Appalachian Figures
In the late twentieth century, thousands of families left the hills and hollers of Appalachia for the auto plants of the industrial Midwest. Mountain men and women who once cut timber or mined coal found themselves under fluorescent lights, tightening bolts on assembly lines in places like Detroit, Flint, and Sterling Heights.
Those plants were dangerous. Lead, solvents, noise, repetitive strain, and speed-up all took their toll. Women on the line faced an added threat. In the 1970s and 1980s employers started rolling out so called “fetal protection” policies that barred women of childbearing age from certain jobs altogether. If you could get pregnant, you could be told to get out of the highest paying work.
The United Auto Workers did not automatically side with the women. Within the union, as in the broader labor movement, there were bitter arguments about whether to keep women away from reproductive hazards or to force employers to clean up the plants. Those debates eventually reached the United States Supreme Court in International Union, UAW v. Johnson Controls, Inc. (1991), the landmark Title VII case that struck down blanket bans on fertile women in lead exposed jobs.
Behind that victory stood a small, determined woman from rural Mississippi. Her name was Odessa Komer.
Born in Kemper County in 1925, Komer moved north as a young girl, left high school early to earn a paycheck at Ford, and climbed through the ranks of UAW Local 228 at the Sterling Axle Plant. She eventually became the first woman vice president of the United Auto Workers and one of the most influential labor feminists of her generation.
Her story belongs to the same era of Southern and Appalachian migration that reshaped coal camps, mill towns, and auto cities alike. It is also a story about how one working class woman insisted that women stay at the bargaining table instead of being pushed out “for their own good.”
From Kemper County To The Ford Line
Odessa Creekmore Komer was born on June 29, 1925, in Kemper County, Mississippi, a poor rural county just west of the Alabama line. Like many Southern families in the interwar years, the Creekmores moved north to Michigan in search of steadier industrial work.
Komer left high school three years before graduation so that she could help support her family. She hired in at a Ford Motor Company plant and got her first taste of life as an auto worker.
She married in 1945 and stepped away from the plant to raise her children, only to return to Ford in 1953 as an assembler at the Ford Sterling Plant in Macomb County. She joined UAW Local 228 and devoted much of her spare time to the union.
Local 228 was a big local, roughly 7,000 members, and like many UAW locals in the Detroit area it included workers whose roots lay in Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and the upland South as well as the Deep South. Auto plants like Sterling became gathering points where mountain families and Mississippi families stood shoulder to shoulder on the line, breathing the same fumes and fighting the same bosses.
Within that overwhelmingly male space, Komer kept running for office. Over fourteen years she became the first woman elected to a series of positions in Local 228, culminating in the job of recording secretary. Every one of those elections marked a first for a woman in that local’s history.
In 1964 she helped win a clause in the Local 228 contract that required seniority to be considered in assigning better jobs. Three years later that clause was written into the national agreement with Ford. For women workers, who had often been trapped in lower paying, less secure jobs regardless of their years in the plant, this was no small thing.
These fights were not glamorous. They involved grievance hearings, contract language, and long meetings after a full shift. Yet they gave Komer the skills she would later use on a national stage.
“I Want Equal Responsibility”: Breaking The Glass Ceiling In The UAW
In 1967 the international union brought Komer onto the staff as education director for Region 1, which represented about 100,000 members in Michigan. Her job was to help local leaders understand contracts, grievance handling, and the broader history and politics of the labor movement.
At the 1974 UAW convention she ran for an international vice presidency and won. She became the first woman to hold that office in the UAW and one of the first women to serve as a vice president in any major American industrial union.
The Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame biography preserves one of her clearest statements about how she saw that new role. In explaining why she pushed for tough bargaining assignments, she said simply, “I get equal pay, I want equal responsibility.”
That insistence on responsibility shows up again in her own writing. In 1981 Komer co authored a chapter titled “Education for Affirmative Action: Two Union Approaches” in the book Labor Education for Women Workers, a guide for labor educators.
In that chapter she described what happened when she took office. At the time of her election in 1974, she was given oversight of several departments: Technical, Office and Professional Workers, Consumer Affairs, Conservation and Natural Resources, and Recreation and Leisure Time. She asked for more. Three months later she was also given major collective bargaining responsibilities. In January 1975 she was put in charge of the Women’s Department as well.
