“I’ve worked low paying jobs before and I don’t want to ...



STAFF, STEWARDS, AND STRIKES:

Labor’s Communication Gap[1]

2005

Journal of Anthroological Research. Vol 51(2):179-200

E. Paul Durrenberger

and

Suzan Erem

Anthropology

Penn State

409 Carpenter Building

University Park, PA 16802

epd2@psu.edu

STAFF, STEWARDS, AND STRIKES:

Labor’s Communication Gap

Abstract

Union staffers think that the willingness and ability of the workers they represent to strike is a key for getting better contracts. Worksite leaders, however, think the key is the speaking and legal skills of the union representatives who bargain for them. This difference is rooted in their everyday experiences, but leads to a communication gap of which neither is aware. Thus, stewards are likely to see a staff call for a strike authorization vote to give them bargaining power a failure of the negotiator’s skills but staffers are likely to see failure to authorize a strike a failure of worksite leaders to organize their units.

Key words: organized labor, ethnography, methods, unions, misunderstandings

STAFF, STEWARDS, AND STRIKES:

Labor’s Communication Gap

In this paper we discuss a major disconnect between the views of union staff people and the workers they represent. While staff members think that the willingness and ability of bargaining units to strike is a means to achieve the power to negotiate good contracts, volunteer worksite leaders think that this power derives from the personal characteristics of the negotiator such as legal skill and speaking ability. These mismatched and unspoken expectations have implications for union bargaining strength and ability to use any of these tactics successfully. This finding is an example of a contribution that anthropology is particularly well-suited to make, in that our experience shows that when the actors are asked these questions directly, in an interview, for example, they provide what they perceive to be the “right” answer, informed by what they know of their union’s program, but that is a different answer from the one we obtain from our paired comparisons.

While many unions have backed away from the strike even as a negotiating tool, some have become increasingly militant and willing to use strikes (Johnston 1994). But, as we have shown in other work, a policy of a union does not necessarily reflect or even translate into ideas or practices of members (Durrenberger and Erem 1999a). We continue to work with one union whose leadership is not afraid to strike and whose membership in many places has voted to strike, yet the disconnect we have identified is as clear with that union as with the others we studied.

In previous papers (Durrenberger and Erem1997a, 1997b, 1999a, 1999b) we reviewed the literature that shows that the chief factors in labor’s decline are structural such as the flight of capital to low-wage countries and unorganized areas, the shift to a service economy, and the changes of law and administration abetted by a history of often violent anti-labor mobilization (Vanneman and Cannon 1987) and a general pattern of worker intimidation (Cohen and Hurd 1998; Fantasia 1988; Johnston 1994). Much of the decline is due to the war on labor that intensified in the 1970s and 80s (Bronfenbrener et al. 1998:3, Levitt and Conrow 1993). The uses of power in the pursuit of class interests are as clear here as in any the examples Wolf (1999) discussed in his interpretations of Kwakutil, Nazis, and Aztecs.

The chief goal of the union movement in industrial social orders is to redress the power imbalance between those who provide labor but do not necessarily control the conditions for its use and those who control the conditions of its use through their ownership or management of productive resources. It does this by attempting to develop collective power based on principals other than wealth. The only way to achieve the structural balance the labor movement seeks is through concerted action. The most effective of those has been the strike (Johnston 1994).

Readers of this paper may be familiar with the events surrounding the 2004 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco. Those were an example of a union initiating concerted action not only among members, but among consumers. Like SEIU in its Justice for Janitors campaign (Johnston 1994: 146-174) the members of UNITE HERE Local 2 engaged in concerted action in their strike, and the larger international HERE engaged AAA and similar organizations in a wider range of concerted action in a “corporate campaign.”

While government machinations at any level may be complex maneuvers of different interest groups, they may operate as channels for the exercise of class power against labor. Though it was precedented (Johnston 1994: 38-40), the most egregious example of the use of administrative power against unions is the Reagan administration’s legacy of breaking the air traffic controller's strike with replacement workers (Newman 1988). Workers can strike when a contract has expired and before a new one has been accepted, but they can also be immediately replaced. This makes strikes less available as a bargaining tool. And they are not at all available as a means of grievance handling or dealing with management during the term of a contract, when arbitration is usually the last step of the process.

When the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the Wagner Act of 1935 specified that unions would negotiate contracts that bound workers to a set of rules for a specified time during which workers may not strike, unions lost a major weapon. Because unions must represent their members in grievance hearings and arbitrations, the law has made them into bureaucracies for handling quasi-legal cases. Many members even see their unions as a form of insurance (Durrenberger and Erem 1997a, 1997b).

The moment at which the organization calls upon its members for concerted direct action for a strike is at the culmination of the union’s efforts to negotiate a new contract through the quasi-legal means of talking across a table with management. It is the moment when talk has failed to achieve the desired collective results and thus becomes a critical juncture at which many assess the success or failure of the legal or quasi-legal efforts of talking (Johnston 1994).

Bronfenbrener et al (1998) review the research on organizing and the reasons that much such research is focused on macro-processes accessible through publicly available statistical material. Most such studies do not include union organizing strategies as variables because these are not included in the available data. Some even theorize that strategy is not significant to outcomes (Bronfenbrenner and Juravich 1998).

There are some qualitative case studies, but these rarely include quantitative material or statistical analysis (Brodkin 1988; Newman 1988, Fantasia 1988). The strength of these studies is that they can capture the realities of the organizing process by the inside perspectives of people familiar with organizing campaigns. Sometimes we see unions in the background as ethnographers focus on work situations (Durrenberger 1996a; Foner 1994; Fink 1998; Wells 1996; Griffith 1995, Stull et al. 1995) or an area (Zlolniski 1994, 1998; Krissman 1995, 1995-6, 1996; Wood 1986).

