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The Abstract, The Concrete, The Political and the Academic:
Anthropology And a Labor Union in the U.S.
E. Paul Durrenberger
Suzan Erem
Penn State University
SEIU Local 73
University Park, PA 16082
Chicago, IL 60610
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The Abstract, The Concrete, The Political and the Academic:
Anthropology And a Labor Union in the U.S.
Abstract
We describe the political structure and dynamics of a labor union local in Chicago
and how both interact with the goals and objectives of the members, stewards, union
representatives, officers of the union local, and the international. We discuss how the
political structure and process was revealed not because we focused on it but in the
process of sabotage that occurred when we attempted a different kind of study.
Key words: unions, organized labor, political anthropology, politics, structure, dynamics
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The Abstract, The Concrete, The Political and the Academic:
Anthropology And a Labor Union in the U.S.
Introduction
We show how events uncover important structural relationships that may not be
otherwise apparent. Fantasia points out the distance between peoples’ answers to
questions on surveys and in interviews and their actions and suggests that we should base
our analyses on their “actions, organizational capabilities, institutional arrangements,”
(1988:11) rather than representations of attitudes abstracted from the contexts of daily life
and action. Though he is a sociologist, he makes a case for ethnography.
Bronfenbrenner, Friedman, Hurd, Oswald, and Seeber (1998) provide an
accessible summary of the state of the American labor movement. The labor movement
is not strong in the United States not because of worker disinterest, individualism, or
some inscrutable difference between the U.S. and European countries that makes it an
exception to the rule, but because of well organized, massive, and often violent
opposition (Vanneman and Weber1987; Durrenberger 1992a, 1994, 1995a ). The
organized share of the workforce peaked in 1946, the year before the Taft-Harltey
amendments to the Wagner act limited union organizing and mutual aid tactics and
empowered employers with new means of opposing unions. The chief factors in labor’s
decline are structural such as the flight of capital to low-wage countries and unorganized
areas, the shift to a service economy, and the changes of law and administration that have
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moved unions toward being bureaucracies for handling quasi-legal cases (Durrenberger
and Erem 1997a, 1997b).
Bronfenbrener et al. (1998:3) cite the evidence that economic factors account for
only a third of the decline. Much of the rest is due to the anti-union offensive of the
1970s and 80s and the allied industry of consultants to keep enterprises union-free.
Cohen and Hurd (1998) outline a general pattern of worker intimidation that Fantasia
(1988) shows ethnographically. Fantasia argues that the bureaucratic routines imposed
by Taft-Hartley channel conflict so that solidarity only emerges when workers have to
rely on it as a means to oppose employers outside these bureaucratic channels. He argues
that in these extra-processual events, to use Bohannan’s (1958) term, solidarity emerges,
but under normal working conditions there is no space for it. Thus everyday routine
action reflects less interest in unions and organizing than polls indicate (Bronfenbrenner
et al. 1998).
Economic and policy changes may set the framework for the decline of
American unions, but the unions failed to respond even when they had the resources to do
so. Some understood that they could not afford to wait until the climate was less hostile.
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the United Automobile Workers
(UAW) bought many service workers and public sector workers into the labor movement.
In 1995 John Sweeney of SEIU and his slate were elected to lead the AFL-CIO on their
promise to organize "at an unprecedented pace and scale." Since taking office they have
committed significant resources to this effort (Bonfenbrener et al 1998).
Bonfenbrener et al (1998) review the research on organizing and the reasons that
much such research is focused on macro-processes accessible through publicly available
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statistical material. Most such studies do not include union organizing strategies as
variables because these are not included in the available data. Some even theorize that
strategy is not significant to outcomes (Bronfenbrenner and Juravich 1998). There are
some qualitative case studies, but these rarely include quantitative material or statistical
analysis (Sacks 1988; Newman 1988, Fantasia 1988). The strength of these studies is
that they can capture the realities of the organizing process by the inside perspectives of
people familiar with organizing campaigns. Sometimes we see unions in the background
when ethnographers focus on work situations (Durrenberger 1996a; Foner 1994; Fink
1998; Wells 1996; Griffith 1995, Stull et al. 1993) or an area (Zlolniski 1994, 1998;
Krissman 1995, 1995-6, 1996; Wood 1986).