Komer believed that symbolic representation was not enough. She warned that if women leaders never sat at the bargaining table, their offices would be treated as tokens. In her chapter she explained that, in the UAW’s fiercely competitive local politics, “Women must be prepared and qualified in order to run for an office.”
That line could have been written for any coal local or steel local where a woman tried to break into what had long been “men’s work.”
Building A Women’s Department That Trained Bargainers
As UAW vice president, Komer used the Women’s Department to do more than hold annual conferences. She treated it as a training ground for women who would go home and run for leadership positions in their own locals.
In Labor Education for Women Workers, she laid out a strategy built around residential schools and intensive institutes at the Walter and May Reuther UAW Family Education Center at Black Lake in northern Michigan.
Each year, roughly 200 women from local unions around the country were brought to the center for concentrated study of union structure, parliamentary procedure, labor law, and bargaining. They were expected to go back ready to serve on negotiating committees, grievance panels, and executive boards.
Komer’s goal was simple: a support structure that would make it normal for women to be elected to top local offices in proportion to their numbers in the membership. Michigan Women Forward notes that this strategy paid off. UAW women reached those positions in roughly the same proportion as their share of the union.
Her approach also placed the UAW within a wider network of feminist labor activism. She served as a national officer of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), sat on the advisory board of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and co chaired the National Coalition for the Reproductive Rights of Workers (CRROW). Those organizational ties would prove crucial when the fight over fetal protection policies came to a head.
“Fix The Workplace, Not The Worker”: The Johnson Controls Fight
Beginning in the 1970s, companies that made batteries, chemicals, and other hazardous products faced growing pressure over occupational exposure to toxins like lead. Some employers responded by barring all women who could become pregnant from the highest paying production jobs. These so called fetal protection policies claimed to protect unborn children, but in practice they pushed women out of the best work and left male workers in the same dangerous conditions.
Inside the UAW, there was sharp debate. Some leaders and members supported the policies, arguing that the union had a duty to protect future children. Others, including Komer, argued that the real solution was to reduce exposures for everyone instead of excluding women from jobs.
Legal scholars who have studied this period credit her with helping move the UAW away from exclusion and toward what came to be called the “fix the workplace, not the worker” position. An influential law review article on fetal protection policies notes that the UAW reached its anti exclusion stance after internal debates in which leaders like Komer pressed for equal treatment and safer plants.
Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame puts the matter plainly. With “the jobs of 22 million women workers at stake,” it explains, “Odessa Komer led the UAW challenge to corporate policies that removed women of child bearing age from dangerous areas,” carrying the fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
The case that finally reached the Supreme Court was International Union, UAW v. Johnson Controls, Inc., a challenge to a battery manufacturer’s blanket exclusion of “all women except those whose infertility was medically documented” from jobs involving lead. In a 1991 decision, the Court held that these policies violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act as amended by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. The Court ruled that fetal risk was not a legitimate basis for excluding women from jobs if men were allowed to take the same risks.
When the decision was announced, the AFL CIO News quoted a joint statement by UAW President Owen Bieber and vice presidents Odessa Komer and Stan Marshall. They called the ruling “a vindication of our belief that women should have every right to the same employment opportunities as men.”
In the wake of Johnson Controls, agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) revised their guidance to match the Court’s ruling. Employers could no longer keep women out of jobs solely because they might become pregnant. They had to address the hazards themselves.
For Appalachian and Southern women who had followed their families into auto, steel, and battery plants, the decision mattered. It meant that women from Harlan County or Hazard who hired into a lead shop in Ohio or Michigan could no longer be told to step aside “for the sake of the baby” while their brothers and husbands stayed in high paying jobs.
Environmental Politics: Sun Day, Solar Power, And The Conservation Department
Komer’s responsibilities extended beyond the Women’s Department. In the late 1970s and early 1980s she also headed the UAW’s Conservation and Natural Resources Department. That position put her at the intersection of labor, energy policy, and environmentalism at a time when coal, nuclear power, and oil were all hotly contested.
