CHRISTINA: So the women were always prepared to work together to protect rights of theirs which hadn't yet been officially recognized?

MADELEINE: I remember the first textile workers' meeting I attended in Valley field in '42. There were about 60 to 80 people. Men came into the union hall individually, but the women came in groups. It was something then for a woman to set foot in a union hall, so they came together and sat together, not only for company but because they wanted to consult each other during the meeting.

When a man raised a question he raised it as an individual; but when a woman raised a question you realized that it came from the group of women. After the meeting they consulted together and agreed that they would sign their card and pay their dollar. The first significant remark I remember was, “Well now, this is the beginning of the end of the reign of the favorites.”

It was difficult for those women too because they went to church on Sundays where the vicar would preach that a woman's place was in the home, even when he knew very well that they were working in the cotton mills. It made them feel guilty and shy about asking for rights and for wanting to go back to work after childbirth, but the union gave them the strength and support they needed to question the double wage scale and other inequities.

CHRISTINA: Would you say that today things like daycare, maternity/paternity leave, and protection from sexual harassment are becoming part of standard contract negotiations?

MADELEINE: Oh, yes, except for day care demands which are more a community issue. Even during and after the intense strikes of '46 and '47, where women played a militant role, we talked more about the issues that were of particular concern to women, cutting in on the traditional male union ideology. For example, asking for maternity leave was not a concern only of married women, but also of the women who left work to have a baby out of wedlock. You hadn't won anything until you'd won recognition for all those women to have their jobs back, and you had to protest openly against the bosses giving speeches on morality. Many a company manager was embarrassed by the women's response.

CHRISTINA: It seems that many women in the work force are moving toward work that is not traditionally organized. What are the possibilities of unionizing in banks or in what we might call "white collar" jobs?

MADELEINE: It has to be done. There have been heroic efforts over decades and very modest results. In the factories, there was a more direct and more obvious movement for women to organize because they had a strong sense of being working people, of being low in the hierarchy, of being obliged to punch a clock and follow certain disciplinary rules. Those conditions made their own position clear and the need to organize more obvious. But many unorganized white collar employees are reluctant to define themselves as workers and the policy of the banks is to take advantage of that ambiguity.

For example, the manager and chief accountant of a local bank branch often try to give employees the impression that they are all one big happy family. Of course that prevents the development of a sense of solidarity among the women employees. I've noticed that one of the first steps women attempting to organize in a bank may take is to tell the male accountant that they want to have lunch by themselves.

CHRISTINA: What do you think about the proposed free trade deal between the United States and Canada? Will it make organizing in those service sectors more difficult?

MADELEINE: The US-Canada free trade accord will definitely be a threat to our working conditions. While in Canada 38% of the work force is in unions, in the US the figure is only 17% and as one Canadian union leader has said, employers will fight to "level the playing field" in order to compete with American business.

It will also facilitate the take-over of service companies. With current technology, we can bet on it that data banks will be moved in large numbers from Canada to the United States. Information will then be stored and processed there, and we will lose many, many jobs. As an example, a friend of mine was in Quebec City and wanted to make a hotel reservation in Montreal. She phoned the usual 1-800 number and confirmed her reservation, then out of curiosity she asked where she was calling. The answer was "Dallas Texas, Madam." So it's already starting.