On the white-collar assembly line
Levinson, Marc
make rite, how to make text into event. ~i'his will require us to budget enough money to train local people or hire professional people to do this in our parishes. We need an artist person...
...The Steelworkers will pursue white collar organizing with a vengeance," promised Leon Lynch, a vice-president of the United Steelworkers of America, two years later...
...As for law firms, Reader's boss, OPEIU president John Kelly, makes no bones about his view...
...This was to have been the decade for white-collar organizing...
...Concerted action to gain wage and benefit improvements will be next to impossible, and the self-employed white-collar workers with their home computers will offer an easy alternative for employers faced with organizing drives...
...In Art As Experience, Dewey wrote: The ordinances of r e l i g i o n . . , are efficacious as they are clothed with a pomp, a dignity, and majesty that are the work of imagination (p...
...1 June 1984:335...
...We decided not to go for an election if we weren't sure we could win at all four offices," an organizer relates...
...Add to this the frequent intervention of anti-union consultants whenever organizing is attempted, and the idiosyncracies of a labor law that hinders organizing by leaving it unclear who is labor and who management or whether a bank branch or the entire bank is the proper unit for organizing...
...At the side of each machine, a counter silently registers each line as it is typed...
...But the circumstances of office work today make this increasingly unlikely...
...You spend weeks at hearings litigating who's management and who's not...
...But there is one important difference between the white-collar production workers and their blue-collar counterparts...
...OPEIU, one of the leading unions in the field, admits it has no interest in organizing law firms and banks...
...By the art in them, they were changed from doctrines into living experiences" (p...
...Soon after clerical workers at the Equitable Life Assurance Society's office in Syracuse voted for a union in 198 l, the company announced plans to shift the work elsewhere...
...There will be fewer people in the middle, and it is those people who have traditionally been most responsive to unions...
...Because of this aesthetic strand, he asserts, " . . . religious teachings were the more readily conveyed and their effect was the more lasting...
...The supervisor picks up the finished pages and distributes them throughout the building...
...and also covered business and labor in the Southeast for Time...
...Technology also creates the possibility of a new sort of runaway shop...
...Turning texts and structures into events which engage the imagination tO know the presence of Mystery in the assembly will be breathtaking and difficult...
...The church, Dewey points out, has always, at its best, connected its faith with the arts...
...The prospect of similar action ended an attempt by the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) to organize the four regional offices of Government Employees Insurance Company...
...I These are the production workers of the 1980s, white-collar workers whose jobs have been transformed by technology into routine functions similar to those of the assembly line...
...With microprocessor technology, such routine work may be shifted out of the office altogether...
...The company' s executives never venture into the third-floor room...
...Secretaries working directly for management personnel have often felt closer ties to the executives they work for than to their fellow secretaries, and employers have played heavily on those loyalties...
...Traditionally, unions have done best among those who viewed themselves as long-term employees...
...Moving the office simply involves shipping the computer terminals somewhere else...
...The repetition, the alienation, are no less than what workers in dead-end factory jobs often find...
...I I I MARC LEVlNSON has written regularly on labor matters for Daily Labor Report, a publication of The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc...
...With their printers working steadily away beneath sound-dampening plastic shields, the women listen to one tape after another, turning their recorders off and on with foot pedals as they transcribe...
...The automated office, in which secretaries may work for several bosses, in which file clerks and typists can be located in sterile, factory-like settings with none of the personal reinforcement of the old-fashioned office, was expected to offer a better environment for unions than the oldfashioned office...
...Outside of government offices, the union presence remains almost nonexistent...
...326...
...In addition, unions expected that the feminist political consciousness of recent years would work in their favor...
...The office workers are far less likely to be represented by a union...
...except for lunch and coffee, the typists need never leave their scientifically designed chairs...
...Then we've got an increase in low-wage jobs, where skills are broken down, so you have a spread between high-paid and low-paid...
...by satellite and entered into a computer as easily as if it had been typed in New York...
...The book is Madonna Red...
...Many of them will be independent contractors, not employees who can be organized...
...We need an artist person to create this work...
...Only when wind becomes the breath of the Spirit, which moves the imagination of believers, will the Spirit merge and mesh with spirits to disclose the Gospel powerfully to this people and time...
...The results are clear...
...The character of the electronic office also poses an obstacle for organizers...