The literature

Centered on individual choice and responsibility, “meritocratic individualism” is an ideology that Katherine Newman describes as characteristic of the managerial middle class that commands the labor of workers. She observed that the working class perspective, more focused on structural factors, is grounded in the experience of layoffs, callbacks and closings which people understand to be caused by remote and impersonal forces. Since sociologists have done much more work with unions than anthropologists, we found the work of Matthew Hunt (1996) relevant. He reviews sociological work that indicates sociologists see individualism as a universal cultural characteristic of Americans, but observe that because of membership in certain groups and personal experiences people develop structuralist ideas that they layer onto existing individualistic conceptions. Because the ideology of personalism doesn’t match the experience of working class people, they are likely to create the kind of structuralist alternatives Newman discusses (Hunt 1996).

Another sociologist, Rick Fantasia (1988) takes his colleagues to task for privileging survey methods over ethnography. He argues that by considering only verbal responses about attitudes, sociologists have “been generally blinded to class sentiments expressed in the collective activities of workers” (Fantasia 1988:10) which create and express class-consciousness. He suggests (1988:5) that the world is a “paradoxical and contradictory place” to those negotiating it. Survey research in the sociological tradition overlooks paradoxes and records responses to surveys as fixed and static. It abstracts attitudes and ideas from the “world of class practices in which they are embedded.” He argues strongly that practice is a more compelling guide to class sentiments than surveys. (Fantasia 1988:8). Other sociologists, Vanneman and Cannon (1987) suggest that we can best understand class-consciousness through the study of practices (see Rubin 1992) rather than disembodied mental attitudes.

Paul Johnston (1994) provides a fine-grained account of practices from the points of view of an insider and of an outside observer and points to the management bias of much labor research devoted to public sector labor relations (Johnston 1994:36). We come to similar conclusions on our comparisons of inside and outside views (Durrenberger and Erem 2005). Comparing the viewpoints of an organizer, an outside analyst and an outside analyst taking the various perspectives of participants, Johnston (1994: 50) says:

It is one thing…to be able to gather a collection of…relatively powerless individuals…into a collective actor capable of defining a common interest and wielding power to achieve it; it is another to conceptualize that process as something requiring explanation; it is still more difficult to include in that explanation things taken for granted and thus invisible from the standpoint of the participant.

It is these assumptions that we discuss here—assumptions that participants in different structural positions think they agree upon but upon which they do not. That is the major focus of this paper. Johnston points out (p 56) that until his work, people who had written about strikes were, “…well insulated from the participants,” and acknowledges that aggregated quantitative data sometimes provided him a refuge from the confusions of everyday life. Our quantified data are closer to the ground.

Hannerz (1992) reviews anthropological literature and recognizes that peoples’ views of things depend on the positions from which they see them (Durrenberger and Pálsson 1996). People construct meanings from their location in social structures from the flow of available experiences and intentions. “Through the interaction of perspectives, culture is produced. How many people have to be involved in order for us to see culture as a collective phenomenon? As few as two, or as many as millions” (Hannerz 1992:68). Concrete personal experiences are the basis for generalized understandings and generalized understandings are frameworks for interpreting experiences. Shared meanings are tied to specific shared experiences of people in settings. These shared meanings then inform action.

We will describe union staff and worksite leaders’ actions, how they talk and what they talk about, the organization of concepts, how widely people share those organizations, and the relationships among the realities of everyday life, conceptual structures and action and the communication gap that results from differing conceptual structures.

The ethnography

Our ethnographic observations, Suzan’s union experience, and our interviews all indicate the salience of five means for a union’s acquiring the power to negotiate a good contract: having everyone in the industry organized, the speaking power of the negotiator, the legal skill of the negotiator, the ability and willingness of members to strike, and having friendly relations with management.

Unlike Scandinavian workers, most American workers find it difficult to imagine their whole industry organized by unions to represent their interests. The peak of labor organization in the U.S. was in 1948, so it is difficult for contemporary American workers to imagine a Scandinavian condition in which everyone is represented by a union. For instance, it is a huge struggle for HERE to imagine every hotel worker in the U.S. as a member of a union. From an American perspective, given the obstacles, this concept sometimes takes on an almost utopian hue.

Thus, “Having everyone in the industry organized” is an abstraction to many union members, most of whom do not participate directly in organizing drives. It often doesn’t take long for members who have negotiated a contract, or watched negotiations, to hear their employer object to certain wage increases because “the market” won’t permit it, and the employer would go out of business if the costs of production were raised to that extent. Or that the budget from corporate headquarters is established and there is only a set sum for labor—one category that is budgeted along with transportation, rent, and so on.

If all workers were organized, all employers would be on an equal footing and none could get labor cheaper than another (Johnston 1994: 118). Given the opposition in the U.S., this is a daunting task, but is a goal the Living Wage Campaign approaches in a minimal localized way by urging municipalities to contract only with firms that pay a greater than poverty wage.

From the other direction, union staffers often explain the need to organize the whole industry so that “the guy down the street” won’t take a union worker’s job for lower wages. Still, union members consider organizing the industry “the union’s” job, not one for individual members, and it is one that the labor movement is intent to accomplish by allocating more resources to organizing. That is part of the reason, for instance, that HERE pays the wages of people to work with academic organizations like AAA for their corporate campaigns.

Because of the grievance handling provisions of U.S. labor law, worksite leaders come to rely on the speaking power and legal skill of their union staff. Their persuasiveness and the contract are all that stands between aggrieved members and management. Members and worksite leaders see the union staff as the “experts” whose services and salaries they pay for with their union dues.