Like the rest of the labor movement, Service Employees International Union
(SEIU) is aware of the declining influence of organized labor in the U.S. To provide the
basis for new initiatives it commissioned a 4 year study of its members and leaders which
concluded in 1995 that leaders believe the way to be more effective is to organize
unorganized workers and to elect labor-friendly politicians. Members prefer to see their
dues money go to getting them better contracts, significant wage increases, better
benefits, and better job protection rather than organizing or politics. They want the
service they pay for.
As Suzan Erem, Director of Communications and rep at a Chicago local read the
results of the study, she concluded that while the committee had amassed a large amount
of data but not made it relevant to the daily activities of people working in the locals.
Why would local union leadership care about this gap? Because a plan came out of this
study to shift millions of dollars into organizing. When a rep servicing current members
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quits or gets fired, that slot is filled with an organizer who talks only to potential
members, trying to get them to organize as a unit of the union, not servicing paying
members already in the union. With fewer staff to enforce and negotiate contracts, local
union leaders have to shift more work onto volunteer worksite leaders, core activists in
the membership who are not prepared for that level of responsibility. Union presidents sit
in political positions, and irritating the activists who are trained to resist when they see an
injustice is not in any officer’s interest. Nor is a staff that feels alienated by increasing
workloads of more units to represent, more contracts to bargain, and more stewards to
train. No matter how good it looks from the national level, the plan has lots of room for
disaster at the local level (Fletcher and Hurd 1998).
Suzan thought the union’s leaders would set out on a course of convincing the
membership that to get more money and better contracts for them what they really need is
political power and more members. Suzan was cynical about the approach, but she knew
it was the only one the union had available. If someone doesn’t believe what you’re
saying, just say it louder, more convincingly and in more attractive ways. That’s how
they had bargained contracts for decades.
The union had built an analysis on abstracted opinions with no context of action
or structure. In appropriating the means of states and corporations (Piore 1994)—in
“seeing like a state” in Scott’s (1998) phrase, their analysis had missed the complexities
of the local of which they were all aware from experience. That was the gap that worried
Suzan. This was familiar to me from similar relations between the abstract “state” view
of economists and the local ethnography of fisheries (McCay and Acheson 1987).
When Suzan told me about the International's study and the issues at the local
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level, I said, "this sounds like a job for an anthropologist." "Where do I find one?" Suzan
asked without hesitation. I got on the phone and the e-mail to my colleagues in the
applied community and asked who had worked with unions. I drew blanks for weeks.
The president of Suzan's local supported the idea of a locally based study--if it didn’t cost
too much. I advised Suzan to prepare a request for proposal and with it, she convinced 4
anthropologists from around the country to submit proposals.
The proposals did not make sense to people in the local and the president balked
at the cost. I was as frustrated as Suzan with the proposals. Presented with this unique
opportunity to experiment with new ways of doing anthropology to approach questions of
inequality and power, inside and outside voices, and academic and practical
anthropology, as well as the possibility of doing something useful for the local, Suzan
and I resolved to embark on a joint study. It was collaborative from the beginning.
Suzan responded to my first proposal with question marks. We then put our
heads together to put the proposal into language that janitors and hospital workers, the
members of the local's executive board could understand. This was congenial to my
conviction that if you can't explain something to a freshman, a farmer, or a fisherman,
you don't understand it yourself. The rest is learned foldorol to set academics apart from
the people we are supposed to serve and to make us special. Sometimes it doesn’t even
make sense to academics because there is no sense in it (Alland 1998). The bare bones
proposal got past the president. My academic salary, travel for other purposes and
friends who put me up in Chicago and drove me around subsidized the study
economically.
Throughout, Suzan provided the day to day insider view and I provided the
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outsider view. Suzan moved among the roles of informant, participant, and co-worker for
writing and analysis. I observed, questioned, interviewed, and worked with Suzan on
writing, analysis, and organizing the study (Durrenberger and Erem 1997 a,b; Erem and
Durrenberger 1997; Durrenberger 1997).
