Dorothy Sue Cobble's Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century
Montgomery, David
DISHING IT OUT: WAITRESSES AND THEIR UNIONS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, by Dorothy Sue Cobble. University of Illinois Press, 1991. 327 pp. $34.95 hb., $14.95 pb. The decline of unions in the...
...Waitresses' unions grew out of the occupational, gender, and racial demarcations that existed in restaurants at the dawn of this century...
...Observations in every chapter force the reader to reconsider commonly accepted categories of historical analysis...
...Could labor appeal to the growing femaledominated service work force," she asks, "or was it historically and irredeemably linked to the anchor of the blue-collar male worker...
...429-36 and "Rethinking Troubled Relations between Women and Unions: Craft Unionism and Female Activism," Feminist Studies, 16 (Fall, 1990), pp...
...But Cobble has aimed our attention in another direction: food service...
...Unlike the women union leaders studied by historians in other occupations, the lives of women who became salaried officials of HERE were remarkably similar to those of the rank and file...
...The waitresses' understanding that the union flourishes not so much in its contracts as in its members' hearts and minds remains as valid as ever...
...Dorothy Sue Cobble, an associate professor in Rutgers University's Institute of Management and Labor Relations, has addressed this question directly...
...By 1975 the proportion of unionized eating and drinking places was less than half what it had been in 1954...
...Before the late 1930s, waitress locals recruited only women and set out, in the words of Chicago leader Elizabeth Maloney, to make of their occupation "a real trade by which any girl might be proud of making her living...
...Union hiring halls dispatched members of proven competence to fill vacancies, union meetings disciplined those who violated standards of performance on the job (thus assuming much of the disciplinary enforcement exercised by employers elsewhere), and business agents equalized access to work among members, though they seldom challenged the dismissal of a worker from a particular job...
...A revival of unionism on the waitress model is unlikely, because of both the steady transformation of hotel and restaurant union practice to something closer to the prevailing worksite model of most unions, and the severe restrictions placed by the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin Acts on craft union practices...
...Respectability for women was intimately intertwined with sexual respectability," she writes...
...These continued to be the major organizing weapons even after the Wagner Act was passed, with the sit-down strike added to their arsenal...
...The decline of unions in the United States has led scholars and labor activists to ask about past forms of collective action by workers other than contractual worksite representation through governmentally certified bargaining agents...
...Because restaurants were omitted from coverage under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, women leaders of HERE continued to campaign for state laws applying only to women...
...Success in the long battle for a legal forty-hour week began to come their way only in the 1950s and 1960s, just as the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment was about to reach its crescendo...
...In Cleveland no union member could "make coffee, sweep or mop floors, wash silver or dishes, mirrors, windows or coffee urns, clean fruit, vegetables or make salads, put away or count silver...
...Some of their officers (not all) came to believe that minimumwage laws undermined union-wage scales...
...A complete answer would require analysis of past and present unionism in health care, clerical work, and the public sector (where the rate of unionization is today considerably higher than it is in manufacturing...
...In general, however, the waitresses not only favored gender-specific legal regulation of wages, hours, and conditions, but also worked closely with the National Women's Trade Union League and the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor in drafting and lobbying for such statutes, and then in securing the appointment of their own people to the enforcement agencies...
...Organizing the Postindustrial Work Force: Lessons from the History of Waitress Unionism," Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 44 (April 1991), pp...
...Both the cohesive culture of the waitresses and the stringent demarcations of their craft rules reinforced racial exclusiveness in the world of food service...
...Moreover, yearround, full-time waitresses constituted scarcely one-fifth of the soaring number of people serving food for wages...
...Training periods of up to six months were required for admission, technical schools improved members' skills, and union rules strictly defined the boundaries between a waitress's work and that of a cook, salad man, or bus boy...
...There is an important lesson here: without effective unions there cannot be meaningful legislative reform of working conditions...
...The union waitresses have much to teach us...
...As Cobble astutely observes, daily adversarial relations with men in the restaurants prepared waitresses for dealing with men in their international union, while the all-female locals provided union careers for women whose advancing age made it increasingly difficult to find the better waiting job...
...All this was classic craft union practice, and all was designed to secure the waitress respectful treatment, from employers, fellow workers, and customers alike...
...That history helps one understand Myra Wolfgang's public denunciations of Betty Friedan and the ERA...
...This does not mean that waitresses supported all measures ostensibly designed to "protect" women workers...
...This familiar aspiration of trade unionists, Cobble writes, had a special meaning for women workers...
...During the last two decades historians have devoted close attention to experiences with the empowerment of shop stewards, campaigns for a legal thirty-hour work week and universal social insurance, enterprise (or company) unionism, and the pre-Wagner Act practices of the Knights of Labor and of craft unions...
...It seems as though every city had its episode of some popular restaurant dismissing "granny waitresses" in quest of a new image of "personality and pulchritude...
...Moreover, since the 1910s women had been prominent among the union's officers and staff representatives...
...The small number of black women (and men) enrolled in HERE were gathered into segregated locals, and most worked in establishments with African-American clientele...
...Many activists among them turned to the courts or the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission for redress of their grievances, and they often filed their charges against both employers and the union...
