Jane LaTour, a union activist and author who chronicled the lives of girls in historically male labor unions, documenting their battles with each their employers and their unions, died on Monday within the Bronx. She was 76.
Her husband, Russell Smith, mentioned her loss of life, in hospice care at Calvary Hospital, was attributable to lung most cancers that had unfold to different organs.
Working as unions had been declining in power, Ms. LaTour usually criticized labor leaders, whom she accused of not representing the wants of their rank and file. She was the writer of the 2008 e-book “Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City,” and her writing gained a number of journalism awards.
She additionally taught, managed labor historical past archives, helped create maps of labor historical past websites in New York Metropolis and State, and ran a nonprofit program supporting democratic reforms inside unions.
“She’s actually an establishment,” Priscilla Murolo, a labor historian, mentioned in an interview. “Everybody across the New York labor motion knew Jane LaTour. And outdoors the motion she actually was invisible.”
Ms. LaTour obtained her begin in labor unions when she left school in her first 12 months to earn cash. She labored as a spot welder, drill press operator and warehouse employee, amongst different jobs, an expertise she later compared to that of “a visiting anthropologist attempting to grasp the unusual folkways of the folks I encountered.”
What she encountered, usually, was sexual discrimination and harassment, the “giant and small every day indignities” that drove her to union activism and in the end again to Rutgers College. She earned a bachelor’s diploma in historical past there in 1971, graduating with highest honors, and a grasp’s in labor research in 1977.
All through her work, her husband mentioned, “she had two traces of pursuit.”
“One was equality for girls: Ladies needs to be allowed to turn out to be plumbers and electricians and firefighters,” he mentioned. “And unions should turn out to be democratic. The survival of organized labor was at stake except labor managed to wash its home.”
For this work, he added, “she obtained plenty of pushback from individuals who mentioned, ‘Don’t criticize unions, they’ve sufficient hassle, we’ve got to assist our management.’ She mentioned no.”
Jane Ellen Latour (she capitalized the T in her surname after she began writing professionally) was born on Might 3, 1946, in Burlington, Vt., the third of 5 youngsters of Irene (Fisher) Latour, a former mannequin, and Ransom Latour, who offered insurance coverage and managed jewellery shops.
She was a bookish youngster who fell asleep most nights studying beneath the covers, her sister Mary Butler mentioned. Ms. LaTour mentioned her Roman Catholic upbringing had led her to consider that reform — whether or not in workplaces or inside unions — needed to come from the least highly effective.
She had a son, Richard, in 1966, whom she put up for adoption. She married Jim Kowalski, a school scholar, the following 12 months. The wedding led to divorce after a number of years. She later developed a bond together with her son.
In October 1991, Ms. LaTour struck up a dialog on an uptown Manhattan A prepare with Russell Smith, a union tour information and store steward. He instructed they exit for espresso. “She mentioned, ‘Let’s go for a beer,’” Mr. Smith mentioned. They moved in collectively in Higher Manhattan two years later and married in December 2012.
“We lived a life glued to information companies and media,” Mr. Smith mentioned. “We didn’t personal a automobile or have property. We had been extra folks of books and concepts.”
Her work concerned each telling girls’s tales and serving to to enhance their working circumstances. A stint as an organizer for New York Metropolis’s District 65 of the United Vehicle Employees of America, a famously left-leaning union, left her disillusioned with the way in which higher-ups within the union handled the rank and file.
“Reasonably than everybody being on the identical crew,” she mentioned, “the members would usually be preventing in opposition to the union.” She was fired after three years, as a result of, she mentioned, “I favored staff over the union.”
So she centered on reforming unions from the surface, and on telling the tales of their members. She labored for the Association for Union Democracy, a nonprofit reform group, the place she ran the Ladies’s Challenge; for the New York Labor History Association; and as an archivist for the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York College. For the final 20 years, she labored as a journalist for Public Employee Press, the official publication of District Council 37 of AFSCME (the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Staff).
“Jane noticed within the tales of those tradeswomen a common story and an opportunity to point out folks that these girls within the trades — Black, brown, white, homosexual, straight — had been feminists,” mentioned Brenda Berkman, who efficiently sued the New York Hearth Division to get it to scrap a bodily take a look at that excluded her and different girls. (Her story was advised in Ms. LaTour’s “Sisters within the Brotherhoods.”)
“They may not consider themselves as feminists,” Ms. Berkman added, “they won’t even know tips on how to outline their feminism, however they had been saying plenty of the identical issues that the feminist motion had been saying because the Nineteen Sixties.”
For Veronica Session, a carpenter profiled in Ms. LaTour’s e-book, the eye gave her validation at a time when tradeswomen weren’t very seen.
“It gave a voice to our tales and our plight,” Ms. Session mentioned. “It meant that each one your strife was not for naught, that it meant one thing. It gave me vitality to maintain on, realizing that someway this might matter to folks. And in addition, that somebody would possibly see themself in me.”
Ms. LaTour’s final days in hospice drew a vigil by the form of girls she had commemorated: pioneering firefighters, ironworkers, carpenters, plumbers and union dissidents. She remained optimistic that unions have a future, her husband mentioned — in the event that they reform.
Along with Mr. Smith, Ms. LaTour, who lived within the Inwood part of Manhattan, is survived by her son, Richard Heber; her sisters, Mary Butler and Susie Morin; and three grandchildren.
Her second e-book, provisionally titled “Rebels With a Trigger: An Oral Historical past of the Combat for Democracy in New York Metropolis Unions,” is scheduled for publication subsequent 12 months.
