Sharing, connecting and building leadership skills with Teamster women. This blog is for Teamster women by Teamster women. The views shared on this blog are our own.
Taken from the recent report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research on the status of women in the US, union women’s leadership is critical to advances that are especially important to women and families—including equal pay, access to affordable child care, a higher minimum wage, and expanded access to paid sick days—and raising these issues to the forefront of unions’ agendas.
Union leadership can build the skills of talented women who may then expand their personal goals to include leadership in other areas of public life (Caiazza 2007).
Women make up a large and growing proportion of labor union members and have been closing the gender gap in union membership. In 2014, 6.6 million of 14.6 million union members were women, with women comprising 45.5 percent of all union members (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015a). Women’s share of union members has increased in each of the last three decades, from 33.6 percent in 1984, to 39.7 in 1994, and 42.6 in 2004 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014) and women are projected to be the majority of union members by 2025 (Jones, Schmitt, and Woo 2014).
Stage One: Entry into Leadership
Also known as who does she think she is?!, ok Norma Rae or that's not "lady-like!" etc...
Finding your voice is the first step to understanding oneself as a person with power in an organizational setting. Not to mention that I know U-CAN!!!
Things to think about...
Most future leaders were urged, pushed, or pulled into leadership roles by another human being, usually an individual close to them who already held a leadership role with the union.
The classic work of Anne Nelson and Barbara Wertheimer in Trade Union Women: A Study of their Participation in New York City Locals, which showed that most women who moved from "members" to "leaders" of the union did so as a result of individual encouragement, usually from union leaders.
This and other research suggest that the most common and effective mode of leadership development is encouragement and recruitment by current union leaders.
Women were more likely to articulate their reasons for becoming leaders as helping others than because of their own ambition.
Poor working conditions or dissatisfaction with the union's handling made people want to become active but not usually enough to motivate people to take on leadership roles.
Having the opportunity to get training and education made a key difference to women. This could be formal or informal
One thing that observers of millennials agree on, including sociologists, union officials and managers, it’s that they communicate differently than older generations. They expect a constant flow of news, information and feedback. They were raised with a sensibility that leads them to think it’s a good thing to question whether the options being presented to them are the best ones possible. This is a generation that wants to be consulted.
"A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be." -- Rosalynn Carter, former First Lady RESOURCES:
