"Women's Day Workers and Industrial League"

The Women's Day Workers and Industrial League (WDWIL) was a domestic workers' union during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The League's purpose was to protect African American women from exploitative working conditions and to increase their low wages.It had little immediate impact on the terms of domestic service work.Traditionally,American women have been responsible for the unpaid household-based work inside their own homes, while African American women,and other women of color,including recent immigrants, have dominated paid housework positions in other people's homes.Throughout the 1920s and 1930s,over 50 percent of  African American women working outside their homes were employed as domestic workers in jobs that required long hours and paid low wages.By the 1930s,most  domestics were employed as day workers,rather than "live-ins" within their employer's homes. This development allowed domestic workers to reduce their isolation from one another and to develop new types of realtionships with their employers.It also faciliated the organization of domestic workers into unions such as the WDWIL. In the 1930s young left-wing activists, such as Ella Josephine Baker, became involved with the league's unionization efforts and challenged some of the worst aspects of the domestic labor system.President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal administration favored the unionization of workers. The 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act and the the 1935 Wager Act encouraged workers to bargain collectively for higher wages and safer working conditions and protected unionized workers from employer discrimination.In 1933 only 6 percent of the workforce was unionized; by 1939, 17 percent of the workforce had joined unions.In spite of the growth of union membership and the advances workers made under the provisions of the Democratic New Deal,domestic workers did not fare as well.Paid household labor was virtually unregulated by government agencies throughout the Great Depression and would remain unregulated until the late 1940s.The 1935 Social Security Act and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act excluded domestic workers. Consequently,there were no provisions for unemployment benefits,nor were the maximum hours or minimum wage standards.During the first and most serve years of the Depression,black domestic workers often lost their jobs when their white female employers resumed