Being willing and able to strike depends on the cohesiveness and consensus of members at a worksite, yet it requires a personal choice on the part of each member. We have observed workers making this choice discuss personal financial situations ranging from how much fuel-oil is in their furnace tank, how much food is in the freezer, how bountiful their garden is to which of them are married and have a second household income. Especially at the lower end of the wage scale, it is no small thing for workers to consider foregoing even a day’s pay, much less a week’s or even worse, an open ended period without wages.

So, while worksite leaders may be persuaded of the wisdom of having the whole industry organized, their everyday work-lives dealing with day to day grievances and worker-management relationships are shaped by the their interactions with managers and union members. These form their concepts. While they may accept an abstract structural concept as important, it does not mean it will order their behavior or worksite priorities. They have to “keep the peace” at their worksites, enforce contracts against often-hostile management, and keep their members from losing their jobs. That is where their energy and thought goes. For the same reason, no matter how much labor organizations implore them, political action is not a priority for stewards even if it would help in the longer term to elect labor-friendly politicians. (Durrenberger 2002)

The point of our quasi-experimental before-and-after research on union consciousness in Chicago (Durrenberger and Erem 1999a) was to suggest that workers’ everyday experiences of power and subordination and workplace relationships shape their conceptions. The data from other Chicago union stewards suggested the same thing (Durrenberger 2002).

While an outside analysis may indicate the strength of structural factors in framing conflict-ridden interactions between labor and management that give rise to complicated personal dynamics of power in workplaces, the daily experience of stewards signifies that individuals and personalities are stronger. This experience is a consequence of factors such as the laws and practices that put stewards in the role of peacemaker rather representatives and spokespersons rather than as potential leaders of strikes.

This legal restraint determines the flow of experiences and intentions upon which stewards base the cultural models that inform their actions. In addition, union stewards, whether women or men, whether in homogeneous or heterogeneous unions, whatever their ethnicity, and even in highly-gendered jobs of both genders, think personal factors of ability and hard work are more important in achieving success than the structural factors of race and gender (Durrenberger 2001).

Approach

We found the same communication gap of our title in unions that are structured differently, located in different areas of the country and represent completely different kinds of workers.

Most recently, we have been studying the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago and Service Employees International Union District 1199P who organize healthcare workers in Pennsylvania. We have also worked with SEIU locals in Chicago, as well as with a local of legal services workers (UAW) in Chicago. For all, we traveled and observed union staff and worksite leaders at membership meetings, in grievance meetings, in negotiations and, for staff, in staff meetings. We will focus most of our comments for this paper on the Teamsters and 1199P, both with about 22,000 members in 2004, with very different histories and organizational structures.

The Teamsters of Chicago hail from a long tradition of thugs, (Bruno 2003) known for their immense political power and their keen ability to “persuade” those who don’t agree with them through “education” based more on a pedagogical philosophy of violence than argumentation, rhetoric, or discourse. Until the early 1990s they lived up to their reputation through patronage, stuffed ballot boxes and intimidation of their own members. The membership is largely male, racially mixed, mostly between Black and white, but more recently with more Latinos, with only a smattering of women of any race attending union meetings or becoming stewards or staff. The union’s governance structure is tightly controlled from the top, with a handful of officers and an executive board of three trustees – which usually defer to the top officer - making all of the financial decisions for the local. The top officer, called the secretary-treasurer, directs all staff and ultimately makes all decisions about the allocation of resources.

In the early 1990s, the international-level reform leadership of Ron Carey “trusteed” the local, throwing out its mob-style leadership and bringing them up on charges, and appointing new leaders, drawn from the rank-and-file. Those leaders were able to run for office, and eventually won and held office for the next decade. Considered reformists, they spent union resources of every kind building what by any standard would be considered a more democratic union. They made union meetings accessible with an open mike, and encouraged members to speak their minds. They abandoned the roaming goons to intimidate any who spoke out of turn at meetings. They made the election of officers by mail ballot so voters could not be intimidated by the previous process of voting in person at the union hall. They funded monthly steward meetings and fed their stewards to entice them to attend. Their top officer was known for being accessible to members and always willing to meet. And late in this leadership’s tenure, the membership voted to elect their stewards – an identifiable power base – instead of having them appointed by staff or local leadership. This result was against the expressed opposition of the top officer as well as the staff.

While Teamsters Local 705 was on a steep and uncharted democracy curve during the 1990s and into the new century, District 1199P had a different kind of trajectory. A union deeply-rooted in democratic principles, known for its organizing savvy and its progressive rank-and-file orientation, 1199P boasts of its radical history organizing low-wage health care workers across Pennsylvania.

Each worksite in 1199P elects its own officers and delegates to the larger body, its leadership assembly, which meets once a year. These delegates serve as stewards. Members in regions of the state, or from larger worksites as defined by the by-laws, elect their own representatives to the union’s statewide executive board, currently made up of 27 people. While it maintains a stable statewide leadership that might be difficult to unseat, they have put their funds behind their ideas of democracy in rebating dues to those units that successfully involve their members in the union.

A little more than a decade ago a large majority of the national 1199 union affiliated with the Service Employees International Union. 1199P risked becoming diluted by the much larger SEIU organization’s process and politics. Instead, SEIU looked to 1199ers as organizers to emulate, and put many of them in the top leadership of the international union.

Chosen as the union that would become the umbrella for many other Pennsylvania locals, 1199P fared well and in the last five years has grown from about 6,000 members to more than 21,000 partially through these affiliations as it “absorbed” the members of smaller locals. Having moved the stream its way, 1199P is no longer on the margins of the Pennsylvania or national labor movement, it is in the mainstream. It still represents a membership that is mostly women and mostly white, none of whom make the kind of wages and benefits Teamsters in Chicago do. And unlike its Teamster counterpart, the union still represents only a fraction of its industry in any specified geographic area.