Suzan was in the middle, interpreting me and the purposes of the study to her
union co-workers and the culture and structure of the local to me. There was the prospect
of some know-it-all professor from a university unfamiliar with the daily grind of work in
a union telling the local what it was doing wrong, how to do it right, how some theory
from the ivory tower could make it all better and how they were implicitly idiots for not
seeing that in the first place. The staff would have to sit through another seminar before
returning to the things they knew would work.
I struggled with this one too. What could I contribute? In my professional
journals and meetings I read and heard about constructing personal identity, reflexivity,
subjectivities, discourse, the crisis of authority, genre, epistemological relativity, text, and
hermeneutical interpretation--stuff that may be fun around the seminar table, but has no
relationship to the bare-knuckle politics of union life, or for that matter, to peasant or
fisherman or farmer life as I knew it from my work in other areas of the world. The
theoretical work I had found useful was about household economies, peasants, farmers,
fishermen (see e.g. Durrenberger 1984, 1992b, 1992c, 1995b, 1996a, 1996b,
Durrenberger and Pálsson 1989, Durrenberger and Tannenbaum 1990, Pálsson and
Durrenberger 1996, Thu and Durrenberger 1998) --not industrial workers and their
organizations. Some less fashionable work seemed promising--work on practice theory
and social movements from historians and sociologists (Durrenberger and Erem 1997a,
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1997b). But the center stage of anthropology seemed to me to be full of academic fluff.
The Anthropological journals, books, and meetings were all aflutter with the discovery
that ethnography is text that people write, that description is interpretive, that inside
views are different from outside ones, that power relations matter, that not every inside
view agrees with every other one, and that nothing is certain—wisdom that anyone who
cared to read could find with a good deal less hand wringing and self-flagellation in many
works of classical anthropology (Spiro 1992, 1996; Kuznar 1997).
The Proposal—research design
Suzan and I designed a project to bring the strengths of anthropology’s
ethnographic methods to bear on the topic by means of a 6-step program for me to:
1. Observe events as they happen
2. Spend time with members to understand their situations
3. Interview a random sample of members in depth
4. Spend time with staff to understand their situations
5. Interview staff in depth
6. Take time to analyze the material and write a report
As the study progressed, I learned of the annual steward’s meeting and was given
permission to conduct a paper and pencil survey with the attending stewards. I also
developed a questionnaire for members and administered it one-on-one with a number of
members. Thus, the study centered on ethnography--participant-observation,
interviewing, and surveys. I developed the surveys from what I learned in interviews and
by observation, tried them in various contexts such as membership meetings, and
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modified them in light of that experience.
I found, for instance, that people were unable to rank a list of five or six items
from most to least along any criterion. The question depends on the assumption that the
elements of the lists rank according to some scale. Sometimes the assumption is wrong.
I used paired comparisons instead of ranking exercises because paired comparisons do
not assume ranking but reveal whether or not people do rank the items. After several trial
instruments, I developed one that I used for the balance of the study. The steward’s
survey and the membership questionnaire yielded quantitative data, some of which we
have reported on in anthropological meetings and elsewhere (Durrenberger, 1997;
Durrenberger and Erem in press).
The study—research practice
Fletcher and Hurd (1998) interviewed officers and staff of 12 SEIU locals about
"best practices" to find out how locals handle the contradictory demands to both represent
members and organize. The organizational features they describe for one of these
resemble those of the local Suzan works for.. One dimension that does not arise in their
study is the internal politics of locals. This is no doubt an artifact of the method—
interviewing officers and staff rather than any degree of participant-observation that
might reveal differences between interview answers and practices—the distance about
which Fantasia (1988) cautioned. In interviews, people may articulate the main points of
a program, profess adherence to it, and anticipate its success but resist or sabotage it in
action. Interviews cannot reveal this deviation.
