Will Unions Work for Women?

al., Richard moore et

Uphill Struggle BY RICHARD MOORE AND ELIZABETH MARSIS Will Unions Work for Women? One January evening in 1935, two women walked into the grand ballroom of New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel,...

...We would have been far more effective if we had concentrated on the concept of a union, on what it can mean when people work together...
...Persistence is the key...
...Pay inequities, sexual harassment, unequal promotional opportunities—all these issues are beginning to find their way into the public consciousness, and they are likely to be strong assets in union organizing drives...
...lost their bid for union representation...
...The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is aggressively engaging in joint organizing drives and is the first major labor union to sanction a national campaign, conducted through its semi-autonomous District 925, to organize the nation's clerical workers...
...There are signs that these conflicts have been severe enough to hamper unionizing efforts...
...The endeavor has the backing of the AFL-CIO, and participating unions include SEIU, the Steelworkers, the United Auto Workers, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and the Office and Professional Employees International Union...
...Tensions over organizing strategy have surfaced between union organizers and more cautious AFL-CIO officials...
...Success in the 1980s will be a matter of building consensus around workplace issues...
...Even in retailing, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union is making a spirited attempt to organize Lazarus department stores in Columbus, Ohio...
...Moore and Marsis are collaborating on a book about the retail and garment industries...
...But an equally important aspect of the failure at McCrory's was the lack of worker identity and commitment among the union's leadership...
...The problem, these critics say, has not been a neglect of workplace organizing, but a lack of patience with development of women's issues...
...Between 1977 and 1980, for example, service occupations attracted an increase of more than 450,000 workers but experienced virtually no gain in union membership...
...Other unions, however, are testing new techniques and pursuing coordinated organizing efforts...
...For weeks before the Waldorf incident, women activists and department store workers had walked a picket line around Ohrbach's store and shackled themselves to street lamps, forcing police to hacksaw them free...
...Frank Strock, a former Bloomingdale's worker who was an organizer in the United Storeworkers' McCrory's campaign, which the union lost by a close 88-to-79 margin, says, "By focusing on short-term issues like wages, pensions, and health plan exclusively, we sacrificed teaching people the importance of collective action...
...In conjunction with simultaneous and equally ambitious attempts by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union at metropolitan May's department stores, it was the most intensive department store organizing drive since the 1930s...
...They talked about abstract problems of discrimination, but the workers weren't interested...
...Recognition of the Office Workers Union was for them a non-negotiable demand...
...Nonetheless, part-timers are almost impossible to organize...
...Vigorous ventures by some unions have been offset by neglect in others...
...Ultimately, however, Ohrbach workers Richard Moore, a former organizer for the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Workers, has written for In These Times and other publications...
...But 925 does enjoy a certain built-in advantage: The union grew from a partnership between SEIU and Working Women, an educational organization of 10,000 office workers...
...In a 1978 statement announcing the revival of the long-defunct Department Store Organizing Committee, Alvin Heaps, president of the Retail, Wholesale, Department Store Union (RWDSU), offered a candid reason for his union's renewed interest in organizing: "Only the unorganized," he said, "can solve our present dilemma...
...And a second defeat was inflicted on women organizers that same winter at Milwaukee's Boston Store...
...The local dropped its organizing staff and abandoned the campaign immediately after the loss, despite statistics showing that unions win almost 60 per cent of the elections held after initial representation defeats...
...Such AFL-CIO affiliates as the Service Employees International Union and District 1199, the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, have more than doubled their membership, winning major victories in low-wage, oc-cupationally segregated health-care workplaces...
...Part of 925's dynamism arises from a carefully cultivated media image designed primarily to break down the cultural stereotypes held by clerical workers...
...Another innovative approach, coordinated by the Coalition of Labor Union Women and the AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Department, is now being tested in the Washington/Baltimore metropolitan area...
...Others, however, contend that the AFL-CIO has taken a cynical view of organizing women and has pressured the Campaign to ease its feminist approach...
