Stewards (Pt. 2)
My article, An old anecdote helps us understand the American war against Iran, is out from behind the Chief’s paywall.
The $200 Billion the Pentagon is reportedly asking for could be better distributed as a $588 check to every American.
More on Stewards
Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel
Martin Glaberman and Staughton Lynd, Punching Out and Other Writings
In Striking Steel, Jack Metzgar writes about his father, who was a shop steward in a steel plant in the 1950s and ‘60s. In Punching Out, Martin Glaberman, a Red, and an activist in the auto industry, also writes about stewards. As you will see, he disagrees with Metzgar about “the workplace rule of law.” This was partially rooted in their different aspirations, but also may have had much to do with the different conditions in the two industries. In auto, the union specifically ceded control of the workplace to management, breaking the power of shop stewards. In steel, a particularly good contract provision forced shop management to bargain with the union – and the steward – on virtually any attempt to speed-up the work.
A steward, Metzgar writes, is
a shop-floor leader responsible for knowing what was going on in the industry, the union, and national and [local] politics. (6) It is rare for members to feel an intense personal loyalty toward a national union leader… the principal relation between member and union, then as now, always involves face-to- face relationships, relationships between people who know each other and make commitments to one another, and who either live up to those commitments or don’t. For most workers, this relationship is with their shop steward. (46) By regularly attending union meetings, reading the national or local union newspaper, and keeping informed about what’s going on, they are the union for most of its members, providing leadership to their immediate workmates on everything from presidential elections to the local union picnic. This requires skills in reasoning and formal argumentation, but it also requires less tangible skills in cajoling or intimidating, soft-soaping or avenging, and in knowing when to “stand up” or “back down” to either a foreman or their fellow workers. (47) Without them, the leadership couldn’t lead and the membership wouldn’t follow. The quality of stewards and grievance systems varies greatly from union to union, place to place, and time to time. But when it works well, a union steward system is a wonder of workplace democracy that blends thousands of face-to-face, grassroots encounters into a powerful national institution for collective action. (49)
The CIO unions focused their educational efforts on steward training in the immediate postwar years, and they defined the steward in broad terms as a shop-floor leader with responsibilities well beyond mere grievance handling. A typical steward’s training then emphasized that grievance handling was only one of four basic functions of the steward. The others were organizing (winning support of members for union programs and recruiting new members if there was no union shop), educating (explaining union goals, encouraging members to read union publications, and providing a steady stream of union information), and being politically active. (52) Organizing then was not simply about signing union cards. It was about breaking through people’s fear and lack of confidence and working out the nuts-and-bolts organizational details to inspire them to collective action. It was about developing local leaders, forming committees, and uniting people for struggle. (56)
Glaberman agrees about these early years of the CIO - the late 1930s.
The workers, organizing in the CIO, wanted to establish their control over production, and to remove from the corporation the right to discipline. Their method was direct action-—the carrying out of their own plans for the organization of production to the extent possible. In the first upsurge in the rubber and auto industries the workers in the shops established their own production standards. They announced what they would do and that was it. Their answer to company discipline was the wildcat strike. It was a common practice in the auto shops for negotiations on the shop level to consist of the steward, surrounded by all the men in a department, arguing with the foreman. No one worked until the grievance was settled—and most of them were settled in the workers’ favor without the red tape of a bargaining procedure, appeals, and umpires… Foremen, for the first time, asked the steward how much production the department would get so he could plan accordingly. The steward consulted with the men—-and then gave his answer to the foreman. (8-9)
What about the “workplace rule of law”?
Ironically, though, stewards in the United Steel Workers came to known as “grievers” or “grievance men,” naming them after the most problematic part of their job – filing written grievances about violations of the contract instead of organizing shop floor production and job actions to enforce those decisions.
Glaberman is almost apoplectic about the result.
Why does a working man or woman, chosen by his or her fellows to represent them, sooner or later turn against them? Why does a worker, when he is elected to union office, turn against his own kind? How does an ordinary rank and file worker become a pork-chopper, a pie-card, a bureaucrat? (2) [Under workplace contractualism] even the well-intentioned union representative becomes an enforcer of the contract, including its no-strike clause. Even the former picket-line leader, chosen by his or her fellow workers to be their steward, becomes a cop for the boss. … a good steward fights for all he can get for the workers he represents [but] is tied to the contract and feels duty-bound to support it. (VI-VII)
The idea that even a good steward can become a contract policeman – especially when the union’s leadership is emphasizing this role and actively discouraging them from being a leader of their crew - is a powerful critique, and in my own experience both often true and invariably demoralizing. Writing about the next level up in the union food change, the Committeeman, who is released from work full-time to do union business, Glaberman is even more scathing.