Both unions have spent significant resources in recent years organizing new workers, but both also service many sites where the union has been in place for two generations or more of workers. So they struggle with the expectations, and often militancy, of newly-organized workers while providing contract enforcement staff to those with the “I pay my dues for a service” insurance attitude common among workers who get hired at a union worksite long after the union was organized and, pleased with the higher wages and benefits they enjoy, never risked anything or helped to organize the union that gives them the power to get those wages and benefits. Their experience tells them the employer pays a decent wage, the union takes an outrageous amount money each month from their check for dues, and every few years there are negotiations after which they’ll get a raise. As far as they’re concerned, “the union’s” job is to get them that raise and to keep them from being fired if they get into trouble.

With both unions, we participated in regularly scheduled gatherings of volunteer worksite leaders, called stewards or delegates, depending on the union. We also interviewed officers and staff, and based largely our previous work, developed surveys that we administered to worksite leaders. We found triads and paired comparisons particularly useful because they allowed us to measure perspectives without our subjects being able to “guess the right answer,” a skill that union people have developed well. We’ll explain why in the Methods section. But our survey work, as Fantasia (1988) cautioned, is not complete without the qualitative data we gained from our observations and participation in events.

For the first ethnographic vignette, we take you into the auditorium of Chicago’s Teamster City at the beginning of a hotly contested election campaign at the local, though the election itself was still a few months in the future. The 34 tank drivers of Exxon-Mobile are deciding whether or not to vote to authorize a strike. This is a step negotiators often take before a vote to strike. It signifies the members’ willingness to strike, a tool the negotiator can then use at the bargaining table. But here members are divided in at least three directions – for the company, for the union, and for the union in general but against the current leadership – personified by the negotiator who was leading the discussion.

A strike vote

“I’ve worked low paying jobs before and I don’t want to jeopardize a good job now that I have one,” a young man is saying to Jim Lyons, the gray haired union rep-negotiator opposite him. The two are surrounded by others dressed in blue jeans and Teamster jackets standing around in knots discussing the strike vote Lyous has requested.

Lyons has just presented the workers a scholarly lecture, peppered with colorful Teamster terms, on their place and role in a globalized political economy. He showed them graphs and charts on globalization and the future of transportation, their jobs, and the union movement.

“You are misleading these men,” says an older man to the union rep.

“What’s their offer?” asks another.

“They don’t have a specific offer on the table,” Lyons says. “But that’s not the point. The point is that I need something I can take to the bargaining table. I need some leverage I can use when I need it. That’s what we’re asking for here.”

“I don’t know,” says the young man. “This is a good company. They pay well and have good benefits.”

“Good company?” another member asks the young worker, incredulous. “You think it’s a good company? It’s not the company. It’s your union. It’s your union that got you those wages and those benefits. The company fought it every step of the way.”

“How long have you had this job?” asks Jim.

“A few months.”

“Ask the old timers. Ask them what happened over the last 20 years. Ask them what this union’s got for you.”

“But you’re asking us to strike….”

“No, I’m not asking you to strike. All I’m doing is asking you to authorize a strike. The company knows the drivers are with me.”

“I still want to know what they’re offering,” another comments.

“We’re not at the point of having concrete offers yet,” says Jim.

“And you’re asking us to strike?”

“No, once again,” Jim answers, impatience in his voice, “we’re asking for you to vote to authorize a strike in case we need it. You need to have confidence that I will use that power well. I won’t pull you out unless it’s necessary. It’s a matter of trust.”

“Yeah, it’s that trust you’ve lost. It’s that confidence you’ve lost. It’s that confidence this union’s lost,” says one of the older drivers, his finger jabbing at Jim’s face. This is a reference to the upcoming election.

“Yeah,” says the young man, “What’s this union done for me?”

One by one the men return their folded ballots to the folding table in front of the auditorium. On the table are sheets of paper with the signatures and identifications of the 34 members who work for the company, all of whom have taken ballots.

A steward from another barn, as Teamsters call their worksites, counts the ballots as all watch. “Nineteen ‘no,’ fifteen ‘yes.’”

There’s a stunned silence.

As we move toward the entrance of the auditorium, one older truck driver says, “Ah, that guy’s a kid. He’s just got a house, and the dumb fucker got himself a new car. He’s strapped. He’s gotta make those monthly payments. I can understand that. He’s stupid. But I can understand it. What I can’t understand is some of these guys who know better.”

We’re seeing the result of decades of “business unionism” that Jim Lyons and other leaders of 705 have been trying to turn around, as well as effective union busting by the employer, as later events show, as well as an electoral campaign against the leadership, as other events also show. But in this snapshot, we see that the members are looking for a service from the rep, without having to provide any backup in the form of their own commitment to strike. The accusation by one member of “the union” losing the confidence of the members is another example that shows the distance between staff and members. Relying on the old timers and the old days is the Jim’s way of referring to a time when the skill of the union rep wasn’t so much a factor as the ability and willingness of the workers to strike, if in this local, abetted by a historical, if no longer appropriate, reputation for intimidation.

Contracts and their enforcers

When enough workers at a worksite vote to have a union, their employer is legally obligated to negotiate a contract with the union. The members the union represents are called a bargaining unit. Some of their co-workers serve as stewards to represent the rest to management. Stewards may be elected or appointed by the leadership.

When a contract between the union and one of the employers expires, both sides are obliged to negotiate a new one. The union’s bargaining team is usually comprised of a full-time union staff person as a negotiator, if the union is big enough to sustain such staff positions, or an officer, and members from the bargaining unit. The contract specifies the terms of work for the period of the contract—any raises, breaks, vacations, sick-days, company contributions to the union’s pension fund and its health and welfare fund or health insurance, grievance procedures, and other matters. This contract has the force of law.

Since stewards are responsible for enforcing the terms of their contract, they have to be aware of its every nuance. At their monthly meetings, for example, 705 stewards usually sit with stewards from their own industry—tankers, freight, cartage, liquor and food, and parcel delivery services. As they eat together in the same auditorium where the strike vote was held, they compare notes on the details of their contracts in short hand references that are as particular to their trades as government acronyms are to their bureaus. They are also acutely aware of the provisions of each other’s contracts and who is getting a better or worse deal.

But stewards don’t regularly talk or think about negotiations. They deal with the supervisors and managers who oversee the workers that stewards represent. They often spend hours a day outside of work investigating grievances with varying degrees of merit and serving as quasi-lawyers, social workers and mediators for their co-workers.

Sometimes they can get someone “off” with the force of a good argument, which may contribute to a sense that their union rep should exhibit similar skills at the bargaining table. Other times, they’ve got to make the case with every shred of evidence and rhetorical nuance they can muster. If they fail to develop an irrefutable case, and can’t “convince” lower level management they are right, they drop the grievance or move it up in the process to the union rep and officers.

There the union provides yet another “service” as it uses institutionalized methods for resolving grievances. Local 705, for instance, uses courtroom-like “panels” of management and union representatives to hear cases. These hearings provide an arena for the appraisal of the legal and speaking skills of the person making the case. Some are considered eloquent; some, “dumbfucks,” in 705 parlance. Finally, if the case is judged strong enough, and there is no resolution, the union local may use its resources to support arbitration, a costly procedure.

Particular problems with grievances often suggest weaknesses in the contract. In the months leading up to a union contract’s expiration date, the union prepares to negotiate a new agreement with management. For union members, the contract is the written translation of the power they have in the workplace, and increasingly, in the industry. It is what will protect them, or leave them exposed to management’s unfettered power, for the term of the contract. It can be an indication of how strong the union is in the industry, in the country, or in the global economy, of how powerful the forces aligned against them are, and how effective the union can be in the face of it all. And finally, at least to those directly involved, it becomes the reflection of everything those workers have done, or not done, collectively in the period leading up to negotiations. It reveals to all the strength of their organization and solidarity.

What does a negotiator do?

Negotiators, usually full-time union staff, must have the skills to negotiate a contract on behalf of the members, one of the “services” a union organizer often lists as a benefit of joining a union, and something most members expect of the staff they pay their dues to employ. This expectation is set up early in the relationship between union staff and the members. For example, a common conversation between a union organizer and the people she is organizing may go like this:

Organizer: Your strength is in your unity. If you stick together you’ll get more, and get it in writing with a contract.

Worker: But we don’t know how to negotiate a contract.

Organizer: That’s OK. The union has trained and experience bargainers who will help you (for examples see Erem 2000).

The bargaining team, sometimes elected, sometimes appointed, should represent every major job class, and every shift, covered by the contract. Ideally, every member in the workplace is mapped, or charted, so that bargaining team members know who is responsible for communicating with, agitating or mobilizing whom. In 1199P, for example, an early and immediate test of the organization of a bargaining unit is how easy or difficult it is to accomplish this charting. In a well-organized unit, it’s automatic because the members have done it already; in poorly organized one, it may be next to impossible because people don’t know their co-workers or when and where they work.

Negotiators must be prepared with all publicly available financial information about the company as well as any information that might have surfaced about the company or its officers, any government reports or charges on for example, safety, finances and public health. They get this in one degree or another from union members and stewards, from the appropriate agencies and occasionally from an international union’s research department (see Durrenberger and Erem 1997b).

Negotiators also need to know any local or national politicians who may have an interest in the workers, the neighborhood, the employer or the industry (Erem 2000). They must understand the law and its limitations and its strengths, which usually lie in some ambiguity or untested area. They must be able to articulate the issues effectively, which sometimes means calling on bargaining team members to tell their own stories of working on the front lines. They must keep track of all the proposals and counter proposals, and understand the way a certain turn of phrase can turn the meaning of a clause inside out—the difference between a “shall” and a “should;” between a “must” and a “may.”

Finally, negotiators must understand how people think and feel. This applies to understanding the boss across the table and what will hit a nerve, trip a trigger or send bargaining into a tailspin, but it also applies to the people sitting on the union side.

When they are bargaining, negotiators are as attuned to every nuance of body language, voice tone, facial expression, and turn of phrase as any interpretive anthropologist at a cock fight. In private they analyze these repeatedly and endlessly discuss alternative interpretations as they mine the minutest of details of dress, body language, facial expression, language intonation, eye motion, and word choice for meaning. Negotiators often coach the members of the bargaining team on facial expression and body language, and members often chastise or praise each other on their ability to follow this coaching.

The bargaining team is typically a group of motivated volunteers - often worksite leaders - who want more for themselves and the members they represent. They look to the union to get more, and what they consider “the union” is what can make the critical difference, as we’ll discuss later.

All of these are the tools for negotiators, the tactics they can employ on behalf of members while negotiating the best contract they can. Experienced chief negotiators believe they have speaking and legal skills, and pressure points such as public sympathy or friendly politicians they can use during bargaining. One source of power is any power the local or its international can develop through political alliances (Johnston 1994:40) or a corporate campaign.