...But the retail workers, employed in one of the few industries with a significant number of women employees, dug in...
...Organizers for the Campaign are supplementing workplace activity with non-traditional strategies, including heavy use of radio, television, and most recently, transit advertising...
...Many part-time workers do not feel they are a part of the union effort like full-timers," says Charles Boyd, education director of RWDSU Local 1-S, affiliated with the Organizing Committee drives...
...One recent change may be significant...
...The participating unions have also formed a regional advisory council of twenty-three major women's organizations and a Women's Resource Center to provide community outreach programs...
...In finance, real estate, and insurance, all industries where women workers have recently begun to outnumber men, union membership continues to decline both absolutely and proportionally...
...Through the long decade that followed, they established a CIO Department Store Organizing Committee, joined community coalitions, lobbied for equal pay for equal work, and hired women organizers...
...Although the Campaign has apparently won a reprieve—both Joyce Miller and Campaign coordinator Lillian Moss insist it will continue—labor insiders predict a collapse by year's end unless dramatic results are achieved...
...We pay a lot of attention to committee building and trying to establish support systems in the workplace...
...The traditional bread-and-butter approach to unionizing may be inappropriate for workers who do not start out with a pro-union attitude...
...Since they are not around as often, many of them feel left out, both socially and in decision-making, and that creates a big identity problem for us...
...Having won recent victories at the Syracuse, New York, office of Equitable Life, one of the nation's largest insurance companies, and among 3,000 clericals at the University of Washington, District 925 is conducting campaigns involving 15,000 workers and has opened offices in Seattle, Syracuse, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C...
...One January evening in 1935, two women walked into the grand ballroom of New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, chained themselves to a railing, and heckled the speaker, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia...
...They are just beginning to question the belief that they don't deserve a raise...
...District 925's early successes are creating a surge of optimism within labor, if not yet a surge of members...
...Today, some 70 per cent of all retail employees work part-time, a practice management uses to depress wages and escape payment of the benefits for which full-time workers qualify...
...Within weeks of Heaps's announcement, RWDSU locals launched campaigns at major New York department stores, including Macy's, Abraham & Straus, and, later, McCrory's...
...That sounds like an exercise in semantics, but it points to some deep divisions within the Campaign itself...
...For one thing, labor's most striking gains among women have been in the public sector, not in the private service, retail, and financial industries where organizing efforts are most urgently needed...
...Today, despite the entry of twenty million women into the work force since 1960, only about 18 per cent of women workers are enrolled in unions...
...With few exceptions, labor's efforts to achieve the surge of unionization Kirkland describes have been uneven and uncertain...
...Office workers now desire more for themselves...
...Unions affiliated with the effort, known as the Women's Organizing Campaign, blur traditional jurisdictional boundaries and work together in coordinated drives...
...It is possible, though, to draw unduly optimistic conclusions from these developments...
...The workers wanted to know what the union could do for them and for their immediate problems...
...A glance at some recent organizing activities—a failed drive among New York City retail workers, impressive inroads in the clerical sector, and an experimental project in the Washington/Baltimore area—reveals the strengths and weaknesses of labor's approach to women in the 1980s...
...The ideological dispute—a clash of values in a strained labor movement—has seriously impaired the project's first year...
...But as men returned from war to their jobs and their unions and their traditional positions of authority, female workers found themselves systematically ignored by labor organizing drives...
...But ultimately, the AFL-CIO is not the labor movement...
...Growing stronger as World War II concentrated more women in their ranks, small department store locals persevered and finally won union shops at Macy's, Gim-bel's, and Bloomingdale's...
...This is where the women's movement and equality issues have an effect...
...In the 1950s and 1960s, union leaders tended to perpetuate cynical views of women as marginal workers...
...By mid-summer 1981, the Committee's drive sputtered to a halt, failing to gain elections in all but two retail stores—and losing both of those...