In an article for the EPA Journal titled “What Is the Most Significant Environmental Achievement of the Past Decade?”, she reflected on the union’s role in promoting solar power. Writing as UAW vice president and director of the Conservation Department, she pointed to Sun Day 1978, a nationwide day of action for solar energy that the UAW had helped organize.
“We felt that by using cleaner solar power rather than total dependence on conventional energy sources we could benefit the environment,” she explained, recalling the union’s solar projects at its Family Education Center on Black Lake and its Jobs Environment Justice conferences that tried to bridge the divide between environmentalists and industrial workers.
For communities in central Appalachia, where strip mining and power plant pollution scarred the land, those debates about energy and jobs were not abstract. UAW plants employed thousands of people with roots in coal counties. A union leader who could speak credibly about both job security and environmental protection mattered.
Presidential Appointments: Women’s Rights And Disability Rights
By the late 1970s Komer’s work had caught the attention of national policymakers. In June 1978 President Jimmy Carter released a statement announcing forty members of the new National Advisory Committee for Women; among them was Odessa Komer, identified as a vice president of the International Union, UAW.
Two years later, Carter announced his intent to nominate her to the National Council on the Handicapped, the body that would later become the National Council on Disability. Sources that trace the early history of the council list her as one of the original members, placing a labor woman at the table as the disability rights movement pushed toward the eventual Americans with Disabilities Act.
She also appeared before Congress and federal agencies in her capacity as UAW vice president. Legal and policy histories cite her testimony in 1977 House hearings on pregnancy discrimination and in other proceedings dealing with pay equity and workplace harassment.
A 1990 Senate hearing volume titled Women and Violence lists Komer as a participant in discussions about domestic and workplace violence, noting her titles as UAW vice president and director of the Women’s Department.
These appearances underscore a pattern. Whether the subject was disability policy, violence against women, or reproductive hazards at work, she tried to carry shop floor concerns into national policy debates.
On The Record: Contracts, Fighter Jets, And Public Debate
For a union leader whose work focused on internal education and policy, Komer still left a noticeable trail in contemporary news coverage.
In 1986 the Los Angeles Times reported on tense contract talks between the UAW and Bendix Corporation, describing Komer’s role in an around the clock bargaining session that produced a tentative agreement.
Three years later, United Press International covered a UAW call on President George H. W. Bush to halt a fighter jet deal that the union believed would cost American jobs. As head of the union’s Aerospace Department, Komer was quoted urging Bush to stop the sale in order to protect U.S. workers.
C SPAN’s archive records at least one 1989 forum appearance where she spoke as a UAW vice president, providing a rare audiovisual record of her voice and style.
Even her critics help us understand how she saw her job. A Marxist paper, The Workers’ Advocate, quoted her from a 1987 Detroit News interview saying, “My job, as I view it, is to keep a plant alive,” using the remark to accuse her of putting companies’ survival ahead of more militant tactics. Whether one agrees with the critique or not, the quote captures a leader wrestling with how to protect workers in industries facing layoffs, imports, and automation.
A Legacy Of Leadership
Odessa Komer retired from her UAW vice presidency in the early 1990s after nearly two decades in that office. She continued to serve on boards and advisory committees and remained a reference point in union women’s leadership circles.
In 1995 she was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame. Her citation highlighted both her pioneering role in the UAW and her leadership in the Johnson Controls fight to protect women’s right to hazardous duty pay on equal terms with men.
She died on July 15, 2004, at the age of 79. Obituaries noted that she was a retired UAW international vice president and remembered her as a labor leader, feminist, and community figure.
Within the union today, her name is kept alive through events like the Odessa Komer Memorial Breakfast at UAW political action conferences and through Women’s History Month tributes that call her a “history maker” from Local 228.
Why Odessa Komer Belongs In Appalachian History
At first glance, a woman born in Kemper County, Mississippi and elected to union office in Sterling Heights, Michigan might seem far from the coal fields of Harlan or the company towns of Leslie County. Look closer and the connections become clear.
