Black Women Working in Factories Natalie Journee Throughout the duration of the second semester in my English Bard College class, we have been discussing the lives of African-Americans living and working in New Orleans. In this essay I plan to deal with the issue of women factory workers who worked and/or lived in New Orleans as well as the worker’s unions they were members of or helped establish. “I was thirty-eight-years-old, and you, three months, when I started working in the swatching department at Kenneth Gordon, a men’s-clothing factory located in Harahan, LA.” These are the first words of my mother when I asked her to tell me about her experience as a factory worker. She went on to tell me that her main task was to take swatches of material and place them on swatch cards for salesmen to present to potential customers all over the United States. I remember helping my mother swatch one weekend when I was around eleven years old. Her instructions were, “Take a little card and match it with the fabric that has the same number. If the card you‘re holding is 00112 then look for the fabric with 00112 on it. Then take two little strips of double stick tape and place the card and put the piece of fabric on top.” We worked from about eight in the morning to onethirty that afternoon. Our working experience was a delight compared to that of Brenda Marie Osbey’s grandmother Alberta in the poem “Alberta (Factory Poem/Variation 2)” from All Saints by Brenda Marie Osbey. In the poem Osbey first tells about the condition of Solomon factory, specializing in men’s suits, where her grandmother worked as a girl. my grandmother Alberta was a girl when she first saw women eating small sandwiches or bread dry-long-so from the hip-pockets of their dresses as they stood sewing because they were given no time for lunch. While working with my mother that Saturday I had around three breaks to do as I chose, because according to child labor laws I was too young to work anyway. I even got to go to the restroom when I needed to unlike the women in the poem. women bleeding through triple-layered toweling afraid to leave their machines… to wash and change the wadded cloth between their legs afraid to lose the pay… If there was a way that the workers could have come together and/or made decisions as to how their working conditions were, such as a union, the workers most likely would have
had better experiences, better pay, which may have made them enjoy working. My mom was asked to join the union at Kenneth Gordon. She told me that, “The amount of work I had to do didn‘t change, and the type of work was okay.” I guess that because there was a union established at Kenneth Gordon, the workers never really had a problem.