Years ago I met a woman struggling to make ends meet on her low-wage, humiliating, dead-end job. "Who do you turn to when you have problems on the job?" I asked. "My mother," she answered. No union, community agency, women's organization or political leader came to mind. I was surprised until I came to learn that in a world where collective power is rare, workers have a painfully constricted view of the options for change.

I thought of this woman when I read Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Barbara Ehrenreich's insightful best-seller takes us on a sojourn through low-wage women's work in America. She describes with jangling clarity details of the work life of the working poor, a distressingly large sector of the work-force. Earning only enough to pay bills week to week, these millions of workers fall off the ledge when anything unexpected comes up: a toothache, a flat tire, a kid with a problem in school, a bad landlord. Comfortable middle class readers end the book asking, "How do they do it?" Ehrenreich admits she doesn't really know. She "cheated"-she was in good health and had insurance; she had a car; she had enough money for a security deposit on an apartment. Some of her co-workers worked through sprained ankles, lived in vans and went without meals.

The recession on the heels of September 11th only magnifies the problems. Hundreds of thousands of women in jobs like those Ehrenreich held-hotel maids, food service workers and retail clerks-are out of work with little or no help from the federal government in extending and expanding unemployment insurance.

In my experience, the strains Ehrenreich describes are not reserved for women in the high-turnover jobs she took. Much of "women's work" requires feats of social engineering. I met a secretary with fourteen years experience, the single mother of three, who didn't have enough money in her monthly budget to buy a pack of gum. A mother of two with a new full-time job could afford to get either health insurance or pay for child care-she chose health insurance, and had her seven year-old take care of her five year-old before and after school. A hospital worker with no health insurance had a heart attack. Within months she was back working three part-time jobs to pay off $60,000 in hospital bills. A middle-aged flight attendant shared an apartment with three other women. "I'll never be able to retire," she said.

Workers believe they deserve better. According to a 2001 AFL-CIO survey, "Workers' Rights in America," a cross section of workers believes they are entitled to basic rights: 87% believe there should be a "living wage"; 85% support job security unless the employer has a good reason for termination; 82% believe employers should provide education and training. And virtually all workers believe it is essential or very important to protect the following rights: 97% for equal treatment regardless of race or ethnicity; 95% for equal pay for women; 96% not to be sexually harassed; 92% for equal treatment regardless of age.

Workers see the gaps between what they should expect and what they can expect: only 14% say rights are already protected enough; 63% don't trust much in employers to treat employees fairly; and 57%-up 10 points since 1996-say management has too much power compared with workers.

How to bridge the gap between the power of management and the dismal working conditions of workers? As it turns out, low-wage women workers are the sector of the workforce most eagerly looking to unions as a solution.

More women than men have joined the labor movement every year of the last twenty years; union election campaigns where a majority of the workforce is women are more likely to win; women are more likely to say they would join a union tomorrow if they had a chance, especially young women; and women are more likely to side with workers over management in a dispute.

We need only look at the big organizing wins of the last few years to confirm the statistics. Consider health care workers, including the 74,000 home health aides in Los Angeles who joined SEIU for the biggest organizing victory since the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, hotel and restaurant workers, and light manufacturing-all predominantly women's jobs.

But organizing faces enormous resistance. Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell points out flagrant abuses of workers' rights by management in a study published in 2000. Among other forms of intimidation, employers illegally fire union supporters in 31% of organizing campaigns; and half of employers threaten to shut down the company if employees organize. Fierce employer opposition and wholly inadequate labor laws keep the gains of unions modest.

Unions must do a better job, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney acknowledged last December at the AFL-CIO Convention: "The American labor movement is failing to help new members organize at anywhere near the level we need to-and this failure must be addressed.or the future of this federation is at stake." The Convention pledged to invest more resources in organizing, to use union power and influence to make organizing more possible, and to take steps to change the environment for organizing.

Progressives can help change the environment by lending support when workers organize. Winning a union is a community affair, and members of a community can hold employers accountable by participating in Voice@Work campaigns (see www.afl-cio.org/voiceatwork/index.htm).

The need for unions for low-wage women won't be going away anytime soon. "What surprised and offended me most about the low-wage workplace," Ehrenreich writes, ".was the extent to which one is required to surrender one's basic civil rights and-what boils down to the same thing-self-respect." Any organizer will tell you that the desire for respect is at the heart of every organizing campaign. And it will take more than Mom's help to get it.

Karen Nussbaum is the director of the AFL-CIO Working Women's Department.