The Whitest Collars Turn to Unions
Michaelson, Charles
The victory of the United Federation of Teachers in the collective bargaining election among 33,000 classroom teachers in New York last December, probably the largest white-collar election...
...Today there are 20 million non-supervisory, salaried white-collar workers...
...From 1958 to 1960 the federation gained a mere 4,000 new white-collar members yearly...
...You were in a menial status, your professional training didn't count for a thing...
...When the teachers realized this, resented being only employees and felt the desire to affirm what they'd been trained for, they had to have the union...
...Changes in technology are weakening their bargaining power, especially in the more highly automated industries...
...The clerical first— then professional approach is the long way...
...Seven hundred teachers missed the point altogether and voted for no agent...
...The professional has a high degree of education directed toward a specific vocational goal, so generally he likes his work better than the nonprofessional...
...It asked the city to provide $27 million next school year for 6,000 new teachers, both in the classroom and for the corrective reading program...
...Of the 20 million white-collar workers, by contrast, only two million are organized...
...The victory of the United Federation of Teachers in the collective bargaining election among 33,000 classroom teachers in New York last December, probably the largest white-collar election ever held in this country, has had some important effects...
...Sometimes they're working for the 20 per cent discount on clothing...
...It has spurred organizing by locals of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO...
...it formulated a series of reasonable appeals directed to educated people who are ordinarily suspicious of unionism...
...They showed that a professional union can also be a militant union...
...The union's experience is that white-collar bargaining demands may be different in particulars (engineers want tuition refunds for advanced study written into the contract), but there is little basic difference in organizing or bargaining...
...From 1955 to 1960, production worker employment in manufacturing dropped 800,000 while non-production employment increased by 600,000...
...But the most important change that the election has brought is the improvement of teacher morale throughout the system...
...The Board has offered about $30 million for salary increases while the UFT is seeking $53 million...
...Organized labor is also obligated to represent the entire work force...
...it then granted to non-union employees, mostly white collar workers, an average hourly increase of 26a cents...
...Labor people are watching to see if the New York election will prove to be a breakthrough that opens the white-collar drive the federation must conduct sooner or later...
...The UFT's 5,000 members struck on Nov...
...It will certainly result in individual and professional improvements for the city's teachers...
...The negotiations have ended some of the authoritarianism and favoritism (who gets the "good" classes...
...The Teachers Bargaining Organization, a coalition of "professional" associations hastily thrown together by the National Education Association, got 9,770...
...Company paternalism slows the campaign down easier...
...Daniel Bell pointed out that in 1957 steel management negotiated a wage increase averaging 19% cents an hour for its production workers...
...The UFT overcame this prejudice by convincing 20,000 teachers of their need for a union...
...Automation has already displaced hundreds of thousands of production union members, the core of the federation, and replaced them with unorganized white-collar workers...
...We want to complete the union, make it a total blue-collarwhitecollar union...
...We have the most democratic union in the city," UFT member Eugene Blum said flatly...
...We've got a high degree of membership participation and our members are jealous of their rights...
...He has the same basic problem dealing with his single employer that a clerk or secretary has, but he also has personal characteristics that unions can capitalize on...
...We hope to develop an organizing approach to the engineers and professionals first in new campaigns," said George Collins of District 4 of the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE...
...District 4 has 80,000 members, a fifth being white-collar workers who range from clerical to professional engineer...
...We hope to have an analysis of the strike's effects in our next issue.-ED...
...that has existed in the schools...
...But with this group expected to increase by 8% million by 1970, labor will have to enroll nearly a million new whitecollar workers during the sixties merely to hold its present low level of representation...
...It ran its election campaign more like a political primary in a middle-class neighborhood than a plant organizing campaign...
...For example, 3,700 members of an Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers local struck a Texas refinery recently and stayed on strike for 10 weeks...
...Many of the white-collar workers organized in the past were in fields like transportation, communications and entertainment, industries where operating unions could effectively shut off service in support of the whitecollar workers...
...The employed professional and technician— the accountant, engineer, publicly employed doctor, nurse and medical technician, teacher, staff lawyer— present a more hopeful picture than the clerical worker and salesperson...
...When the professionals finally do organize, they generally make first-rate trade unionists: loud, democratic, educated and militant...
...The union can appeal to the professional as an agency that will help him increase his satisfaction on the job and his value to society...
...And it has reminded the unions of their obligation to organize the white-collar worker, or at least to try a lot harder than in the past...
...The imbalance is growing...
