The Weak Suffer What They Must — A Natural Experiment in Thought and Structure
I realized I had a serious leadership crisis. More often than not, members started coming up to me with their grievances about a nasty boss, or denied vacation. I received phone calls from members I’d never heard from asking if management had the right to do this or that. I’d refer them to the stewards, but they’d say the steward didn’t know. Worse, they’d go away without talking to the steward, and without telling me, unsatisfied and believing the union was weak and ineffective to help with their workplace problems.
In February, 1998 after negotiating a new contract, we held the contract ratification meeting where I described what we’d negotiated, and distributed the same triads test Paul had done more than a year before, when Della was still there. Members voted, then filled out the triads tests, and then received their contracts. The contract was ratified. With bargaining behind me, I could focus on the internal problems more carefully.
I sat down with the two stewards. I said, “This isn’t fair to you and it’s bad for the union. These folks won’t follow you and you’re beating your heads against the wall.”
Both men nodded enthusiastically at that assessment. I agreed to hold steward elections, define the job of steward and reinforce that once members vote for a steward they have to trust and follow that person.
The word went out through the kitchen that Bernard was up for election, and the older workers looked concerned.
“Why?” they asked me. “Because you’re not following him, and the union can’t afford that. If you’re going to follow him, then re-elect him, if not, then vote for somebody else. But we’ve got fights to fight, and we can’t be screwing around.”
By the end of that week, Bernard called me and announced that he’d taken 6 workers from the kitchen with him to the human resources department and demanded to meet with the director. They’d met for almost a half hour. I congratulated him loudly. Later that day I received a phone call from management requesting that only one person meet with them. I knew we’d made a point. The next week, the members re-elected him steward.
Housekeeping didn’t turn out the same way. I asked members what they thought good qualities in a steward were. They listed them:
“They ought to speak up for people. They ought to study up on the laws and the contract. They ought to never be cutting their own deals, but looking out for everybody.” So I re-listed them – “so they should defend their co-workers, go to trainings, and lead.”
They agreed. Then I reminded the members that if the steward holds up his end of the deal, they have to hold up theirs and follow. They agreed. Then they voted in a new steward, and I had to start over again with training.
Members in the nursing department also held a spirited meeting and steward election and voted in two stewards. Finally, the union was back on the upswing, but months of deterioration were going to weigh heavily on morale. The key was to win back the full-time hours. That would be the first real test.
Triads revisited
The same triads test administered just after the ratification of the new contract shows a cognitive pattern quite different from the first one more than a year before (r=-.41) (see Table 1). Whereas the first pattern was similar to the staff pattern (r=.64), the second is not (r=-.47).
This could be because different people responded to the two tests, but the proportions of people in different departments are about the same, and at least some of the same individuals responded to both. In this unit, unlike some others, there are no factions, so differential representation of factional views could not be a factor.
The multi-dimensional scaling representations of the two scema in Figures 2 and 4 shows there is a shift away from a model based on union membership and hierarchy to one based on workplace proximity and hierarchy. In the first, 1996, model (Figure 2), reps and stewards are higher than supervisors and managers; the second , 1998 (Figure 4), reverses this hierarchy; the superiority of the steward to the rep in the first model is reversed in the second. This suggests that members at Schwab were no longer seeing themselves primarily as union members, but as workers for the management of Schwab. They no longer held union officers to be more powerful than management but management more powerful than union officers.
The triads test was administered at the same time as an overwhelmingly positive vote to ratify the contract, tantamount to a survey of satisfaction with the new contract. The ratification vote was strong, so the shift in the triads cannot indicate alienation because of the new contract. The shift must be related to what appeared to Suzan to be a leadership crisis, the change in the structure of the unit occasioned by the withdrawal of all of the experienced stewards and the chief steward and the disappearance of those networks of relationships from the unit. The cognitive models reflected the changing realities of power and organization in the worksite. The fact that the cognitive model changes to mark reorganization of the structure leads to the conclusion that structure causes cognition, not the other way around.
Details
Here we report in more depth the statistics of this exercise. Those who find such material boring will perhaps forgive the exercise and skip to the next more qualitative section on structure, agency, and class so that our colleagues with a more developed senses of methodological aesthetics will not be neglected.
A comparison of the proximity matrices of different worksites shows just how they differ. Table 3 shows the proximity matrix for a group of industrial workers. Table 4 shows the proximity matrix for the public hospital which was considered a model of strong organization. Table 5 shows the proximity matrix for the staff. The “perfect” model and staff model show a 0 or near 0 similarity between union reps and stewards on the one hand and supervisors and managers on the other while the industrial model shows a stronger similarity. The “perfect” and staff model show a near 0 similarity of members with supervisors and managers but the industrial model shows significantly stronger relations. The “perfect” and staff models show a similarity of about .5 for stewards and reps on the one hand and members on the other. The industrial model shows a much weaker similarity. All together these 12 relationships indicate that industrial members see themselves as closer to management and farther from union officers than the “union model” would. The multi dimensional representation of these relationships shows the contrast among industrial members and staff as figures 5 and 6 indicate. These representations suggest that while staff see a clear demarcation between union and management and a hierarchy much like the etic grid, the industrial members see management and union officers as being equally different from and more powerful than members.