclude this book on a triumphant note with the success of the union campaign in 1937 and with subsequent achievement of industry-wide agreements that secured higher wages, shorter hours, paid vacation and sick days, arbitration machinery to mediate workplace grievances and a closed shop,” confessed Jenny Carson (6). By moving the time frame forward, she instead offers a sobering study of New York City's laundry worker unionism that accounts for the subsequent purge of communist organizers and the postwar defeat of the civil rights–and community-based “democratic initiative” led by Black women (127). The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), the union where the laundry workers found a home, installed a cadre that maintained white male power while suppressing rank-and-file decision-making and sustaining the racialized gender division of labor in the industry. Nonetheless, Carson finds inspiration in the laundry...

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