During the mid twentieth century, entire communities in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, southwestern Virginia, and eastern Tennessee sent their children to the auto plants of Michigan and Ohio. Coal miners’ daughters and sons turned into autoworkers. They joined the UAW, went to classes at places like the Black Lake Family Education Center, and learned how to run for steward, bargaining committee, or local president.
The programs Komer built in the UAW Women’s Department and the positions she fought for at the bargaining table directly shaped the opportunities available to Appalachian women in those plants. When the union trained a new crop of women negotiators or held a women’s conference, some of the women in those rooms had grown up in hollers and coal camps.
The Johnson Controls decision that she helped shepherd into being did not just protect women in one Wisconsin battery plant. It set a national standard. Women from the coal counties who hired into lead exposed jobs in Toledo, Lordstown, or the Detroit suburbs faced a different legal landscape because Komer and her allies refused to accept exclusionary policies.
In that sense, her life is part of the long, complicated story of how Appalachian migrants remade both the industrial Midwest and the law of work. She stands as a reminder that battles over mines, mills, and factories do not just happen in the counties that sit inside official Appalachian maps. They also unfold in the diaspora, where mountain people and their Southern neighbors fight over who gets to work, under what conditions, and on whose terms.
Sources and Further Reading
Odessa Komer, Gloria T. Johnson, “Education for Affirmative Action: Two Union Approaches,” in Labor Education for Women Workers, ed. Barbara Mayer Wertheimer (Temple University Press, 1981). First person account of Komer’s election as UAW vice president, her departmental responsibilities, and her strategy for training women leaders. Veteran Feminists of America+1
UAW Women’s Department, “ODESSA KOMER,” official biography on uaw.org, summarizing her career from Local 228 to the international vice presidency and listing her service in CLUW, NOW, CRROW, and other bodies. UAW
Michigan Women Forward, “Odessa Komer,” Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame biography, highlighting her bargaining work, women’s conferences, challenge to fetal protection policies, and major board appointments. Michigan Women Forward
EPA Journal, “What Is the Most Significant Environmental Achievement of the Past Decade?” (Nov/Dec 1980), contribution by Odessa Komer as UAW vice president and director of the Conservation Department, discussing Sun Day 1978 and the union’s solar projects. Environmental Protection Agency
AFL CIO News, “Fetal Protection Win Boosts Women, Safety,” quoting a joint statement by UAW President Owen Bieber and vice presidents Odessa Komer and Stan Marshall on the Johnson Controls Supreme Court decision. Internet Archive
Jimmy Carter, “National Advisory Committee for Women Appointment of 40 Members,” June 20, 1978; and “National Council on the Handicapped Nomination of 14 Members,” May 1, 1980, both in the American Presidency Project archives, documenting Komer’s presidential appointments. The American Presidency Project+1
United Press International, “UAW calls on Bush to halt fighter deal,” March 31, 1989, quoting Komer as UAW vice president in charge of the Aerospace Department. UPI
Women and Violence: Hearing Before the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate (1990), listing Odessa Komer, UAW vice president and director of the Women’s Department, among participants. Ford Library Museum
International Union, UAW v. Johnson Controls, Inc., 499 U.S. 187 (1991), Supreme Court decision striking down fetal protection policies that excluded fertile women from lead exposed jobs.
“Odessa Komer,” Wikipedia entry summarizing her life, offices held, and recognition, with references to UAW, New York Times, Barbara Love, and Britannica. Wikipedia
Joan E. Bertin, “People Protection Not ‘Fetal Protection’,” law review article analyzing the Johnson Controls decision and crediting labor leaders like Odessa Komer for shifting union positions toward anti exclusion policies. SAGE Journals
Laura Oren, “Protection, Patriarchy, and Capitalism: The Politics and Theory of Gender Specific Regulation in the Workplace,” scholarly study of fetal protection policies that includes a telephone interview with Komer and discusses UAW policy changes. eScholarship+1
Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women’s Equal Citizenship, which cites Komer’s testimony in congressional hearings on pregnancy discrimination and describes the Johnson Controls decision’s impact on pregnant workers’ rights. epdf.pub
Barbara J. Love, ed., Feminists Who Changed America, 1963–1975, which includes an entry on Komer and situates her within second wave feminism, CLUW, and the UAW women’s movement. Wikipedia+1