Abstract

The Coalition for Reproductive Rights of Workers (CRROW) was formed in 1979 to advocate and organize for the rights of workers to conceive, deliver, and raise healthy children, while retaining equal job rights. A unique coalition of labor unions women's groups, legal organizations, environmental groups, health groups, and civil rights organizations, CRROW worked to eliminate discriminatory employment policies, such as those practiced by American Cyanamid, of excluding women workers from certain worksites. Although toxic chemical exposure of either the father or the mother can result in fetal damage, industry's solution was to exclude women workers from certain worksites. CRROW had three main objectives: to continue working with government agencies to develop regulations to protect workers from discriminatory policies and develop workplaces free from reproductive hazards; educate workers, trade unionists, doctors, lawyers, and the public at-large in the scientific, legal, and regulatory aspects of reproductive hazards; and participate in selected legal and administrative proceedings, as well as stockholder resolutions in conjunction with unions and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), regarding discriminatory policies and reproductive hazards. In 1979, at the time of the formation of the CRROW, Dr. Wendy Chavkin was a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. In the late 1960s and early 1970s she worked on litigation challenging restrictive abortion laws in several states. As abortion became legal in New York and other states, even before the Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade, Dr. Chavkin worked to prevent sterilization abuse, both by helping to develop city, state and federal regulations to insure informed consent of women as a precondition to any sterilization procedure, and also by challenging arbitrary rules that prevented women, who were truly informed of the risks and the benefits of sterilization, from obtaining the procedure. The Coalition for the Reproductive Rights of Workers (CRROW) Records (dated 1976-1989) collected by Dr. Wendy Chavkin documents CRROW's organizing, advocacy, and community-building at the intersection of labor and reproductive rights regarding labor protections for women, with particular emphasis on discriminatory employment practices and the impact of environmental exposure to hazardous chemicals on workers to conceive, deliver, and raise healthy children. Materials include correspondence, administrative documents, meeting agendas and minutes, legal memoranda, conference materials, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documentation from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).