The committeeman’s job is talk. Many workers refer to them as lawyers. But they don’t win cases very often because the contract is their sacred document, what they live by. An ordinary lawyer will try to do the best for his client under the law. That is not the case with the committeeman. He is more a cop than a lawyer. He enforces the law. (27) The committeeman becomes a social worker. He knows the workers better than they know themselves. He knows what’s best for them. (28)
Metzgar accepts this critique in part.
As contracts grew more complicated, a lot of the discretion that had at first belonged to both the foreman and the workers was removed to higher levels of the company and the union, and even, in crucial instances, to a third-party arbitrator. The complex process of solving disputes came to center on the interpretation of the contract, not on what was fair in itself… It virtually eliminated the possibility of direct workplace action in the form of wildcat strikes and job actions. (49)
In many unions, the steward is nothing but a messenger who carries a worker’s complaint to a union staff representative, who decides whether it is a gripe or a grievance and then does whatever is appropriate. In such situations, stewards will typically not have sufficient understanding of the contract to use it to enhance their own and their workmates’ informal power; the union’s paid staff will have all the power, formal and informal, and only they will have the opportunity, at some distance from the specific work setting, to exercise imagination and creativity. (51)
[The] workplace rule of law… bind[s] workers as well as managers, restricting them from taking things into their own hands with wildcat strikes and other spontaneous job actions that might oppose injustices allowable under the contract; in the long run, this may undermine worker militancy and the very capacity for concerted action. (36)
An Exception?
Still, in steel, two particular provisions of the union’s contract mitigated this danger and gave stewards an unusual power to stop speed-up. Past practices establishing staffing on particular jobs and procedures could not be changed – unless management introduced new technology. But even then, the union could challenge management’s new staffing levels in front of an arbitrator – and often won, at least in part. This was “Section 2-B” of the contract. Thus,
If management wanted efficiency, if it wanted increased productivity and profits, it would have to come to you (or your representatives) and talk about it, negotiate it, bargain over it-and it had better come with some incentives in its pocket; it had better bargain in good faith; it had better be reasonable if it wanted you to be reasonable. The cases that wound up with arbitrators were only the tip of 2-B’s iceberg. In order to avoid that possibility – with its potential for establishing industry-wide precedents – local management often gave in whenever a griever merely waved the flag of 2-B… That threat created widespread demoralization among local plant supervision. As one of Bethlehem’s lawyers complained, “There is so much uncertainty about their rights that the lower echelons of management finally give up on lots of things that should be done.” (106)
[2-B] not only gave workers formal power, but it also allowed them, with a little imagination, to expand their informal power as well. The very rigidity of the formal rules required management, particularly foremen, to negotiate on the shop floor for “flexibility” in specific instances… Grievers and other local leaders convinced foremen and superintendents that 2-B was even more restrictive of their actions than the arbitrators had ruled…. My father delighted in these activities – some of which were simply mano-a-mano contests in his decades-long battle with the evil foreman I knew simply as “Yock,” but others of which required him to organize his fellow workers to maintain or establish informal operating procedures they saw as important to their work lives. (50)
Different aspirations also matter in this assessment of a steward’s role
Glaberman’s critique, though, also sprang from his revolutionary aspirations. Workers try to organize production
to suit themselves within the limits that it is possible under capitalism… to cooperate freely and fully with his fellow workers… In all this the new society appears within the old. A society in which the workers, every one of them, takes his part in planning production, in carrying out the plan, in developing himself by helping his fellow men, in helping society by developing himself. (40-41)
[Workers] look to the union as a source of strength, as a means of keeping the gains they have made over the past years. But they do not look to the union for the next steps to be taken. (20) The union in a capitalist society – even when it’s leaders honorably strive to establish certain minimum workplace conditions – functions in the last analysis to stabilize the status quo. (VI)
Metzgar’s viewpoint is more tied to the reality of the moment in which his father lived and worked. It started from a recognition,
that you could never be in control, that the key decisions were made by others, that the ruling class, whether it had a right to or not, was going to rule. The most you could do was stick together with your own kind and apply your weight with as much shrewdness and cunning as you could muster to affect both the overall outcome and the ways that outcome affected you and yours. (132)
