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Topics: Work & Empowerment

The Prospects for Unionism in a Service Society

Dorothy Sue Cobble, Associate Professor
School of Management and Labor Relations
Rutgers University
February 12, 1995

This essay is reprinted from Working in the Service Society, edited by Cameron Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).

Contents

Preface
The Feminization of Unions?
How the New Service Work Force Differs
Reconceiving Collective Representation
Signs of Change: The Emergence of New Models
Waitresses and Occupational Unionism
Organizing the Contingent, Nonstandard Work Force
Reshaping Public Policy to Encourage Postindustrial Unionism(s)
References
Notes

Preface

About a month later, we moved into the "policy section" of the course and returned once more to unions. But this time the discussion was shockingly different. "We've looked at legal and legislative remedies," I began, "and the reforms initiated by employers. But what about the need for employee organizations—you know, groups like unions that are organized independently of the employer and whose representatives meet with employers to discuss problems, resolve grievances, and make suggestions for workplace reform?" The response was swift and pointed. "Why, of course, employees need a collective and independent voice. We don't want to have to beg," one student asserted indignantly. To a woman, their heads nodded in militant agreement.

These two class sessions, I later came to understand, laid out in a simple yet powerful way the challenges unions must face if they are to represent the twenty-first century work force. Women comprise 39 percent of all union members, and manufacturing employees represent less than a third of the unionized work force (USDL 1994; Spalter-Roth, Hartmann, and Collins 1994b; Johnson 1995), but many still perceive unions as organizations whose primary and even sole constituency is the blue-collar male worker. Of equal importance, although slightly less than half of American workers would vote for a "union" at their workplace, 60 percent "approve" of unions and 90 percent approve of "employee organizations" (Freeman and Rogers 1993: 33). In other words, although many workers perceive today's union institutions as not meeting their needs, the central premise of unionism, that is, the notion that collective representation is necessary for the protection and advancement of the interests of employees, is still widely accepted. The new work force does not reject unionism per se; it rejects the particular form of unionism that is dominant today.

This chapter is in part what I would have liked to have said to my students. It is also a continuation of my ongoing research on the transformations in the world of work and the implications of those changes for employee representation. I will look first at the relationship between unions and women, focusing in particular on women service workers. The labor movement, historically and in the present, has been quite diverse—both in terms of who it has represented and the forms that unionism has taken. Babysitters may not have organized, but waitresses, flight attendants, nurses, teachers, and even Playboy bunnies did. In the past, unions successfully represented women and service workers—two major components of today's new work force [1]—and they are still doing so today, despite the increased power of capital and the outmoded public policy governing labor-management relations.

Nevertheless, if the labor movement is to organize the vast numbers of women and service workers now outside its ranks, it must reform not only its agenda but its institutional practice. The old-style factory unionism of the 1930s is no longer appropriate for many sectors of today's work force. [2] The second part of this chapter will analyze this mismatch between the current work force and the inherited models of unionism. How does the new work force differ from the work force of the 1930s? What are the implications of these changes for employee representation? I will conclude by describing some of the new models of unionism that are struggling to be born and the changes in public policy that would nurture their progress.

The Prospects for Unionism in a Service Society

The Feminization of Unions?

In the 1960s and 1970s an even more dramatic change occurred in the gender balance of organized labor as unionism spread into female-dominated sectors of the economy such as education; federal, state, and municipal government; and, to a more limited degree, health care. In 1954, women comprised 17 percent of organized workers; by the early 1980s, the figure had almost doubled (Milkman 1985). Many of the most powerful and vocal internationals within the labor movement—the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the teacher unions—now had large female constituencies (Cobble 1993).

In the 1980s, these unions provided national leadership on a wide range of women's concerns, from pay equity to parental leave (Blum 1991; Cobble 1993). They also pioneered more democratic, participatory approaches to organizing and representation (Hurd 1993; Hoerr 1993; Eaton, this volume). Their sensitivity toward and successful advocacy of women's issues have helped undermine the long-standing feminist critique of unions as bastions of male power and privilege. [4]

In part because of the increased power of women in certain sectors of the labor movement, women (as compared to men) are now reaping enhanced economic dividends from unions. Union membership has always offered women and men higher earnings. [5] But in the public sector and in white-collar jobs where women have achieved the most power within their unions, the union premium (or the amount unionization raises wages) is now much higher for women than for men (Freeman and Leonard 1987). Indeed, over all, unions not only raise wages but reduce income inequality between men and women as well as between white workers and workers of color (Spalter-Roth, Hartmann, and Collins 1994a:39; 1994b:202-3). Unions, of course, also continue to provide women other benefits such as greater "voice" in decisions that affect their working conditions, increased job security, "due process rights" through grievance and arbitration procedures, health and other fringe benefits (Spalter-Roth, et.al, 1994a; Cobble 1993).

But problems remain. Women have been feminizing an institution in rapid decline. Union density in the U.S. has fallen continuously since the early 1950s, making U.S. unionization rates among the lowest of any industrialized country. In 1991, 17 percent of the U.S. work force was organized, contrasting sharply with the unionization rates of Sweden (85 percent), Denmark (73 percent), the United Kingdom (42 percent), Germany (34 percent), and even Japan (27 percent) (Freeman and Rogers 1993:15). And, of equal importance, in part because of their declining membership, unions have less power to deliver enhanced earnings, job security, and other workplace benefits either through collective bargaining or legislative initiative. Much of this decline can be traced to factors largely beyond the control of union institutions: structural shifts in the economy away from heavily-organized sectors, the globalization and deregulation of markets, technological disruption and deskilling, and an increasingly unsympathetic political and legal establishment.

Yet, ironically enough, labor could do much to reverse its decline if it were willing to feminize even more. The changes that have occurred—the increase in the proportion of union members who are women and the new awareness of the gender-specific needs of women currently represented by unions—are necessary but insufficient. To move beyond its shrinking base and organize the 87 percent of working women outside its ranks (Johnson 1995), labor must be willing to recognize itself as a gendered institution whose very structures and institutional forms must be feminized. The labor movement as we know it today was created to meet the needs of a male, factory work force. If it is to appeal to women and in particular to the majority of women who work in service occupations, it must rethink its fundamental assumptions about organizing and representation. Labor as an institution must be transformed to meet the needs of a transformed work force: those outside the factory gates in the restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and offices that dominate the landscape of the service society.

But some would argue that labor has been acting rationally. A movement with limited resources, it focused its effort on organizing those workers where it perceived the return to be the greatest. For the labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s, that meant targeting male workers in large industrial worksites. And, in the 1960s as opportunities opened outside of manufacturing, labor shifted its priorities. Organizing successes in such female-dominated settings as education and public sector clerical employment helped dispel long-held beliefs that women were "unorganizable." Academic writings helped undermine remaining prejudice. Surveys revealed that women favored unions more than men and that this sympathy translated into more frequent union election victories (Kochan 1979, Bronfenbrenner, n.d.) [6]

A new myth, however, has replaced the old. The old idea that women were "unorganizable" has now been superceded by the unsubstantiated notion that certain kinds of jobs (almost all of which are female-dominated) are "unorganizable." The reasoning here is circular. The sectors of the work force that are the least organized have certain identifiable characteristics, particularly in the private sector. The service industries—for example, business services, retail trade, and personal services—are disproportionately nonunion, when compared to the goods sector: 12 percent as opposed to 34 percent. Only 7 percent of part-time workers belonged unions in 1993; full-timers enjoyed 18 percent organization (USDL 1994:248). The figure contrasting all nonstandard employees (those working part-time, part-year, on a contracted, temporary, at-home basis) with standard employees (those working full-time, full-year, on-site, as regular "hires") would be even more dramatic were those figures available. Similarly, large worksites tend to be more unionized than small. Workers in firms with more than 100 employees constitute by far the largest share of union members, over 80 percent for both men and women (Spalter-Roth, Hartman, and Collins 1994b:199; Brown, Hamilton, and Medoff 1990).

Yet these statistics really tell us more about who has not been organized than about who can. Although large number of those in service sector jobs, at small worksites, or employed on a part-time, part-year or contingent basis remain unorganized, that does not mean these jobs are "unorganizable." Instead, I would argue that organization lags among these groups of workers because they require different models of organization and representation. Until the distinctive characteristics of these jobs are recognized and the implications of these differences for employee representation explored, these groups of workers, the heart of the service society, will indeed remain ipso facto "unorganizable."

The Prospects for Unionism in a Service Society

How the New Service Work Force Differs

Currently, the fastest growing occupations are not the highly skilled and well-paid knowledge workers but jobs such as food server, janitor, and retail salesperson—jobs that are low-paid, lack promotional opportunities and benefit coverage, and exhibit high turnover (Silvestri and Lukasiewicz 1985; Nussbaum and Sweeney, 1989). Given this new working poor, the wisdom has been that the primary implications for unions of the rise of the service sector are obvious. Workers need the basics unions have always provided: wages, benefits, improved working conditions, and job security. I agree. These issues will remain central for the new work force just as they were for the old. Yet there are discontinuities as well as continuities that warrant attention.

At least four fundamental transformations are reshaping the world of work. First of all, 90 percent of all new jobs in the last decade have been created in the service sector. These new service jobs (as well as the "old" service jobs) differ in significant ways from the blue-collar factory jobs that for so long have dominated conceptions of work and the work environment. Many of these jobs—both low-level and professional—involve personal service or interaction with a client, customer, or patient. The employment relationship is not the classic one described by Marx nor even the conventional adversarial one. A new third party, the customer, complicates and transforms the old diad. Many service workers may perceive this third party as more important in determining their wages and working conditions than the employer (Cobble 1991a:44-48; Hochchild 1983:174-84). This attitude may prevail regardless of whether the worker's income is derived wholly from the customer (the professional in private practice or the self-employed home cleaner), only partially so (the waiter, bartender, or cab driver), or not at all (the nurse or teacher).