On the way to a bargaining session, Paul, having worked with Chicago union locals whose negotiators wore suits, ties, and shined shoes, asked Jim Lyons, dressed in an open necked short sleeved knit shirt, whether 705 bargainers wore neckties. He answered, “If you have a strong union, you don’t need a necktie.” They spent the rest of the afternoon high above the ground in the wood and glass paneled palatial quarters of a downtown law firm surrounded by union-busting attorneys in full dress corporate regalia who attempted every form of intimidation. It became apparent that “strong union” meant one with a reputation for effective strikes.

This negotiator’s open necked shirt was an informal statement of what our more quantified findings confirm--that negotiators still believe the most critical tool of unions in the history of American labor is their most effective one today: workers’ collective action – the ultimate one being the ability and willingness to strike - lagging only behind having the entire industry organized--a feat accomplished away from the bargaining table and usually beyond the scope of their responsibilities.

The employer’s requirement to negotiate does not mean the employer will agree with the wishes of its workers. Employers may use negotiations as a theatre for embarrassing the union, forcing concessions, or even attempting to bust the union, getting the workers to vote to de-certify it, as we discuss in the epilogue to this paper. Therefore, in preparing for negotiations, unions usually develop strategies for leveraging power to gain better contracts, as the next example shows.

Where the staff is coming from

Minutes before the 705 strike vote we described, there was a meeting of the full membership of the local. The principle officer, Jerry Zero, discussed the evolving contract with freight drivers and the new contract with one of the parcel delivery services. In these excerpts, Jerry is first recognizing staff for the work they perform. It’s an election year for the local, and it’s Jerry’s job to provide qualified, expert staff so members can enjoy the best wages, benefits and job security possible. But he is also sending a clear message to members - either you be willing to strike for these benefits, or tell your negotiators you don’t want them. Jerry knew that without the tool of a strike threat, union negotiators didn’t have a prayer at the bargaining table, and in the end, members would blame him for a bad contract.

We owe a debt of thanks to the International and President Hoffa that got this moving. We thought there would be a strike on [the national package delivery company]. Hoffa got into it and in a matter of two weeks got a contract that was even better than the national master contract because [the company] has more money than freight and movers. But there are other things we [in this Local] enjoy like more sick days, so future plans of the Local are to try to keep our health and welfare plan in tact. Everyone here doesn't belong, but yours should mirror it closely, and there will be no co-pay and we're going to keep it that way. We have never had that and don't plan on it.

Everyone clapped and Jerry continued, addressing the union pension fund, which, because of its stability and great payouts is the envy of many workers who aren’t in it yet. The union negotiates retirement benefits, but in a move parallel to the Bush administration’s push to privatize social security, employers have pushed hard for 401K plans, which are less expensive for them.

The pension fund-we'd like to build participation in the pension fund. Jim Lyons will bargain hard for the pension fund.

Jerry discussed details of the pension fund and the advantages of a union pension fund versus a 401-K fund invested in a variable and random stock market during the Cheney-Bush administration, as he called it. Eventually, he tied negotiating power not only to the willingness to strike, but the union’s success in organizing the industry.

We have some good people in our Health and Welfare and Pension Department. These people from our department have done a great job. This is what we're going to try to put into movers, tankers, and food and liquor industries. The negotiators will be working hard. It will be difficult. It’s not be going to be easy. In all three of these industries we will take a couple of strike votes along the line. Be ready. We may have to go out on strike. If you don't want them, tell our negotiators and we'll work around them but this is our best opportunity to get these things. We've built these industries back up. Our organizers have built them up. Thanks for coming--you can learn a lot of stuff from Jim.

Then Jim Lyons, who later presided over the failed strike authorization vote, took the stage. He emphasized much less what he would accomplish, and much more what the support of members would accomplish.

I want to take a moment to tell you what kind of fight we're going to have. I'm going to use tank as an example. We've had huge resistance in tank. We’ve been at the table with Mobile for nine months. We haven’t gone anywhere. For every action there's a reaction. We're taking a strike vote. I suspect before we're done the whole tank industry will have a strike vote. And movers are coming up….

I'll guarantee you—the companies will find out what we're made of. And I'll guarantee you that you're only get from these companies what you're big enough to take--they won't give you anything.

People applauded and got up to get sandwiches and move on to their various smaller meetings for each division. But what did they hear? Lyons thought he was clear - Without at least the threat of a strike, you won’t get what you want. But when it was all over, the Exxon-Mobile members would not authorize a strike. What happened?

Where the worksite leaders are coming from

We turn now to a hotel conference room in central Pennsylvania where an 1199P staff organizer (union rep) is talking with members who work at a nursing home. He is preparing them for upcoming contract negotiations. They are discussing health insurance. This union pressures its members to solve their own problems, but these members are facing great challenges, losing more than winning, and still seeing the union staff as the solution to their problems.

Org: We have a lot of senior employees compared to a home in a city with teenagers. You are more expensive, and they won’t insure you.

But we have the ability to fix it. …Whatever it takes to get there. The best way to avoid a strike is to be ready for one.

Member A: We can go around with a Band Aid on, or a sticker [she’s referring to concerted action of everyone wearing a band-aid or a sticker in a conspicuous place on their uniforms or bodies to indicate discontent—a low level of concerted action.]

Vice president of the bargaining unit: Everyone wants to call [our organizer]. We’re the union, not [the organizer]. When there’s a problem you won’t get everyone to help you. They’ll come to me or Betty. I say, “Write a statement.” They won’t. If we don’t stick together, we won’t have a union. One or two can’t fight it.

