Shop Stewards (Pt. 1)

I wrote a piece on Iran for The Chief, coming out in a few days; I’ll link to it next week.

In the meantime, I’ve been asked to write a long article on shop stewards – or other similar elected union representatives within a workplace – and I’m going to use this substack over the next few weeks to sort through some of my ideas. This week, I thought I’d talk about some personal experiences and the lessons I drew.

1. Stewards at Polychrome (1)

I worked at Polychrome Corporation in Yonkers for three years, 1981-84. The main plant, which produced light-sensitive aluminum plates for the printing industry was right along the Hudson River – it’s river-front co-ops now. I worked with a dozen other co-workers in a small building a couple of blocks away. We built car-sized machines that basically ran those plates through chemical baths – sort of like developing a photograph for those of you who remember that. In any event, the big plant was unionized, we were not. We went down the street a few times to ask the chief steward there “why not?” and were met with a shrug. Then, he was hurt on the job and the workers elected a new chief steward – an honest guy. Almost immediately, he came up the hill to ask us, why aren’t you in the union? It turned out the union contract mandated that any other worksites within fifty miles fell under the base union contract. Was the first guy getting paid off, or bought off by favorable treatment? (I’ve seen stewards who parlay their union position into no-work or little-work jobs.) Or was he just afraid to confront management? By the next week, we were making $1.50 more an hour.

Moral: who your shop steward is really matters.

2. Stewards at Polychrome (2)

I became the shop steward in our little plant; I was young and learning by doing. I don’t remember much except for one incident. It was winter, and the heating blowers weren’t working right and it was pretty cold in the shop. I canvassed the crew. The four workers from the West Indies were upset – they wanted to go home. The two Russian immigrants were ambivalent; they were willing to go along. The three young white locals seemed excited. I went to the boss: it’s too cold, we’re going home. He said, you can go home, but I’m not paying you for the rest of the day. I went back to the crew. Now the white guys said fuck this, I need the money, I’m not that cold, I’m staying. The West Indian guys left, I left, and everyone else stayed. For a brief moment we had unity, and then it fell apart. Rats.

Moral: organizing is hard, and sometimes your members let you down.

3. The best shop steward I ever saw

Louis Russo, my shop steward for a dozen years in the House Maintenance crew at the Transit Authority’s 207^th St Subway Car Overhaul Shop, was one of those natural organizers, a genius. I could never hope to replicate what he did, but I sat at his feet and learned. Here are some of those lessons I learned from Lou Russo:

· A great organizer is always in front of her crew, pulling them forward, getting them to be more united and militant than they would have thought possible.

· But a great organizer never gets so far out in front of crew temperament that they say, okay, good luck, and don’t follow.

· A great organizer is always gauging the moment: what is the right issue? When is the right time?

· A great organizer keeps the supervisor off balance, smiling at her one day, snarling at her the next.

· But even when they’re smiling, that great organizer hates, really hates, management.

· A great organizer knows they are greater if they build their own militant minority within the crew; that helps pull the waverers along.

· A great organizer has crew meetings, to understand where his members are at, to push them forward, to isolate the brown-nosers or the cowards. But they also talk to people one-on-one.

· A great organizer tries not to write grievances, but to resolve matters right in the workplace.

· A great organizer bends the rules – certainly management’s rules, but sometimes the union’s rules too.

· A great organizer uses the contract when it’s in their favor and ignores it when it is not.

· A great organizer, when they ask you to do something, you feel honored that they are asking you to do some work.

Moral: Only a few people are natural organizers, but even those of us without that charisma and intuitive understanding can learn to be okay, even pretty good at the job, if we try our best to apply these lessons.

4. “Confrontational Grievance Handling” - giving what Louis Russo did a name

When I went to work at TWU Local 100, I met Eddie Kay. Way back, in prehistoric times, back when the wheel was being invented, Eddie Kay had been a shop steward in drug stores. By the time I knew him, he’d been an organizer and later the Vice President of Hospital Workers 1199. He had retired in 2000 to start his career as a union-gun-for-hire, and TWU Local 100 was his first gig, helping us new union officers fight management. At 1199, he had taught “confrontational grievance handling.” That’s when the steward brings the whole crew into the boss’s office to deal with a festering problem. When she does that, she needs to make sure she isn’t the only one to speak. It turns out that managers don’t like to say “no” to twenty or thirty people. And even if you don’t win, or win everything you want, your members like this. They’re emboldened by the presence of their co-workers and they’re willing to say things they would never otherwise say to the boss’s face.