Many of these service jobs also differ from the typical manufacturing job in that the line between employee and employer is more indistinct than in the traditional blue-collar, mass production factory. Service sector workers (with the exception of government services) tend to be found not only in smaller establishments (restaurants, dental offices, retail shops—but in situations of close personal contact with their immediate boss (for example, clerical). [8] Employee-employer relations may be personal and collaborative rather than adversarial, formalized, and highly bureaucratic.

Of equal importance, many nonfactory workers, have always engaged in certain "managerial" functions such as making decisions affecting the quality and delivery of service. Since genuinely friendly service and attentive caring can not best be extracted through authoritarian and close supervision, many service workers enjoy more autonomy from management. Especially in the direct service environment, employees may work in semiautonomous, self-managing teams where the senior member takes responsibility for organizing the flow of work, supervising less skilled coworkers, and maintaining work quality. This blurring of "managerial" and "worker" roles contrasts sharply with the Taylorist model of factory relations in which efficient production was to be achieved through strict separation of managerial and worker functions, detailed work rules, narrow job classifications, and a hierarchical decision-making structure (for examples, see Cobble 1991a; Benson 1986; Armstrong 1993).

Second, in addition to the rise of service work, the new postindustrial work world appears to be increasingly characterized by the rise of what many term "nonstandard" or "atypical" employment (Cordova 1986). The dominant employment arrangement (at least since World War II) consisted of on-site employees who worked full-time, full-year with the expectation of long-term tenure, benefits, and promotional opportunities. This traditional relationship—with its defined boundaries and its deepening mutual obligations as employees accumulated seniority, pension contributions, and presumably increased their skills and productivity—is eroding. Roughly one-quarter or more of all workers in the U.S. now fall outside this "standard" work arrangement: they are part-time, part-year, temporary, leased, on-call, subcontracted, off-site workers. Few put in a 9-to-5 work week at the office, shop, or factory and fewer still have long-term continuous relations with a single employer (Plewes 1988; Christensen and Murphree 1988). This "casualized" work force may not see the employer as either friend or enemy: their relationship with individual employers is brief, distant, and often mediated by a subcontractor or temporary agency.

Third, work sites themselves are changing. Economic restructuring and the growth of service work has meant the proliferation of smaller worksites and the decentralization of production. Even industrial workplaces have followed this pattern (Nussbaum and Sweeney 1989). Home-based workers—the seamstresses, legal transcribers, or business consultants toiling alone in home work sites scattered across the decentralized residential landscape—represent one aspect of this deconcentration of the work force (Boris and Daniels 1989). The "virtual office"—"not a place but a nonplace" where a mobile, plugged-in corps of insurance sales agents or other technologically-sophisticated professionals can "converse" periodically—is yet another indication of decentralization. In this instance, the workplace has not only shrunk but has almost disappeared as a spatially-rooted entity (Patton 1993).

Fourth, the long-standing separation between home and work is being challenged. With the phenomenal entry of women into the waged sphere beyond the home, the dissolution of the traditional family, and the aging of the workforce, the problems of household production and human reproduction have become business concerns. Those juggling work and family—primarily women but some men as well—are demanding family support services such as child care and family leave. But they are also calling for a "new work ethic" and asking that the workplace adjust to family needs rather than vice-versa. Why, for example, should waged work be structured along the traditional male model of a 9-to-5, 5-day (or more) week? Why should intermittent, non-continuous, and part-time work be penalized? Why should productivity gains be taken in the form of higher wages rather than shorter hours? Why should leisure or retirement years all be taken in one's sixties—a time when many women are still quite healthy and are free of child care responsibilities? Why not, as Swedish economist Gosta Rehn suggests, provide paid time off from wage work in one's early and middle years when household responsibilities are the greatest? (AFL-CIO 1990; Howe 1977; Hochschild 1989; Schor 1991; see Ratner 1979, pp. 427-28 for Rehn's ideas). When the New York Times can report that 59 percent of women and 32 percent of men would give up a day's pay for a day of free time, what Carmen Sirianni has called "the politics of time" must be given more attention (Sirianni 1988; Kerr 1991).

Reconceiving Collective Representation

Of equal importance is the need to rethink the very assumptions embedded in the institutional practices of a unionism centered on the factory workplace. Under the New Deal/post New Deal framework of labor relations, both labor and management accepted certain Taylorist principles of work organization. These premises were inscribed in governmental labor policy and incorporated into numerous contracts governing the behavior of employers and employees. Yet Taylorist notions of strict and clear demarcations between employee and employer and of a single, one-dimensional adversarial relation between worker and boss are inappropriate to the service and white collar work world with its heightened personalism, its blurring of employer/employee roles, and its concern with the service encounter as much as the boss-employee relation. Union campaigns based merely on an anti-boss message may have little appeal, for example.