...In the balloting, the UFT got 20,045 votes, more than 60 per cent of the total...
...Very few of the seven million employed professionals have seen this, but it is the basic white-collar organizing challenge, for if the professional employee and the technical employee can be organized, the other whitecollar workers should be brought into the labor movement without great difficulty...
...And the AFT, which now has 60,000 members, hopes that the collective bargaining urge will mushroom across the country...
...If ten per cent of all white-collar workers are organized, only about two per cent of the top group, the employed professionals, are...
...Eventually the UFT hopes to reach a $6,000-12,000 scale for teachers with a bachelor's degree and two $1,000 increments for holders of advanced degrees...
...The UFT began negotiating a contract with the Board of Education late in December, the first time in America that any organization of teachers, union or association, has entered collective bargaining with a board of education...
...The rank-and-file teachers organized the system themselves: they saw the union as an opportunity to improve themselves and to heighten their professional standards...
...Only one question remains...
...By 1970 their number is expected to reach 29 million...
...Although automation is growing in the store and office, the clerical and sales workers still present a formidable problem...
...If organized labor — the industrial union, the white-collar craft union (such the the Office Workers and the Insurance Workers) and the professional union—can attract the professionals, it can recreate a dynamic American trade unionism...
...But in today's "mass" white-collar industries such as finance, trade and government, organized production and service workers can do little to advance organizing...
...Another factor that makes retail and clerical organizing difficult is the number of part-time workers, many of them women...
...Recent white-collar organizing has been at a standstill...
...The three white-collar groups—the nine million clericals, the four million salespeople and the seven million professional and technical workers— have all resisted unionism, the resistance generally rising as the skills do...
...We like teaching, we want to make sure the kids learn," one UFT member said...
...The AFL-CIO needs to do this if only to protect its 12 million produc tion and service members...
...The saleswomen at the shopping center are working for luxuries, for a refrigerator or to pay off the mortgage on the house," one union staff man said to me...
...And part of the ideology of the leadership is the desire to build a democratic organization of teachers...
...The above was written before the recent teachers' strike...
...At present the AFL-CIO's membership is 85 per cent blue-collar although these workers are less than half of the non agricultural work force in the nation as a whole...
...The Detroit local expects to ask for collective bargaining rights within a year...
...7, 1960, persuaded 4,000 other teachers not to cross their picket lines and forced Mayor Wagner to fulfill his earlier promise for a collective bargaining election...
...The employed professional has long been blind to the fact that his selfinterest and morality both lead to unionism...
...The unions now have about 35 per cent of the production and service workers in their ranks...
...And new white-collar jobs are being created...
...Because the professional is the best educated white-collar worker, he should be the first to recognize the unpleasant changes in his working conditions: increased specialization, greater interchangeability and subsequent loss of individual bargaining power and status...
...As Sol Barkin has noted, labor's power has not yet deteriorated seriously, and the Kennedy administration has created a more favorable climate for organizing...
...Since the teachers' votes were counted in mid-December, the UFT (which then had 9,000 members) alone has organized 4,000 new members and all are employed professionals, the most status-conscious whitecollar group...
...Spurred by the election, the AFT local in Chicago, which represents more than half of the 18,000 teachers there, has asked to be named collective bargaining agent for Chicago's teachers...
...Management has fostered this feeling, even by the use of collective bargaining with its production workers...
...I hope," Collins said, "that our union will follow the pattern of industrial change and become a modern industrial union...
...The first sign of improvement was the Superintendent of Schools' preliminary budget, submitted to the city budget director early in February...
...And this is what happened among the New York City teachers...
...On salary the negotiators have reached an impasse...
...He should be the first white-collar worker to realize that he must join a union—not just a "professionaI" association—if he intends to regain any control over deteriorating conditions...
...You followed policy handed down through a corporate set-up...
...the independent Teachers Union got 2,575...
...While they were out, 600 supervisors and technicians brought production up to 65 per cent of the prestrike capacity and would have raised it higher if the strike hadn't ended...
...There was the feeling that you, as a professional, didn't count," one UFT member said, describing the atmosphere in his school before the union organized a chapter there...
...It's asking for $500-850 raises above the current, $1,800-8,650 scale for teachers with a bachelor's degree...
...Most of the campaigning was done by several hundred spirited rank-and-filers, not by staff members...
...Can the lame lead the blind...
...They have imagined themselves as part of management, tied to its goals...
Vol. 9 • April 1962 • No. 2