Keeping those gains, then, was a real victory. In this context, those like Glaberman who critique the workplace rule of law have
little sense of its role in liberating workers from arbitrary authority and all the indignities, the humiliation, and the fear that come with being directly subject to the unlimited authority of another human being… What [is] the alternative to living by impersonal rules? (36) In my father’s view of things, the very impersonality of the labor contract as a binding document was the foundation of his freedom and dignity, and a great deal of peace of mind as well. He believed in what was called then “the sanctity of the contract”: “You have to live by the contract. It binds us as well as them [management or the company]. But it’s our contract. We were bound before. They weren’t.” (37)
To him the apparatus was a tool that, if you mastered it, could be used to confuse and intimidate management and, if everybody stuck together around the contract, could slowly but consistently erode management authority, put management on the defensive, and put lots of liberty and control in workers’ hands, even without their filing a grievance. (97)
“With the union,” he would say, “they can’t do just whatever they want. One guy can’t come in and change things to suit himself. We’ve got a say in how things are run.” After a pause, he’d qualify, “Don’t get me wrong. We don’t have much of a say. They’re still the boss. But if we all stick together around the contract, they have to deal with us as men, not just ‘hands.’‘’ This was the most valuable thing about the union, according to him: “Forget the wages, forget the health insurance. If the union hadn’t done anything else, it would have been worth it just for that.” (95)
Is there a way between these perspectives, that gets us back to those early days of the CIO, in which necessary contractual protections were a minimum rather than a cap on workers’ aspirations, and management control of production was routinely upended by the steward and their crew? Next week, I’ll look at Huw Beynon’s classic, Working for Ford, in which militant stewards in a production plant near Liverpool vie with both management and union leadership. We’ll see both the extent and the limitations of a steward’s role.
More on the NYC Nurses Strike
Following up on my earlier substack on the NYC nurses strike, Beth Loudin, the head of the New York-Presbyterian bargaining team explained to In These Times why they urged that the first proposed agreement be rejected. A mediator had proposed a package of wages and benefits, but
there were two things lacking for us. One was staffing… The second part was job security. If you were aware, last year, New York-Presbyterian decided… to do a 2% layoff across the whole enterprise. This affected about 1000 NYSNA represented employees at our site here, and a lot of the targeting was at the nurse practitioner level, our advanced practice nurses…. and then they came for our beloved midwives, and said, oh, we don’t need that service anymore. But then a week later, opened up the service under Columbia University, so that New York-Presbyterian was not paying for it, but Columbia was. This was clear union busting from the past three years… When we brought it to our membership on Sunday, we were very clear. These are the gaps. We’re going to push back on the mediator and say these are the gaps they need to fix. If they fix it, then we will recommend this proposal. They came back around midnight and said, no, that was not possible, so therefore our committee was not going to move forward with this proposal.
Two Unions on May Day
The House of Delegates of the Chicago Teachers Union has passed a resolution
joining the call for a National Day of “No Work, No School, and No Shopping” to defend our Democracy, demand ICE out of our cities, and tax the rich to support our schools and vital services; and… in the lead up to May 1 encouraging schools to engage in age-appropriate civic learning, marches and rallies, political education, Peace Concerts, labor history programming, and community safety trainings that equip students, educators, and families to protect themselves and each other.
In an email to all its members, the Professional Staff Congress – CUNY, while noting that it
cannot lawfully call for CUNY employees to strike… [is] calling on all of its members to take part, in some way, in May Day actions. Don’t shop. Participate in a May Day rally in Manhattan or on your campus. Help organize teach-ins and solidarity pickets on your campus… or [join] disruptive actions throughout the city… We recognize that it may take a strike of workers across multiple sectors to stop authoritarianism and protect free and fair elections. We recognize that No Kings and May Day alone won’t stop Trump, and that it will likely take even more action by many more people to stop the slide into authoritarianism… Non-violent methods of non-cooperation with this administration must be practiced and systematically developed by the labor movement, and PSC member participation in May Day 2026 is critical.
US War on Iran as a “a Case Study of Autocratic Governance”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a renowned historian of 20th century fascism and totalitarianism. Here, she examines, “the entry into war as a developing case study of the flawed decision-making typical of autocratic governance,” where “others’ opinions are no match for your own, you live in a bubble of delusions and believe you are omnipotent and ‘always right’.”