...Resuscitating the Organizing Committee was the union's almost desperate reaction to declining membership and waning collective bargaining strength...
...The problem is that the organizers have tended to talk to workers about how exploited women are generally in society," says one labor leader close to the Campaign...
...In the retail field, where women account for 80 per cent of the work force, unionization actually declined from 12 per cent to 10 per cent in the last decade...
...But if the original, Depression-era Organizing Committee was a colorful venture in retail unionism, the second incarnation turned out to be a pallid caricature...
...The target of their protest was not the irascible mayor but a prominent member of his audience: Nathan Ohrbach, president of Ohrbach's department store...
...Campaigns that ignore the needs of women still cloud labor's image, obscuring hopeful new developments...
...Elizabeth Marsis is a research associate with the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union...
...Last year, the Campaign was hailed as a showcase venture likely to be expanded to other cities...
...In addition to SEIU, individual unions engaged in determined organizing include the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and the UAW among clericals, and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees among office and food workers...
...Whether unions can pursue coordinated strategies that will serve the needs of women is a question that still awaits a definitive answer...
...By 1946, thousands of women workers were covered by contracts that called for equal pay for equal work...
...Even among clerical workers, unions have attracted only 20 per cent of the four million women who have joined the work force since 1970...
...As the ranks of organized labor dwindle, many union leaders are finally coming to recognize the importance of organizing women...
...Aimed at a potential enrollment of 300,000 workers, the Women's Organizing Campaign is targeting fifty private-sector employers—banks, universities, factories, and retail stores...
...Telephones at Campaign headquarters are no longer answered "Women's Organizing Campaign" but, more neutrally, "Baltimore/Washington Campaign...
...Recent statistics support Ruffs contention: Labor is winning 59 per cent of all representation elections in which women's issues are emphasized, compared to its overall success rate of just 43 per cent in 1981...
...The failure served to highlight the difficulties of organizing low-wage, predominantly female industries...
...Traditional organizing is convincing workers that a union will benefit them and getting cards signed...
...Results have been so disappointing, in fact, that the Industrial Union Department considered closing the project this summer...
...There is no difference between traditional and nontraditional campaigns," maintains Joyce Miller, president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women...
...Police soon removed the "girl strikers," as The New York Times identified them, but Anne Miller and Anne Friedman managed to focus attention on their cause—deplorable working conditions in the city's department stores...
...The Campaign emphasizes such sex-discrimination issues as pay inequities, sexual harassment, and unequal promotional opportunities—an approach formulated with the aid of a public-opinion survey...
...Without a public image, many office workers would think unions are not for people like them," says Ruff...
...AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland insists that a "surge of unionization" is already taking place in many female-dominated service occupations and will eventually offset labor's decline in manufacturing industries...
...Nontraditional campaigns are traditional campaigns," she says, though "there have been some [tactical] innovations...
...Labor's ultimate success may depend on whether those unions without a feminist organizational link can grasp the complexity of the unionizing task ahead...
...This year, however, it looks more like a model not quite glued together...
...Kirkland's assertion, at least in terms of numbers, seems plausible: Almost one million women joined trade unions in the 1970s, accounting for 80 per cent of labor's total growth...
...The struggle for recognition of women workers by labor is not yet won, but with fresh ideas and much energy, a new generation of activists and women workers may soon shift labor's tentative start into a galloping race for economic equality...
...On one side are AFL-CIO officials who believe solid workplace organizing has been neglected in favor of feminist preaching...
...Bolstered by an exuberant staff, this young union is pioneering, or at least resurrecting, techniques that seem certain to make labor more effective and accessible-hiring women organizers, targeting predominantly female worksites, using broadcast media to publicize consumer as well as feminist issues...
...Most important, says Jackie Ruff, 925's executive director, "We are a very decentralized organization and so each of our campaigns is run a little differently...

Vol. 47 • August 1983 • No. 8


 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.