Moral: If you can do this just once or twice, even when you go into the office alone because the issue or the time is not ripe to pull off this type of action, you have a little bit of advantage because the boss is thinking about not wanting those thirty workers in their office ever again.

5. When the union lets the steward down

I taught at Bronx Science for six years. There were a lot of veteran teachers there, and this became a problem for us when the Department of Education basically instituted a soft payroll cap that incentivized principals to push highly-paid teachers out of their schools. How do you do that? By making life really, really unpleasant, and by handing out “Unsatisfactory” ratings like candy – a few of those “U”s, which can’t be challenged in any meaningful way, can end your career. My chapter leader – the UFT’s name for a shop steward – did all the right things. We had lunchtime chapter meetings which virtually every teacher attended. We had pickets outside the school and downtown. We tried to coordinate with the parents. The principal was unfazed; moreover, she retaliated against the chapter leader by giving him “U”s. Sometimes, a problem is too big, and you need help from the “big” union. We needed media attention – look what is happening at this premier institution – and calls to the Chancellor and Mayor: leave our chapter leader alone. But because he was a member of one of UFT’s dissident caucuses, Big UFT left him to twist in the wind until, eventually, he had to leave before he was fired. When that happened, the narrative was clear: it was time to flee, and a score or more of us did.

Moral: The “big” union can sabotage a good steward.

6. Fighting Without the Members, and Then With Them

By the late 2010s, I was a graduate student-worker (GS-W) at CUNY, and a low-level union officer in the Graduate Center chapter of the Professional Staff Congress union (each campus has its own chapter). We were trying to build a departmental steward structure for the first time anywhere in the PSC. Even though we were struggling with how to give them a representational function – since each steward’s members actually did their teaching work elsewhere, at one of CUNY’s many campuses – it did give us a core of inexperienced but want-to-be activists. We had one issue that cut across departments and campuses: in one year of the program, the assigned number of work hours was excessive, although it was unlikely the assignment was a contract violation. A few of the chapter officers met repeatedly with the Graduate Center president, who claimed this was CUNY-wide policy, beyond her ability to fix. At a meeting with our stewards/activists, they were legitimately angry at CUNY, but also us – why were these negotiations going on behind closed doors? So, I said, let’s go see the president right now. At first, they were startled, even reluctant – like so many workers, they were abused but afraid of the consequences of confrontation. Fortunately, I was able to turn their complaints around: you said you don’t trust us, so let’s go see her all together. Within minutes, two dozen giddy GS-Ws were in her office, berating her, demanding action. Somewhere, I still have the video: as we left, we were all chanting we’ll be back, we’ll be back. And within a week, the problem was fixed.

Moral: When in doubt, mobilize your members; and keep checking back in with them – since management knows about your discussions with it, your members should too.

Things I read this week:

Regime change is the through-line in American foreign policy-making, Republicans and Democrats alike. Philip Gordon, the White House coordinator for the Middle East under Barack Obama explained to the Guardian that “gaming out” potential conflict scenarios with Iran was, “one of the reasons we did the nuclear deal and didn’t try to change the regime.”

More on Iran: The Chinese see the American war in Iran as a chance to battle-test some of their offensive and defensive weaponry against the American military.

What are we fighting for? Insofar as there’s discussion that the developing anti-fascist movement also needs to be for something, to present an alternative vision of the future, here’s an Affordability Agenda and a Policy and Resource Manual that provide more detail.

A legal victory: A District Court in Rhode Island issued a preliminary injunction ordering the Veteran’s Administration to restore and honor its collective bargaining agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees, pending the outcome of their lawsuit. I want to wait until we see if that injunction is put on hold by a higher court before I write about it, but here is AFGE’s statement and here is the actual court order.

A methodological change that was not announced by government statisticians (until they were queried later by surprised economic analysts) lowered January’s reported inflation.