Tracing and Placing Women Trade Union Leaders: A Study of the Female Confectioners Union
Studies of union leadership commonly examine full-time officials and workplace delegates. Less attention has been given to those union activists who hold honorary elected roles, on executive or management committees and as office bearers. Women can actively access these positions as a strategy of separate organizing for increasing women’s participation, representation and voice in their union. Separate organizing in the form of a women’s union creates a broader canvas for women workers’ collective activity. Addressing a gap both in the historical literature on women’s union strategies and the contribution of honorary officials, this analysis focuses on the rank-and-file women who emerged as the core leadership group in the Australian women-only union, the Female Confectioners’ Union, in the 1920s. By drawing together analysis of archival records with genealogical sources, the women’s biographical profiles were created and, through the use of thematic analysis, insights were gained into the intersections of the individual women’s industrial and political activism and their domestic experiences. For the next 20 or more years, these women formed the backbone of the union (until an amalgamation with the men’s union in the confectionery trade in 1945) and were instrumental in shaping female collectivism.
Autonomy, diversity, and integration
Abstract For over two decades, union women's committees and educational programs and conferences organized by and for women have played a key role in politicizing women and producing them as a vocal constituency. The project of this article is to provide a conceptual framework to help assess the viability of separate organizing in the face of national and global economic and political restructuring. This article opens with a discussion of analytic tools for exploring separate organizing, outlining distinctions, for example, between separate and autonomous organizing, and between separate organizing and separatism. The second section presents a brief overview of some of the changes wrought by restructuring and globalization. The final sections consider the conditions under which such organizing avoids marginalization, addresses diversity, promotes both autonomy and integration, and facilitates coalition building—all of which will be critical to the continued relevance of separate organizing.
Meromorphic function sharing a small function with a homogeneous differential polynomial
Abstract In this paper, we consider a Brück-type result for a homogeneous differential polynomial generated by a meromorphic function.