The Weak Suffer What They Must — A Natural Experiment in Thought and Structure
The story
When Della retired from Schwab Rehab after 30 years as chief steward I knew the union would never be the same. She warned me she was retiring, but it took a year or more for her to finally leave, so after awhile her complaints of the pain in her wrists from dishing out food for 3 decades didn’t register with me as poignantly and I thought she’d stay at least as long as I would.
But finally Della announced the date she would leave. She assured me that the gangly young jokester who’d just “become union” a year before would make a good steward. Bernard adored Della, that was clear, but so did everyone else. She was the center of the hospital, like a grandmother is the center of a huge family, so it was hard to believe this tall, thin, fun-loving but inattentive character could ever fill her shoes. I knew Della’s judgment was sound, so I trusted she’d teach him everything he needed to know.
A year earlier, the other veteran steward, Marie, from housekeeping, retired. Her retirement wasn’t as noticeable because Della was the true matron, but it left an entire department without a steward. Between Marie’s retirement and Della’s was Monica’s promotion. Monica was the young, articulate and fastidious steward from the nursing department. About 3 months after running a successful union protest against the hospital she was promoted out of the union into a management position as a scheduler-a position that, because it is considered management, is by law not in the bargaining unit. Within a year she had a baby. When she tried to return to work Schwab “couldn’t find” a position for her. Around the hospital the workers would say they knew Schwab did her wrong after the way she helped run that boycott last year, but it was her fault for getting out of the union.
So Della was the last and most effective steward to leave the shop, and that left me with a vacuum. Bernard took over the kitchen, and at a membership meeting a quiet man named Greg volunteered to take on housekeeping. No stewards came forward from nursing. Greg and Bernard spent a Saturday morning to come to a stewards’ training I held at the union office for healthcare workers. They gave up a another Saturday to attended the 1997 annual stewards’ conference as well. (Well, Bernard tried to attend, but after he picked up Della in a snowstorm his car broke down on the expressway. They were both stranded for hours.) Greg called at least once a week to update me on problems, but often indicated he “had it under control.” Bernard, younger and cockier, and that much less secure, never called. When I’d hear problems from other members, I’d ask him about them, but he always assured me “he had taken care of it.”
More than a year passed before I realized something serious was going wrong at the hospital. Just before Della left, the hospital approached the union to eliminate two jobs from the bargaining unit. The hospital was eliminating 31 positions, and was careful not to target the union. Instead of taking the layoff, the members voted–with Della’s leadership–to take a cut to 7 hours of work per day. We signed an agreement to that effect, which also indicated that when the patient count reached an average of 77 for 90 days, everyone would go back up to the full 8 hours. We were confident the count would go up soon with the opening of the new addition to the hospital scheduled for the spring of 1998.
Della retired, and 6 months later Schwab opened its new wing, doubling the size of the hospital. Everyone expected their hours to go up, but instead, the hospital hired more workers, and kept their hours at 7 as well! The members were enraged, and so was I. I made furious phone calls to management, asking what right they had to do such a thing, but they said they’d told us they were going to do it. I had no memory of such discussion, and neither did Della, whom I called at home. It made no sense for me to ever agree to such a thing, since taking the layoff would have resulted in our people coming back to work if we’d thought they were going to hire new staff any time soon.
Meanwhile we had just wrapped up 6 months of bargaining, with these two stewards, and some observing members sitting through it all, no matter how late it ran, whether or not it was scheduled for an off day. I knew I couldn’t afford any internal problems during bargaining, so no matter what I suspected, I kept those two stewards until we were done and the contract was signed.
But every time I went to the hospital, members approached me with the same question: “when are we gonna get our hours back?” I’d update them on the latest phone call but it did no good. I thought they were angry with management for what it had done, but within a few months I began to get a sense it wasn’t management who was getting the brunt of it.
To test my theory, I told the stewards we needed to run a petition against management on its decision to hire more workers instead of increasing the hours for the people already working there to back to eight. I even typed up a petition and gave them copies. Then I gave them a week to get everyone to sign it. A week later, the petition was no where to be found. I asked the stewards, and they said they passed it to so-and-so who never got it back to them. I asked members, and they said they heard about it but never saw it.
Now I knew we were in trouble, but the stewards needed to know that I knew before I could approach them with the problem. I gave them another assignment: take a group of employees with you and meet with the human resources department over the issue. As I expected, the stewards couldn’t get a single person to go with them. This was the hottest topic of the year, and not a single person was willing to follow the union steward on it. Finally I started asking the most honest questions, and getting some answers.
“They say the union is weak,” said one person. “The union gave our hours away and can’t get them back.”