Member B: The problem is employers are seeing whether its shirts, stickers, promotions--whatever it is, whenever we go, we lose. I hear we’d be better off to be at management’s mercy and decertify [the union by voting it out] and be at their mercy or get someone else [a different union]. That’s our right. We’re paying for dues and representation and every time we have an issue we lose

Organizer: You could decertify and go with Steelworkers or AFSCME. But my job is to help you beat the boss.

VP: When people are asked to go against the supervisor, they don’t want to because it causes hard feelings. [They say,] “I can’t do it.”

Member C: We went against her and will again.

Member B: They [management] got away with it once, they say, “We’ll get away with it again.” Reducing our hours [of work].

The organizer went on to begin charting the unit, developing a phone tree, and assigning responsibilities to members. During negotiations, the organizer remained silent during most exchanges with the management team to encourage members to control their own bargaining process, a policy of 1199P. Late one night, after repeated rounds of contentious discussion back and forth, the union team solidified a position in caucus, but when it came time to decide who should speak for the unit, the members said to the organizer, “You do it. It’s your job.” Despite the organizer’s best efforts, the members still looked to him to fix the problem. Again, we ask, what happened?

This example shows the organizer striving for solidarity, for the cohesiveness to threaten a strike, for the power of concerted action. It shows members and stewards are unconvinced that they can pull it off. They are speaking from their daily experience of battling against a relentless management in a class war that remains unrecognized and invisible even to many of the combatants. Even in this highly decentralized union, where more daily problems are resolved by worksite leaders, and even with staff only recently working in similar bargaining units, there is this gap between staff and worksite leaders. Workers have experienced the successes and failures of collective action, and they want “smarter people” or their “union” to solve the problem.

Methods

We asked staff and stewards at Local 705 and District 1199P what is important for gaining a strong contract. Our previous ethnographic work with other union locals (Durrenberger and Erem 1999a, 1999b, Durrenberger 2001, 2002, 2003) suggested that a paired comparisons question would best answer this question.

Paired comparisons ask people which of all combinations of two items is more of some feature. For instance, the example that Weller and Romney (1988) use is which among elephants, mice, and goats is larger. If we ask someone to compare all possible pairs of items for size, the answers would probably indicate that elephants are larger than mice and goats, and that goats are larger than mice. If we count each “is larger” answer as one point, the elephants would score 2, goats would score 1 and mice would score 0. This would represent this person’s size scale for these three animals.

One of our earliest findings in the Chicago work was that respondents could not rank a series of items according to a criterion. They could select one item as the “most” and another as “least” but the others were simply somewhere in between and unranked. This may be because they did not, in fact rank the items. Or it may be that the task called for finer discriminations than people are accustomed to making.

Though they are cumbersome, paired comparisons get around both of these problems, so we developed a series of them for our surveys. A single question can take as much as an entire page. Many workers look at the survey and express frustration with the length of the questions and the difficulty of choices. But even they admit that if we’d asked them to “rank” their choices, they would have a hard time doing it. When we explain that if they make all of the choices of “which one of the two,” “the computer” will tell us how they ranked them, they are often much more willing to do the exercise. This is an important difference that an ethnographic approach to surveying makes. Without our encouragement and explanation as we administer these, usually face-to-face and sometimes on the phone, we would not get the participation we have. Alternately, if we chose the short route and simply made up what we thought was an intriguing or tricky but direct question, we would not be able to interpret the results so reliably.

For this study we asked stewards and staff which of all possible combinations of two of the following things is more important to getting a strong contract. We based these choices on Paul’s earlier ethnographic work with stewards and staff of other unions, and Suzan’s experience as a union representative.

• Being willing and able to strike

• Friendly relations with management

• Having everyone in the industry organized

• Speaking power of the negotiator

• Legal skill of the negotiator

For Local 705 stewards, we did a random-sample survey of ten percent of all stewards. We compared the portion of stewards from each industry, (tank, freight, package delivery etc.) with the overall proportions to verify that our random sample was in fact representative. All staff members completed our surveys.

For District 1199P we surveyed the annual meeting of worksite leaders, and then surveyed a random sample of worksite leaders by phone to check our sample. There also we checked to be sure we had a portion from each division of the local, (nursing home, hospital, public) as well as among job classifications such as registered nurse, janitor, maintenance etc. The random sample phone survey responses had substantially the same results as the leadership meeting responses. All staff members responded to the survey.

We used Steve Borgatti’s package of computer programs, Anthropac (Borgatti 1996a, 1996b) to tally the responses. For each respondent, this program constructs a matrix like the animal size one of our example above. It then sums all individual matrices to arrive at an aggregate matrix. We used Anthropac’s consensus program to measure the extent to which people’s individual matrices agree with each other’s. The convention in consensus analysis is that if the first factor contributes more than three times as much as the second to explaining the variance in the responses, there is sufficient consensus to consider the answer a cultural convention (see Romney et al 1986). Our findings showed very high consensus.

The gap

This is where we found a critical contradiction in perception, one that can both explain at least one current weakness and forecast future problems for the labor movement as a whole. It also helped us understand the failure of the strike vote we discussed earlier and the president’s talk with members. Union staff and worksite leaders have radically different ideas about what they need to have to negotiate a good contract, and these two opposing perspectives are hammering it out with each other in the labor movement every day, indirectly, almost silently.

What our surveys showed was that everyone – staff and worksite leaders from both unions - agreed that “having the industry organized” was most important to gaining the power to negotiate a good contract. And everyone agreed that “friendly relations with management” was least important. What is critical here are the second, third and fourth most important factors.

Local 705 staff listed these factors in this order of importance:

1. Ability and willingness to strike

2. Legal skill power of the negotiator

3. Speaking power of the negotiator

District 1199P staff listed them this way:

1. Ability and willingness to strike

2. Speaking power of the negotiator

3. Legal skill of the negotiator

Note that the ability and willingness of the workers to strike is at the top for the staff of both unions.