Similarly, the factory model of labor relations in which management retains full authority over the design and organization of work and employees are denied any control over quality, work organization, or standards for worker competency may not be attractive to the new work force. The service worker is on the front lines of the feedback loop. Of necessity, poor service is as much their concern as it is management's. Indeed, for many service workers, the quality of service they provide and the amount of control they exert over the service interaction is as central to their financial security as to their dignity and job satisfaction. Preserving the intrinsic rewards of the service encounter—seeing the patient's health improve, humoring a group of hungry, irritable diners, calming a distraught three-year old—must be seen as a critical aspect of employee representation. Improving the quality of the service relationship may be as important to lessening service worker exploitation and alienation as transforming their relationship to management.

The unionism of the 1930s also assumed a long-term, continuous, on-site, and full-time commitment to a single employer—what I have termed its fundamentally "worksite" orientation (Cobble 1991a). The long, drawnout elections required for union recognition; the small, site-based bargaining units of full-time employees certified by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB); and the tying of union benefits to long-term tenure with a single employer—all these aspects of unionism fit poorly if at all with the changed employment structures of the new work world. Organizing and representing workers on a site by site basis, for example, is problematic not only for those who are mobile or contingent, but for those employed at small worksites or who lack worksites at all. A representational system based on employee ties to an individual worksite when worksites are mobile or non-existent is doomed to fail.

Signs of Change: The Emergence of New Models

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Waitresses and Occupational Unionism [9]

Non-professional or "blue-collar" service workers also have relied upon models of unionism quite unlike the industrial or factory model. From the turn of the century to the 1960s, for example, waitresses practiced a surprisingly effective form of unionism that I have termed "occupational unionism." Beginning in 1900 with the founding of the Seattle waitresses local, waitresses established all-female unions and joined mixed culinary locals of waiters, cooks, and bartenders in numerous communities across the country. Affiliated almost exclusively with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE), these food service locals survived the pre-New Deal period intact and experienced unprecedented growth in the 1930s and 1940s. By the end of the 1940s, union waitresses had expanded their ranks to nearly a fourth of the trade nationally, and in union strongholds such as San Francisco, New York, and Detroit, a majority of food servers worked under union contract (Cobble 1991a, 1991b).

For waitresses, craft or occupational identity was one of the prime elements of their work culture and overall world view. (In her work on nurses, Pat Armstrong [1993:312] has noted a similar orientation for nurses, terming it their "vocational commitment.") The unions built by waitresses reflected this emphasis on protecting and advancing the interests of the occupation. They sought not only to enhance wages, provide job security, and other economic benefits but to improve the image and standing of the occupation. Although society at large and their culinary union "brothers" thought otherwise, waitresses argued that their work required skill and was worthy of being considered, in the words of Chicago waitress leader Elizabeth Maloney, "a real trade by which any girl might be proud to earn her living" (Franklin 1913: 36).

Like professional associations, waitress unions devised entrance standards for their trade, oversaw training, developed guidelines for acceptable work performance and took responsibility for enforcing those standards at the workplace. The union controlled the selection of supervisors (they had to be union members) and union members could be brought up before their peers when infractions of "work rules" occurred. Wayward members might be fined and in some cases removed from their jobs. Waitresses themselves policed these standards and meted out the appropriate discipline (Cobble 1991a, 1991b).

Locals held trials in which members accused by employers of inattention to duty were brought before their sister waitresses. One such trial, held before the executive board of the San Francisco local in 1951, for example, involved "the trouble at Jeanettes with a customer." The waitress, appearing in her own defense, said she had been "very busy working her station ... and [only] threw her tray at the customer ... after he called her a slob." As it was her first offense, the waitress escaped with a warning and a lecture on handling offensive customers. [10]

This concern for what I have termed "peer management" makes the occupational unionism of the past a potentially useful model for organizing and representing service workers today, both of the nonprofessional as well as the professional and technical rank. A unionism that emphasized occupational identity and shouldered responsibility for upgrading and monitoring occupational standards would appeal to some so-called "blue-collar" service workers as well as to teachers and nurses. Many blue-collar service workers, like their better-paid counterparts, want an organization that assists them in improving the image of their occupation, in achieving "professional recognition," and in performing their work to the best of their abilities. Organizing campaigns among restaurant workers in the high-priced, high-profit sector of food service—the traditional bastion of restaurant unionism—have suffered from a widely held view among food servers that unionization would lower performance standards and that inept, "over-protected" employees would drive away customers, hence reducing tip income (Cobble 1991b, Cobble and Merrill 1994). In an ironic reversal of its status fifty years ago, HERE membership now connotes inferior skill and competence.

HERE could take some steps to recover its lost traditions of "peer management." It could invest more in training, for example, and initiate more participatory or joint decision-making labor relations structures. But the current legal framework severely hampers the ability of unions to set entrance requirements for the trade, to oversee job performance, and to punish recalcitrant members. Almost by necessity, HERE has had to adopt a more factory-like model of employee representation.

Where HERE has continued to innovate, however, has been in responding to the particular needs of a "sexualized" service work force. Many service jobs involve not only nurturence or what Arlie Hochschild has called "emotional labor" but also the selling of one's sexual self —from flight attendants to TV news reporters to Playboy bunnies. With the backing of HERE International Vice-President Myra Wolfgang, Detroit Playboy bunnies organized into HERE in the early 1960s, and eventually HERE negotiated a national contract covering Playboy Clubs across the country. Wolfgang mounted an astute public relations campaign, attacking the Playboy philosophy as "a gross perpetuation of the idea that women should be obscene and not heard" and praising the Playboy bunnies who had guts enough to "bite back." After winning their first contract with the Detroit Club in 1964 and ending the employer's "no wage" policy—the bunnies had been expected to live solely on tip income—attention turned to issues of female sexuality and attractiveness (Cobble 1991a: 128-30).

Disputes ranged from who would define "attractiveness" and its relation to competency to who would control when and in what way bunnies could "sell" their sexuality. When management fired bunnies in New York, Detroit, and other cities, claiming "loss of bunny image," the women contested the firings using the various state commissions on human rights, the EEOC, and the union grievance procedures. Although the Playboy Club publicly defined bunny image as having "a trim youthful figure ... a vibrant and charming look;" bunnies claimed that defects cited in the Playboy literature included "crinkling eyelids, sagging breasts, varicose veins, stretch marks, crepey necks, and drooping derrieres." Not all of the fired bunnies regained their jobs, but in Detroit and other cities, the arbitrator ruled in the union's favor and reinstated the "defective" bunnies. Hugh Hefner had finally been "displaced as the sole qualified beholder of bunny beauty," quipped Wolfgang (Cobble 1991a: 128-9).

What servers would wear at work was another contested issue. In national negotiations during the 1970s, HERE and the Playboy Clubs International debated just how much of the server's body would be revealed by the bunny costume. In other less publicized negotiations in the 1970s involving cocktail waitresses and "barmaids," HERE restricted employer choice of uniform, arguing in one case that the employers provide "uniforms that fit—[some employers refused to buy uniforms over a size 12]—and adequately covered all parts of the body normally covered by personal clothing" (Cobble 1991a:131).

The issue remains very much alive today. The HERE local in Atlantic City, New Jersey, recently threatened a "pantyhose arbitration," over the sheerness of the pantyhose management required casino waitresses to wear. Casino waitresses preferred thicker, less sheer pantyhose because they experienced less harassment. Heavier "support" hose also were more comfortable, helped tired legs, and covered varicose veins (Cobble and Merrill 1994).

The history of flight attendant unionism is rife with similar kinds of controversies over who would define "attractiveness" and who would determine when to "use" it. Courts helped the struggling airline food servers in the 1960s and 1970s by ruling illegal certain airline practices: the ban on married women and on women over 30. But less blatantly discriminatory policies remained in place. Since the 1950s, flight attendant unions have complained about management's control over their weight, clothing, hairstyle, and make-up. They also pressed for more leeway in customer-client interaction and disputed management's continuing allegiance to the notion that the customer is always right, whether belligerant, sexually-overbearing, or abusive. In one recent show-down, American Airline flight attendants struck successfully for higher wages, more control over their schedules, and an end to management practices such as sending attendants home who report to work with pimples and firing workers who return incivility in kind. A mandatory "Commitment to Courtesy" class in which instructors divided flight attendants into small groups and assigned them to draw pictures on flipcharts showing "attendants being nice" particularly galled the women, one activist explained. "People got livid" (Neilsen 1982; Rapport 1986; Ciotta 1994; Lewin 1994; Kilborn 1993).

Clearly, curtailing the abusive server-customer relationship should be an integral part of any successful service unionism. Sexual service workers have received the most attention in recent decades, in part because of the shifting legal climate defining sexual harassment in the workplace as illegal and holding employers and unions accountable. Yet service workers, from retail clerks to social service professionals, suffer not just emotional and sexual abuse but physical violence from customers, clients, and the general public. One-third of emergency room nurses, for example, are assaulted on the job each year. Indeed, the leading cause of death on the job for women is not faulty or dangerous equipment or hazardous chemicals but homicide. Forty percent of women who die on the job are murder victims, due partially to the concentration of women in retail trade and other interactive service occupations (USDL 1993; Rosier 1994). [11]

Organizing the Contingent, Nonstandard Work Force

Aspects of occupational unionism hold promise for organizing and representing the proliferating contingent work force. Unlike the factory unionism that came to dominate in the 1930s, occupational unionism was not a work-site oriented unionism. Occupational unionism focused on fostering ties between workers within a given occupation rather than uniting all those employed at a particular work site. Occupational unionists recruited and gained union recognition on an occupational/local market basis. Once organized, they stressed employment security rather than "job rights" at an individual worksite; they also offered portable rights and benefits. Benefits and union privileges came by virtue of membership in the occupation and were retained as workers changed employers or moved from site to site (Cobble 1991b).

An alternative to site-based unionism is essential if today's more mobile and contingent work force is to be organized. A mobile work force, whether full or part-time, does not stay with one employer long enough to utilize the conventional election procedures and card-signing associated with NLRB-style site-based organizing. Part-time, at-home, and contracted workers are often ineligible to vote because of their more "tenuous" relation to the worksite and to a single employer. Employees at small individual worksites have minimum economic leverage against a multi-national corporate employer or a chain-style enterprise.

Based largely on their occupational and professional ties, some groups of contingent workers have organized themselves into guilds or associations. [12] Home-based clericals, a group deemed inhospitable to unions by many, are organizing across work-sites. Their associations provide critical services to their members: information about job referrals, data on the reliability of prospective employers, and training opportunities. They also function to set minimum occupational standards by making wages and working conditions a group rather than an individual decision (Christensen 1993). Although these organizations do not bargain formally with employers, they exist to advance the interests of a group of employees just as do unions. Indeed, they offer many of the same services that occupational unions provided historically.

Other nonstandard workers, notably janitors and home health care aides, have built successful union organizations in the last decade, relying by and large on non site-based organizing approaches. SEIU, for example, launched its "Justice for Janitors" campaign in the early 1980s and in ten years organized thousands of cleaning workers. Currently a fifth of all janitors now belong to unions, some 200,000 workers (Ybarra 1994). The strategic key to their organizing victory, according to Stephen Lerner, director of the Building Service Division of SEIU, was a rejection of site by site NLRB organizing and the substitution of a geographically-based or region-wide approach (Lerner 1991). Rather than organize the individual subcontractors or cleaning vendors who "hire" and supervise a janitorial work force scattered across hundreds of cleaning sites in downtown office buildings, they targeted the entire industry in a particular city or region. They used civil disobedience, political pressure, community boycotts, and "shaming" publicity, going after the sub-contractor's employer—mainly commercial landlords—and their tenants (Howley 1990).

Home health care aides relied upon a similar array of nontraditional approaches. Currently the fastest growing occupational group in percentage terms, home health care workers offer an alternative to institutionalized care, assisting the elderly and the disabled in their own homes (Kilborn 1994). Steeped in the "community-based organizing" approaches of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the United Farm Workers, and ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), many of the leaders of the home health care organizations brought these community-based approaches into their labor organizing in the early 1980s. They orchestrated campaigns that embraced all home health care aides within a particular locale and that drew upon local institutions and community leaders for support (Kelleher 1986; Kelleher 1994; Walker 1994; Los Angeles Sentinel, October 24, 1991). Some home health care groups reached out to the clients as well, making the case that lifting wages for aides would help clients maintain quality service. Since social service agencies often pay the wages of home care aides from Medicaid and other public funds (although clients may hire and supervise their aides), clients frequently supported wage increases for their "employees". Clients did express fear, however, that unionization might lessen their "control" over aides (Walker 1994). By 1995, some 45,000 home health care workers had organized in California alone, securing improved wages and benefits. Flourishing locals also exist in Chicago, New York, New Orleans, and other cities, bringing the total unionized to over 70,000 (California AFL-CIO News, November 11, 1994; SEIU 1994; AFL-CIO News, October 17, 1994 and November 14, 1994).

Many of today's successful organizing drives among mobile, contingent workers combine this "community-wide" grass roots approach with "top-down" organizing, that is, they pressure employers for "voluntary" recognition instead of securing recognition by winning an NLRB-conducted election of employees. [13] The work force must be solidly organized, however, since it is the workers themselves who hold demonstrations, picket, and generally make life unpleasant for non-union employers. In the case of janitors and home health care aides, ethnic and racial bonds as well as occupational ties helped forge and sustain solidarity. In Los Angeles, for example, where the Justice for Janitors campaign secured its initial critical breakthrough, four-fifths of cleaners are Hispanic, with many recent immigrants from Mexico (Pastreich 1994). Similarly, home health care workers are overwhelmingly African-American and Latina women (Kilborn 1994).

Present-day unions are turning to another technique relied upon historically by occupational unions: the use of union employment exchanges, hiring halls, or job registries. In the early 1900s, for example, waitresses in Butte, Montana, organized against "the vampire system" of high-fee employment agencies. For the next half century, no waitress worked in Butte unless she was dispatched from the union hiring hall. The Los Angeles waitresses' local, founded in the 1920s, had a thriving hiring hall as late as 1967, where, according to the Los Angeles Times, 350 "extras" were sent out on a typical weekend (Cobble 1991a, 1991b). The local's secretary likened the hiring hall to a Travelers Aid, where transient and impoverished waitresses came in search of help. "Some of them come to town with children in the car, no money, and somebody here comes up with money for a hotel room and a job" (Cobble 1991a: 138) These worker-run employment agencies bound workers together and created a structure for on-going and positive contact with the union. Hiring halls also facilitated organizing because they offered the employer a valuable service: a steady source of trained, reliable labor.

