It’s been a union-centred life of late, even more than normally. Meg spent last week in Ottawa bargaining and rallying to express offense at the flat-out shitty offer the government has made to its workers, so I was thinking about her and her frustrations alot. And here in Vancouver I was getting settled into my first week back as grievance rep from Executive Director and working on drafting a first collective agreement for our staff union (part of CEP Local 467, which brings together union staffers from a number of union-employers).
I work with collective agreements all the time, but it’s been a long while since I’ve worked with one that applies to me, and never before have I been involved in writing an agreement from scratch. So it’s an exciting thing to be doing, and taking the edge off any lingering resentment I have about being forced out of my old position – well, perhaps not taking the edge off, but providing me a productive outlet for my anger at the kind of shit positions my employer has taken with regard to its own staff.
Collective agreements are strange things. They are peace treaties, really, promises by a union to do what it can to control workers in exchange for some commitments from the boss and legal recourse for the union should the boss renege on those commitments. Agreements, then, really are the union. Though it wasn’t always that way. Radical unions like the IWW originally refused to sign collective agreements – the attitude being, “No, the boss signs an agreement. The boss makes concessions because otherwise we don’t work and his business is fucked. We don’t make any promises to be satisfied or pretend we’re satisfied, because we’re not after a bigger piece of the pie but the whole damn bakery. And we don’t make any promises to control workers’ anger because workers’ anger is exactly what we’re all about.”
Unions haven’t been about that for a real long time, however. And so I am finding that the whole process of organizing my workplace, setting my “will-do” / “won’t-do” boundaries and writing a first agreement is leading me to think alot about the relationship between all the shit I hate most about unions and the day to day work that I do.
Unions as managers; unions as employers; unions as bosses.
In 1951 eighteen workers employed by the US Air Line Pilots’ Association (ALPA) embarked upon an organizing drive, and for the first time in North America, staff working for a trade union sought to unionize themselves. And the employing union challenged their right to doso, presenting to the US Labor Relations Board two central arguments:
all union staff should be seen as managers, as they deal with confidential membership information;
a union by definition cannot be an employer as that term is defined legally, and so the right to organize does not extend to employees of unions.
ALPA lost. The Board ruled that the union was indeed an employer, whatever its self-defined “class position” might be. And the significance of all this wasn’t lost on unions or union staff – or the public for that matter. On January 15, 1952, the New York Times printed a story on “Union as Employer”, suggesting – quite rightly – that something had dramatically changed in the way unions should be understood politically, economically, and socially:
The increase in number, variety and complexity of
issues has subordinated the local union and has
compelled the national unions to engage experts,
technicians and professional employees, and the
union structures have tended to fit their new functions.
Within a few years, many of the largest international unions were confronted with staff organizing drives – the Teamsters, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the International Association of Machinists and more, so that by 1961, the AFL-CIO leadership was actively and publicly engaged in the battle to halt unionization of labour staffers. Staff who sought certification were vilified for promoting factionalism, seeking to undermine the growing strength of the workers’ movement, and for promoting – yes, get ready for it…communism! The message was simple – staff either submit their interests to the good of the union, or they actively undermine the union and so serve instead the interests of corporate America or Bolshevism or both. Here’s then-ILGWU President, David Dubinsky:
We have always had a concept of the union leader as a
leader of masses and not as a paid mercenary or as one
engaged in a business for self-aggrandizement.
I spent time in a Czarist jail because I was part of a struggle
to free people, not because I was paid to agitate. The founders
of the ILGWU starved themselves into sickness and death,
faced beatings and crippling, gangsters and prisons because
they felt that this was their responsibility to their consciences
and to their fellow workers…We chose to stay with the labor
movement not because it paid better, not because it offered
more security, not because it offered greater leisure, but
because it was our dedication, our struggle, our belief – our
very lives. What a bitter joke that we are now characterized as
‘management’
Dubinsky went on to lament the ‘materialism’ of union staff, intimating that it was in fact their unionization that caused the bureaucratization of labour. Staff insistence on higher wages and benefits created a “class of super-citizens” within the union, and by organizing they made the union a business rather than a ‘movement’.
I’ve heard variations of this line a whole many times – every time, in fact, staff at a union take issue with the crappy behaviour of their employers. The Telecommunications Workers’ Union staff strike in 1999; numerous job actions by BC Teachers Federation staff; pickets by employees of the Canadian Labour Congress and the BC Government and Services Employees Union – in each case, the debate arose again, and in each case a significant part of the left leapt up to defend the “real” working class from these pretenders.
At the TWU, for example – where I was an elected local rep at the time – the Executive went through various responses – initially declaring at a local meeting, “We’re the employer in this situation and we intend to behave like an employer”, later recanting and hiring an Executive Director precisely because “we don’t want to be bosses” – as though establishing an intermediary could make the conflict disappear. The BCTF, for its part, wrapped itself in the professional association flag, lamenting staff’s “old-style trade unionism”. And the CLC and BCGEU strikes each generated considerable debate among the left generally, the former on a left-wing electronic bulletin board, the latter causing such a schism within BC’s Solidarity Notes labour choir that performances and practices were cancelled after a number of its members suggested a trip to the picket line to sing in solidarity with the strikers.
So, yeah, it’s an old story, but a current one, too.
“Union staff shouldn’t be allowed to organize – they work for the working class.”
“Staff unions just divide workers – how dare these people undermine the credibility of unions when labour is in so much trouble.”
“Union staff have no loyalty – we all volunteer our time, why shouldn’t they?”
It goes on and on.
Really though, the power dynamics at play in union staff/ union executive relationships are variations of general tensions at play within the union as an organization. Whatever is happening with staff at a union is probably happening with members as well.
Now, I’m not whinging about how bad I got it. Union staffers aren’t victims any more than union members are. Professional staffers like me have significant power – we are the drivers of the machine, even though we often find ourselves crushed beneath its wheels and even though we spend every day convincing workers to give the machine their trust. We are often the most critical of the labour movement, but we’re also the most responsible for its continued operation as partner in the industrial relations regime. Staff like me, in short, embody all the contradictions of the labour movement. We are uniquely positioned to reveal that the emperor has no clothes and yet our jobs depend on loyalty – whether genuine or phony – to that emperor. So going to work is alot like walking a maze, and though many of us understand that the only way out is through or beneath the walls, we continue to walk, searching for a door marked exit.
I am a union staffer. I work for an organization recognized under a legal code as a representative of workers’ interests. I am a negotiator, bargaining with management to write joint agreements. I am an advocate, campaigning for improved working conditions and higher wages. I am a politician, brokering deals, managing political support, selling policy. I am a counselor, offering advice and support, drying tears, referring to specialists. And I am a unionist, arguing with bosses, fighting discipline, seeking more money for less work against managers who seek more work for less money. I work in an environment of contradictions. But make no mistake about it – I work; I have a boss; and my job depends on my ability to serve the interests of that boss.
So I am not, in my work-life, part of a working class movement. I am not, in my work-life, charged with organizing workers against capital. I work as one small part of a regime designed to maintain, if not increase, productivity, to satisfy workers’ immediate and specific demands, and to dampen their long-term and general aspirations. I serve labour peace, industrial calm, and good citizenship. My office is a workplace like any other, in which we as employees give up our skills, our experience, and our labour to an employer who directs that labour in its interest. In return, I get a salary, a pension, benefits.
It’s not a bad job, as jobs go. But make no mistake – it’s a job.