...These tactics secured continued union growth in many cities through the 1920s, when Prohibition generated remarkable growth in the restaurant trade (though Cobble devotes little attention to that epoch...
...Waitress leaders tended to run for office only after the age of thirty, and only 6 percent of them had never been married...
...The pioneering locals of San Francisco, Seattle, and Butte rode to success through campaigns to drive Chinese and Japanese men out of the restaurants...
...384 • DISSENT Cobble's question of whether labor can "appeal to the growing female-dominated service work force" or is "historically and irredeemably linked to the anchor of the blue-collar male worker" found a partial answer in HERE's own experience at Yale University...
...Union wage-and-hour standards were attached to the waitress, not to her place of work, and movement from job to job was commonplace...
...A federal court in Washington ruled in 1972 that both gendered job descriptions and separate locals for women were in violation of the law (Evans v. Sheraton Park Hotel...
...Among union members, discontent with restaurants' gender division of labor swelled, and younger members, irate about the veterans' defense of established ways, simply stopped participating...
...Of the 403,000 members in the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), 45 percent were women...
...By the early 1950s one-quarter of the country's eating and drinking establishments were union shops...
...There a clerical force, comprised largely of women, found ways to mobilize itself on a large and complex work site, with the indispensable aid of an older union of blue-collar (mostly) males...
...The era of waitresses' unions had ended...
...The rise of chain restaurants, fast-food service, and in-house training in techniques of waiting that set servers into competition with each other enabled new establishments to resist the union and made hiring from the union hall less advantageous to employers...
...During the thirties, socialist officials of HERE like Edward Fiore and Hugo Ernst and communist leaders in New 382 • DISSENT York's Local 6 tried to organize all occupations and races in hotels and restaurants and encouraged new recruits to join the same multi-craft locals...
...The many family-run establishments that catered to Asian-American, African-American, or Eastern European customers remained outside the union fold (and outside of Cobble's book...
...Officials of the international union threw their weight behind desegregation of jobs and of locals only in the late 1930s, and especially in the 1950s...
...They campaigned ardently against the prohibition of women from tending bar (a controversy that Cobble analyzes brilliantly...
...Although the number of black waitresses in the United States increased by 253 percent between 1940 and 1960 (to 54,000), A. Philip Randolph included the hotel and restaurant locals of New York City in the list of unions he denounced for accommodating racial divisions of labor (or "color coding" of jobs) in a famous 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council...
...Long tenure in the occupation, shared northern European ancestry, and endless hours spent together on the job fostered the development of a distinctive work culture and helped make the union a surrogate family...
...During the following decade, according to Emma Rothschild, "the increase in employment in eating and drinking places [was] greater than the total employment in the automobile and steel industries combined...
...Their story reminds us how much organizing in the late 1930s did not resort to NLRB elections...
...519-30...
...Union waitresses served food...
...SUMMER • 1993 • 383 By the 1970s, however, the circumstances within which waitresses had historically applied that lesson were fast disappearing...
...The way they did it will astonish readers who associate craft uinionism simply with a white male aristocracy of labor...
...Through picketing and boycotts, waitresses enforced their demands for a closed shop and hiring through the union hall...
...Moreover, the revitalization of HERE so evident in its recent struggles in Las Vegas and San Francisco (where non-white workers now constitute most of the active membership) has suggested that the boycott weapon and the mobilization of support from other unions, on which waitress locals had once relied, can be made effective against huge establishments with up-to-date managerial techniques...
...Nowhere is this more clearly the case than in the relationship of waitress unions to the history of protective legislation for women...
...This has resulted in a valuable discussion over whether the industrial unions that reshaped national life during the 1930s and 1940s provide the only, or the best, model for a future labor movement...
...They regularly opposed statutes that excluded women from working high-tip late-night service...
...By 1970 more than 1,230,000 people earned their living by dispensing food and drink, and 92 percent of them were women...
...Throughout their history, however, waitresses' unions were strong advocates of laws to restrict women's working hours, establish minimum wages, and improve the work environment...
...Moreover, although no single model of organizing can suit the needs of all workers, there are many settings, in the service sector and elsewhere, where a style of unionism that collectively enforced standards of acceptable employment practice attached to the individual worker, rather than to the place of employment, may again provide the most effective means of resisting the downward pull of free market economics...
...In articles she has published Cobble has been more forthcoming in drawing lessons from this rich and complex experience than she is in Dishing It Out...
...The waitresses achieved this level of organization through craft unionism...
...Legal regulation of women's hours, wages, and conditions of labor is often depicted as the handiwork of men who wished to exclude women from employment for wages, and even more often as an alternative to the self-organization of women into unions...
...For waitresses, respectability proved elusive because waiting work involved close personal interaction with male strangers in an environment laden with sexual overtones...
...In this respect, their behavior resembled the historic strategy of coal miners' unions—using union power to win and administer legislation...
...The mixed-sex locals of other unions in later decades, though they often had women's committees, failed to produce such numerous and prominent officials of the international union...
...After careful preparatory meetings, Detroit's Myra Wolfgang would enter an eating place and blow her famous whistle, bringing all work to an abrupt halt...
Vol. 40 • July 1993 • No. 3