Union-run employment agencies would appeal to today's mobile work force. Many workers desire mobility between employers and a variety of work experience (Olesen and Katsuranis 1978: 316-38). In particular, those balancing work and family are concerned with shortened work time and flexible scheduling. Well-run agencies could provide such variety and flexibility. They could also offer high-quality benefits that would not penalize work force intermittence, and, presumably, pay higher wages than an agency run for profit.

A number of settings appear ripe for union-run agencies. In addition to the cleaning and food service sectors already mentioned, the health care industry offers a potential site for union-run agencies. The use of temporaries in the health care industry has burgeoned. On the one hand, this restructuring is a form of employer cost-cutting; on the other, at least among nurses, the workers have demanded more flexible work schedules. The increased reliance on nurse registres has been one solution. In response, unions have negotiated protections involving the use of these commercial registries; they have also experimented with providing the employer with a unionized pool of temporary or short-term workers (Engberg, 1993). In other words, the nurses themselves through the union have taken over the function of the commercial agencies.

Reshaping Public Policy to Encourage Postindustrial Unionism(s)

The exclusion of broad sectors of the work force from coverage under the current labor law is a crucial issue. By my conservative estimates, a third of the private sector work force (some 32 million workers) are now explicitly exempted from exercising collective bargaining rights under the National Labor Relations Act (Cobble 1994a). Domestic and agricultural workers, the self-employed and others were originally excluded under the Wagner Act in 1935. Later legislation and legal rulings rescinded the bargaining rights of supervisors, managers, professional employees deemed "managerial," and "confidential" employees. These workers are not defined as "employees" in part because they do not resemble blue-collar industrial workers: their work world is not "industrial" nor are they behind the Taylorist curtain, removed from all "managerial" knowledge and responsibility. The law needs to be amended to open up eligibility to this growing sector of non-factory workers.

In addition, many workers are effectively barred from collective representation because they have nonstandard employment relations. As has been discussed, the traditional site-by-site organizing and representational system creates innumerable barriers to their participation. Although some unions have cleared these hurdles and organized janitors and home health care workers, heir continuing success and the success of subsequent groups (many without access to the resources of a national union) is tenuous without legal reform.

In particular, if a mobile, decentralized service work force is to have representational rights, unions must once again have the ability to exert many of the economic pressures on employers that were once legal. The millions of nonfactory workers—teamsters, longshoremen, waitresses, cooks, musicians, and others—who successfully organized before the 1950s relied on mass picketing, recognitional picketing (prolonged picketing with the explicit goal of gaining union recognition), secondary boycotts (putting pressure on one employer to cease doing business with another), "hot cargo" agreements (assurances from one employer that "he" will not handle or use the products of another nonunion or substandard employer), and pre-hire agreements (contracts covering future as well as current employees)—all tactics now illegal under current labor law. Making them legal again would facilitate the organizing of workers from home-based legal transcribers and domestic cleaners to the millions of fast food workers toiling for minimum wages. McDonald's, for example, is unionized in Denmark, Finland, Mexico, Australia, and other countries in large part because of the legality of secondary boycotts and other kinds of economic pressures. Unionized employees at milkshake supply centers, truckers, and printers all helped bring McDonald's to the bargaining table by refusing to produce and deliver goods to the chain (Cobble 1991a, Cobble and Merrill 1994a).

Yet even when employer recognition is achieved, the small bargaining units typically decreed by the National labor Relations Board make meaningful bargaining difficult. Decentralized, firm-based bargaining fuels employer resistance by heightening the economic burdens on the few unionized employers. [14] It also demands an inordinate degree of union staff and resources. The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees, for example, cannot negotiate individual contracts with the thousands of independent and family-owned eating establishments that exist in even one metropolitan area.

Changes in the law would help remedy this situation. Employers who withdraw from voluntarily constituted multi-employer agreements could be penalized. Legislation could encourage the extension of collectively-bargained standards to other employers on an industry, occupational, or geographical basis, as is true in Canada and many European countries. [15] Removing the restrictions on the economic weapons allowed to labor also would encourage multi-employer and market-wide bargaining. Increasing the power of unions historically often has meant that employers—especially small employers in highly competitive markets—voluntarily sought multi-employer bargaining (for example, see Feinsinger 1949).

These fairly specific recommendations would do much to facilitate new forms of employee representation. On the most fundamental level, however, the framework of our current labor relations system is in need of wholesale reconceptualization. Fully integrating the realities of women's work and of service work into labor relations theory and policy would cause a reevaluation of the most basic premises upon which our labor law and institutional practice rely. The male worker and the factory shopfloor must be dislodged as the basis upon which generalizations are made. The work lives and work needs of the new majority must be seen not as deviant or as a "special interest" group but as the norm, as expressive of the dominant reality.

