Taking On The Big Boys

Today I attended a discussion on Taking On The Big Boys, by Ellen Brovo, for One Book One Campus. We discussed Chapter 6, Nine To Five: Not Just A Movie -The Right To Organize. We discussed the importance of unions as it pertains to women. Women often benefit much by joining a union because they encounter such a disparity in wages between them and the male employees in their businesses. They need to organize and stand up for themselves as a group in the workforce. Unfortunately though, not many women or even men use unions. I thought this concept of inequality and not being able to organize might parallels some of Du Bois' ideas regarding the plight of African American men in his time.

Blacks in Du Bois' time faced several issues in supporting themselves. Like women, they endured unfair working conditions. I think that the greedy businessmen who discriminate against women today are similar to the landlords who ruled over their tenants. "...Landlords as a class have not yet come to realize that it is a good business investment to raise the standard of living among labor by slow and judicious methods; that a Negro laborer who demands three rooms and fifty cents a day would give more efficient work and leave a larger profit than a discouraged toiler herding his family in one room and working for thirty cents" (115). I agree that if a person is happier and lives a more secure lifestyle he is more likely to be more productive. Maybe if African Americans had organized in this time period to get better working conditions, they could have won some for themselves. The south was very dependent on agriculture in this time. The black tenants were responsible for a lot of the "dirty work" that the white men did not want to do. If many black people had stopped working, the South would have been in a stranglehold. The South could not live long without cotton or any other crop it produced. Landlords would have had to grudgingly accept a lot of the tenants' demands.