Jane LaTour has been active in the labor movement since the 1960s. She has worked in factories and on staff for several unions including District 65, one of New York City’s best-known left-led unions. LaTour also worked for the Association for Union Democracy and the Wagner Labor Archives at New York University and is the author of Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City. She has spent her life as an activist in the trade union movement as a labor educator (Empire State College, SUNY, Queens College, and other labor education programs; as the director of the Women's Project of the Association for Union Democracy, a civil rights organization for union members based in Brooklyn, New York; and as a labor journalist. Her articles have appeared in Labor Notes, the Hard Hat News, Znet, Z Magazine, CounterPunch, The Indypendent, Labor Press, The Journal of Labor and Society, and many other publications and websites. She is a long-time board member of the New York Labor History Association and for many years edited its newsletter Work History News. About what led her to activism and labor organizing, she says, “I left my middle-class home toward the end of my first year of college and began working in factories to support myself. During my years as a factory worker, I got a world-class education about America that changed my life and set me on a different course. … I quickly became offended by the large and small daily indignities I witnessed all around me: managers addressing women old enough to be their mothers as ‘girls;’ African-American workers sent to the hottest, hardest jobs in the plants; being told by management right before we were due to leave for vacation that payroll wouldn’t be ready and we would have to make the long trek back to the plant if we wanted our paychecks; the assumptions of managers of their greater intelligence and ability than us the workers; the extreme ways that the professional men and supervisors spoke to us in really demeaning and disgusting ways about sex. ... The discrimination, the injustices and all the rest of what I encountered quickly made me a rebel.” She currently at work on her second book, an oral history about rank and file activism and the limits of reform in organized labor, based on interviews with Teamsters, carpenters, painters, marine engineers, transit and utility workers.

click here