History tells us that diversity is not new. People have long done many different kinds of work; and the environment in which that work has taken place has also been diverse. Over its century and a half of existence, the American labor movement has accommodated that diversity, as the variable practices of representation among waitresses, teachers, janitors, construction workers, and others attest. The labor movement must once again think in terms of multiple and competing forms of unionism. The test of unionism in the twenty-first century service society will be whether it can recover and extend that tradition of multiple unionism.

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Notes

1. The most frequently noted aspect of the new work force is its multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and female character. Minorities will comprise close to a fourth of the work force by the year 2000, with the greatest increases posted by Hispanics and Asians. Women currently make up 46 percent of waged workers and may be half by the end of the century (AFL-CIO 1990). Yet as I will argue in this paper, the new work force also is defined by the nature of the jobs they do.

2. A number of commentators have called for models of unionism that move beyond the industrial or factory model of the 1930s. See Heckscher (1988), O'Grady (1992), Armstrong (1993), and my own work on "occupational unionism" (Cobble 1991a, 1991b, 1994b). Although no agreement has emerged on which alternative models hold the greatest promise, a consensus of sorts has been reached: the issue is no longer whether new models are needed but what form these models should take.

3. See Cobble (1994c) for a fuller discussion of the postwar feminization of unions and for documentation on the gender-conscious activities of women trade unionists in this period.

4. Although earlier feminist literature on the relation between women and unions judged unions harshly (Hartmann 1976; Kessler-Harris 1975), more recent evaluations see unions as more flexible institutions and judge their impact on women workers as beneficial (Milkman 1993; Spalter-Roth, Hartmann, Collins 1994b).

5. In 1994, for example, women union members earned $130 dollars a week more than non-union women ($504 compared to $374) and union men $118 dollars more than non-union ($608 compared to $490). Unionization also raises the wages of African-American and Hispanic women and men more than "white" (Oravec 1994).

6. Kochan's 1979 findings that 40 percent of women would vote for a union if given the chance (as compared to only 33 percent for all nonunion workers) has been confirmed by other, more recent research (Kruse and Schor 1992). Kate Bronfenbrenner's analysis of AFL-CIO organizing data revealed that unions won 59 percent of elections in units with "a substantial majority of women" and 33 percent where women comprised less than half of the unit.

7. The following section draws heavily upon Cobble 1993:13-16.

8. According to Howard Wial's calculations, the average service-producing establishment has about 13 workers; the average manufacturing about 51 (Wial 1993). In the private sector, women are much more likely than men to work for small firms and at worksites with fewer people (Brown, Hamilton, and Medoff 1990: 1-15).

9. The first three paragraphs of this section draw on Cobble 1991b.

10. HERE, Local 48 Executive Board Minutes, February 13, 1951, Local 2 Files, San Francisco, California.

11. In response to increasing workplace violence, some unions petitioned for a federal standard on workplace violence under the Occupational Safety and Health Act; others have pushed for laws requiring retail stores to improve lighting, install surveillance cameras, and provide immediate 911 access (Rosier 1994).

12. Despite high job turnover, the new service work force often demonstrates a strong occupational stability, moving from employer to employer yet remaining in the occupation for a long time (Butler and Skipper 1983). Many carry job skills from site to site, encouraging an investment and identity with their occupation not with an individual employer.

13. Although the law restricts union activities in this regard, some locals won a form of "pre-hire" agreement (termed "Recognition Process Agreements") from individual vendors in which the vendors promised organizer access to work sites, neutrality through the union campaign, and recognition of the union once a majority of workers signed cards. These campaigns have sometimes lasted upwards of five years or more, draining the limited resources of these fledgling locals (Kelleher 1986; Gallaher 1994).

14. Employers in the U.S., as Sandy Jacoby (1991) observes, are "exceptional" in their resistance to unionism. In part, their antagonism is based on strongly-held cultural notions of "management rights" that presumably flow from property ownership. But additionally, the anti-unionism of U.S. employers is fueled by the higher economic costs of being unionized in the U.S. The wage gap between unionized and non-unionized employers is higher in the US than in many other countries, for example, and the unionized sector in the U.S. is small and often competing with a large number of non-unionized firms.

15. For the Canadian system of sectoral bargaining as it exists and is being proposed, see Fudge (1993). The extension of prevailing wage legislation to sectors other than the construction industry would establish a floor below which wages and benefits could not fall and lower the union premium for unionized employers. Prevailing wage legislation requires that all employers in an area pay a rate equal to that prevailing in the area among similar employers. For the first time in 1994, AFSCME, working with a church-based community organization in Baltimore, succeeded in passing a prevailing wage law in Baltimore that required "a living wage" for all workers employed on service contracts by the city (Daily Labor Report January 3, 1995).

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