...As office workers become a larger and larger proportion of the American workforce, the share of U.S...
...Here, their desks separated by color-coordinated partitions, a dozen women spend their days...
...Perhaps only when liturgy is an art will the church more effectively express and experience the mystery which is Christ in us...
...As a result, in many office occupations ranging from word processing to computer programming, dissatisfied workers are less likely to go to the effort involved in bringing in a union and more likely just to seek another job...
...The personal nature of office relationships has long made unionization harder there than in factories...
...The eighties will be for organizing clerical workers what the thirties were for industrial workers," proclaimed Karen Nussbaum of Working Women, a national group organizing white-collar workers, in 1980...
...Frankly, I don't think Catholicism as it now is will engage her imagination sufficiently to survive into adulthood with her.' " 'I think I do understand what you mean,' Father Tierney said, 'And in a small way, I do have a d a u g h t e r . . , yours...
...The scene is Washington, D.C...
...TECHNOLOGY STYMIES THE UNIONS On the white-collar assembly line i MARC LEVINSON I N THE Atlanta office of a major computer firm, a subdued silence reigns in the typing pool...
...A worker who sees his job as temporary, or who has no plans to make his long-term future with the company, has little incentive to take the risks involved in supporting a union...
...Matthew's Cathedral who is preparing the daughter of the British ambassador for her first communion, and the ambassador is saying to the priest, " 'Perhaps Father, you'd understand what I'm saying, perhaps you'd understand what I mean if you had a daughter, too...
...Firms have already begun to send keypunch work to the English-speaking Caribbean, where the finished product can be beamed back to the U.S...
...Commonweal: 334 In theory, technology should ease the unions' way...
...And the challenge of nurturing in her a religious, Catholic imagination leaves me winded.' " Perhaps it is only after being winded, having come off all the hot air and explanations, that a liturgy can be developed which explores Mystery...
...for a secretary with a long-standing personal relationship with a specific boss, sup: porting a union has meant separating her feelings about the company from her personal feelings about the person she works for on a daily basis...
...workers represented by unions will continue to shrink...
...The changes yet to come in the liturgical renewal may be more profound than those of the past twenty years...
...the employees still have no contract...
...To gain enough leverage to win a good contract, unions are thus faced with the need to organize many far-flung facilities at the same time, a far more difficult task than organizing a single plant...
...Something in a novel by James Carroll expresses this well...
...Increasingly, however, companies are s~king to make themselves more flexible in the face of rapidly changing conditions and to save themselves retraining costs by encouraging employee turnover...
...What is happening as a result of the technology is the passing away of the relatively high-paid middle range of jobs, the bookkeepers, secretaries, and others with high skills," worries Mark Roberts, an economist for the AFL-CIO...
...A work of art is not normally the product of a committee...
...Unions' influence on wages and working conditions will diminish, unless they find a way to organize the massive numbers of unorganized...
...I f we'd won one or two, the company would have moved the work...
...It' s absolutely crazy to organize that," he says...
...All of this bodes ill for organized labor, and for the country as a whole...
...The number of unionized banks can be counted on fingers and toes...
...It's really difficult to get interest in banks...
...Among law firms, unionization has gone nowhere...
...Because of such obstacles, many unions have written off some industries altogether...
...instead, they call in their dictation by telephone at home or office.The tiny tapes from the automatic recorders drop into a metal tray, where a supervisor logs them in and assigns them to the next available typist...
...We just couldn't do that to our people...
...Fringe benefit packages work towards this end: with "cafeteria" plans, workers have a choice:of benefits, and young workers are able to select vacations and other short-term benefits rather than the pension plans which bind them to their employer over the long term...
...But, despite all the rhetoric, union elections among clerical and technical workers are still few and far between...
...329...
...One recent estimate has it that up to five million clerical, technical, and professional workers will work from their homes by the end of the decade...
...Things have not turned out that way...
...There is a priest at St...
...I f you can't get the main office of the hank along with the rest of the outside Staff, it'll be very difficult to get a contract because you can't run an effective strike," says Mark Reader, director of organizing for the OPEIU...
...Only a relative handful of insurance workers are organized...
...The whitecollar union will remain a mirage...
...Location is no longer important for many functions...
...All of this movement toward grasping the aesthetic nature of ritual action finds support in the comments of the great American scholar and educator, John Dewey...
Vol. 111 • June 1984 • No. 11