Now for worksite leaders. These are the rank-and-file union members who often serve on the bargaining teams with the staff, whom the staff look to for information and guidance about what members want to see in their contracts, how strongly members feel about certain issues, and how motivated they are to take action.

Local 705 worksite leaders listed the three middle factors of what’s important to gaining a strong contract this way:

1. Legal skill of the negotiator

2. Speaking ability of the negotiator

3. Ability and willingness to strike

District 1199P worksite leaders listed them this way:

1. Speaking ability of the negotiator

2. Legal skill of the negotiator

3. Ability and willingness to strike

The ability and willingness to strike was at the bottom. This is where we saw what we suspected was a serious disconnect. Our discovery caused us to review our previous analyses of other union staffs and stewards. We had routinely reported similar findings for the other three locals where we had asked similar questions without seeing the importance of the finding. These included the staff and stewards of SEIU Local 1 in Chicago, a union of janitorial, industrial and public sector workers. Its membership is almost an even mix of men and women, Black, Latino, and Eastern European. Our previous work also included a survey of the stewards of SEIU Local 4 in Chicago, a union of nursing home workers who were mostly Black women. Paul has reported on the methodology and findings of the surveys of Locals 1 and 4 before (Durrenberger 2002). Our findings on this question were consistent across all demographics, ethnicities, job classifications, structures of unions, and these two regions of the country, both rural and urban.

What we think it means

First, there is no question in our minds that these findings reflect structural relationships, as Hannerz suggested. By studying such diverse unions and unexpectedly ending up with the same findings, we have eliminated other factors such as gender, race and regional effects.

Our quasi-experimental before-and-after research on union consciousness in Chicago (Durrenberger and Erem 1999a) indicated that workers’ everyday experiences of power and subordination and workplace relationships shaped their conceptions. As those workplace relationships changed, so did workers’ conceptual structures. The data from other Chicago union stewards suggested the same thing (Durrenberger 2002).

The ramifications were very clear to the union leaders with whom we discussed them. Their reactions ranged from hitting themselves on the forehead with an open palm to muttering, “Oh shit.” Interestingly, though, when we presented the findings to the 1199P executive board of both union staff and worksite leaders, we observed each group nodding in approval when we were discussing its perspective, and looking shocked when we presented the other’s perspective. Without extrapolating this to a dangerously inaccurate degree, we can raise some questions about staff/worksite leader dynamics.

1. When a bargainer calls on the team to organize a strike vote, are worksite leaders (or members) thinking that the bargainer has failed?

2. When members of the bargaining team fail to win a strike authorization vote, does the bargainer see that as a failure of the worksite leaders to lead and organize their members?

3. In any case, are bargainers and worksite leaders drawing the wrong conclusions from the outcomes of these votes?

4. Are worksite leaders making an implicit deal with union staff when they vote or go out on strike? They may be saying in essence, “We’ll do our part, but you have to do yours. Get us a contract.”

With these findings in hand, we asked some worksite leaders directly if they thought a strike vote was a sign of the failure of their chief bargainer and they denied it. While we continue to test this with direct questions, it appears from this early experience that we will not get the same answers we get in the more indirect, but we believe more reliable and valid, method of paired comparisons. Therein lies, we believe, one of the critical differences between the quantitative data we derive from triads and paired comparisons and our ethnographic interviews.

Again, we think the difference in view reflects the different structural positions of stewards and staff. Staff have to get bargaining power where they can. One source is to be able to call out their members on strike. Stewards, on the other hand, experience their roles in terms of the personal confrontations with individuals—fellow workers and management--in their day-to-day enforcement of contracts. Staff see the ability to strike as important. Stewards see the personal skills of the negotiator as more important. Each view is based on different structural positions, responsibilities, and daily experience.

Current labor law practically dictates these roles and relationships, and there is little hope that today’s labor laws will begin to favor labor any time soon. While some unions are trying to break out of these limitations by training stewards to take on more responsibility, in essence giving them the union rep role, there are members who perceive this as getting even less “for their [dues] money.” Other unions are relying less on the strike as the ultimate tool, and relying more on corporate campaigns to pressure employers from other segments of the economy by reaching out to their consumer base as UNITE HERE is reaching out to AAA and other such groups that use hotels.

We hope that this communication gap between union staff and worksite leaders is one that will be obsolete in the coming years, as labor struggles with new strategies and tactics, new ways to build their base, and new approaches to the global economy. For now though, this gap is an invisible shackle on the ankles of everyone sitting on labor’s side of the bargaining table.

Epilogue

The 34 workers we discussed earlier from the Exxon-Mobile barn that failed to authorize a strike vote later voted to decertify Local 705. Stewards and staff agreed that management accomplished this with a policy of selective hiring of anti-union workers whenever there were vacancies. One such anti-union hire was the older man in the story who argued against authorizing a strike. Over several years the company gradually filled vacancies with anti-union workers and kept them loyal to management by making personal arrangements and side deals with them. Then, the company engineered a decertification vote and won.

Almost immediately after the decertification vote, the union received reports that management had revised the work rules, but the workers have no union representation, no contract, no recourse.

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[1] The new research reported in this paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. We thank Tom DeBruin, Howard Harris, Matt Yarnell, Michelle Book, and the staff , delegates, and members of 1199P and Jerry Zero, Paul Waterhouse, Jim Lyons, Steve Matter, Robert Cummings, Dan Campbell, Mike Colgan, and Mark Postilion and all of the others of Jerry Zero’s remarkable crew, stewards, and members of IBT 705 for their help with these projects.

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