Labor Pains: Inside America’s New Union Movement
Sample: The Union Rep’s Job Description
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At SEIU Local 73 our members held a lot of different kinds of jobs. Some cleaned hospital floors, or stood guard at the entrance to an office building in Chicago. Some were toll collectors, and others baked ice cream cones. One large group – a few thousand – were clerical workers, and another were certified nursing assistants. About 60 percent of the local statewide was African American, but in the metropolitan area that percentage rose dramatically. Very few were Latino or east Indian or Asian, and the balance were white.
They had the union in common, but most of them didn’t think of it that way. They called us when something went wrong with their employers. Our staff’s job was to fix it. At my local, one union representative was responsible for about 2,500 members at multiple work sites and with sometimes as many as 10 employers. These members paid about $20 a month so we could bargain contracts, train members to help enforce those contracts at the work site, and usually step in to enforce them when things got hairy. Bargaining meant surveying members for what they wanted in their contract, developing proposals, choosing a bargaining committee, training the bargaining committee how to bargain, bargaining for months with management, and ratifying the final settlement by the members’ vote. In addition to simply “servicing the contract” as we called this, we were expected to push raffle tickets for the political action committee, mobilize members for rallies supporting our allies in struggles for social justice and living wages, motivate stewards to take a day off to go lobbying in Springfield, and inform all members of current pending legislation, such as NAFTA or efforts to destroy the 40-hour work week, laws which affected our ability to negotiate a decent contract the next time around.
Some sites got the same rep for decades. One group of members had the same rep for 20 years, and his stewards, the volunteer work site leaders, could call him two or three times a week. Sometimes his stewards called him at home, went to movies together or went to the funerals and weddings of each others’ families. But a lot of other members, like mine, saw a new rep every few years because we were reassigned by the president when someone on staff quit or was fired, burned out or moved up. In our office of 20 reps, 10 support staff and a handful of organizers I saw many come and go even in the 6 short years I worked there.
There was the mysterious departure of Craig at the end of the hall, who was hired to take on Barry’s work when Barry moved to the Springfield office. Craig was a former United Auto Worker member, he was proud to say, and a Master’s student at Loyola. He was in his late forties, and looked very much like the classic U.A.W. member with his graying hair, broad paunch hanging over a tight belt, deep voice and a bit of a drawl. Before he was here he was gone, his office emptied. When we asked, the president said that Craig didn’t make his probation.
Sandy was with us for almost a year and a half, her probation constantly being “extended” — as if that mattered since we were at will employees. She was a community organizer hired to do union work. This was always a tough transition; community organizers tend to see organizing as a life long effort, and an effort that, if effective, would improve life for citizens. Union organizers, on the other hand, know their job was much more a “blitzing” style, one site here and another there, strategic and often quick, before the employer could get a handle on it. They knew their organizing wasn’t guaranteed to improve anything. They knew that people could lose their jobs, a life’s work, and the union not even win the war. Sandy took too long. She couldn’t make the change.
The personal lives of reps, as much as one could see from the workplace, were just as transient. There was Luis, who was married with six kids one year, thrown out by his wife the next, and then back with her again the following. We could tell by who was sitting next to him at the political dinners we were sent to during the year. There was me, married with a new baby when I got there, separated for forever it seemed, and still greeting husband at union functions with as much familiarity as if we were still sleeping together. Bill, on the other hand, would never split up with Annette, but a newcomer couldn’t tell from the way he missed a week of work because they had a raging blow-out Sunday night. The next month she’d be next to him at another one of those dinners or helping him on a campaign. Before you knew it, amnesia set in and if someone asked. Are you guys back together? — Bill looked puzzled. “Oh yeah, we’re doing real good, why?”
At the center of it all was Rose, the administrative assistant to the president, sitting in the office next to mine, issuing new key cards and beepers and collecting the old ones, retyping telephone extensions with new staff names, deleting others. Rose had survived 20 years and four different union presidents. She said they all look about the same after awhile and she said that with the same somewhat cheery resignation she greeted my “Morning, how’s it going?” with her pat response: “same shit, different day” and a laugh. The only change in Rose in the years I knew her was when her mother died. After that Rose went home to Alabama every long weekend to look after her father a bit. Like clockwork Rose was at work at 8 a.m. and still going strong after five. So consistent was she that when one morning she decided to come in at 8:45, purposely late for a meeting she knew would start late anyway (this was the closest thing to an act of protest I ever saw out of Rose), Tom panicked. He was dialing the Chicago traffic police to see if she’d been in an accident when he heard her office door click open and her keys splash on her desk.
Friendships? We came close to friends in this job, but never too close. Friends couldn’t get fired from your life, but in the union movement, especially representing three shifts a day, your job was your life. There was only a little room for friendships outside the movement. Some of us were driven by that evangelism, and some us used it as an excuse. In this way we were not so different from workaholics at IBM or the Chicago Stock Exchange, but we’d never admit it.
We could be very boring to our friends outside of work — the friends we’d made before we took this job. We could only tell the stories of other staff, or a battle at a work site. We always carried with us some anecdote about a crazy member (like the guy who wanted us to stop the voices in his head), an out of control human resources rep (who, pushed past the limit, took the union rep by his shirt collar) or a wild steward (arrested for $5,000 worth of pyrotechnics he claimed were for the fourth of July). Someone who had left the labor movement had no interest in hearing these stories. Those who’d never been in “the movement” preferred to talk of travels, or politics, or lovers or a movie she’d seen lately. Most of this was foreign to the daily life of a rep. We traveled in terribly interconnected perhaps pitiable circles both in and outside of work. So, for all the vows of friendship made across the fourth round of beers, lifelong attachments seldom come to pass. The tops keep spinning, and the strings lay limp on the floor behind them.
I sought friends among the like-minded at work, and standing at each other’s office doors we traded stories of our weekends. Over lunch we shared guarded versions of our personal lives, but we usually used that hour out of the office to commiserate and trade tips about the job. Since we rarely received any formal training, there is always a wealth of union experience to exchange. But seldom did we cross that line and join each other at our homes, or on Saturday night. Weekend rallies and house visits for organizing drives took enough of our personal time away that I for one didn’t want to talk shop with a co-worker on an “off” night.
So that is what passed for relationships and this was how we spent our days: troubleshooting, putting out fires, chugging, running, bartering through the chaos each day brought, bargaining at every level, from saving one member’s job to squeezing out a four percent raise for 2,500. We spent them grinding our teeth, biting our nails, gnawing the insides of our cheeks, or picking at our chapped lips, chewing pencils, doodling, smoking or drinking, driving like maniacs from one work site to another or bluffing through meetings for which we had no time to prepare. All the while we were talking, talking, talking and talking, as if the words — enough of them, spoken well and with passion — could change the act, the truth, the reality, the fact that we can never do enough for the people we are supposed to represent, and we could never hold on tightly to any one person while the world spun all around us.