The central part of our study was the healthcare division where Suzan was
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located. I had work through the director of the division, also vice president of the local,
to schedule many of the site visits. Anthropologists, no matter what their intentions, can't
just waltz into hospitals and interview workers. The management has to approve; the
local has to mobilize it's work-site structure to find members and stewards, especially if a
randomly selected list dictates speaking with specific individuals. The VP-director would
say she forgot, or didn’t have time that month, or didn’t receive the memo with the list of
random members on it. When I did get into a site of hers, nothing had been set up-- the
steward never told I needed to meet with any members from any list. We met with
resistance from the chief steward and one of the public hospitals, an executive board
member. We met with disinterest from members. Suzan scheduled entire days at a time to
drive me around, only to have members not show up, or stewards forget. Some people
enjoyed telling their stories, being taken seriously, and at least one of the newer reps was
excited about the local looking for different ways to do things. Some of the most
frustrated stewards and members got a chance to vent.
I had waited to go to one county hospital until the last because I had heard of
political problems. That and because the rep--the VP and division director, Suzan's boss,
hadn’t provided access. I left it to the president to decide whether to press it or not, and
the president decided to--over the objections of the VP. I got in to do my interviews, but
the whole site, not to mention the VP, blew up. She and the president blamed me. Like
me, the President was trying to piece together a complex puzzle, but it wasn't just a
puzzle to him, it was his local and his position, an intensely political matter that had been
simmering. He had an election to face within months. Not that it was hotly contested,
but he wanted a broad base of support because he had plans for the local, plans that
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echoed those of the international.
It was Suzan's involvement with the everyday events and politics of the local that
created the space for our study; it was my involvement with the academy and disengagement from the politics of the local that gave me the means and the external
viewpoints. Unfortunately, that put Suzan in the very uncomfortable place of being in the
middle. Doing the study brought into sharp focus the politics of the local as well as the
vapidness of the fashionable “cutting-edge” anthropological rhetoric. The study did
reaffirm anthropology’s classical findings and approaches as we struggled to utilize
anthropological knowledge to understand practical matters.
Locals--the concrete; the micro
I want to sketch what a union local looks like from the point of view of its
representatives like Suzan, the people who work with union members to translate the
ideals and policies of their unions into concrete action at worksites.
A union local is a territorial branch of a larger national or international organization
chartered to negotiate, enforce, and service contracts on behalf of the members of an area.
Until recently, these have been the chief tasks of representatives of the local, called reps
or business agents. Locals have presidents and officers who are elected by the members
according to rules laid down in bylaws. The International demands adherence to bylaws,
and if a local violates its procedures, the International's policies, or the law, the
International may seize the local and appoint interim officers in a process called
trusteeship (Waldinger et al. 1998). Trusteeship ends when there are new elections.
Member votes are valuable in elections, so control of blocks of votes guarantees
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access to and influence on any person who needs the votes such as a president or aspiring
president. Suzan's local had been trusteed a few years before the study and the appointed
trustee had subsequently been elected president. He and his officers were now facing reelection. A unit is a group of organized workers at a worksite. The members of each unit
elect stewards to deal with immediate problems such as minor disputes with
management. If the unit is large enough to have several stewards, one of them may be
designated as the chief steward.
Reps and stewards are required to represent their members because members of a
union can sue their union if they feel they have received inadequate representation. This
usually means enforcing contracts with management. Contracts specify job descriptions,
grades of pay, seniority, and procedures for requesting job assignments. The stewards
and reps have to enforce these terms. It is largely true that if the union doesn't force
compliance with the contract, management will not automatically comply. This service
dimension is a large portion of a rep's day to day work of answering calls from stewards
and members, and dealing with higher levels of management if stewards and members
cannot resolve grievances at lower levels. The rep is also responsible for negotiating
contracts for the unit in conjunction with a bargaining team, usually composed of
stewards and activists from the unit.
To maintain relations with stewards and members that can be converted into
negotiating strength and to service the unit between contracts requires a personal long
term relationship with the rep to lay a foundation of trust and credibility with members
and stewards. If stewards and reps work well together on behalf of members, they
cultivate feelings of mutual respect and loyalty. Especially through grievance handling,
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reps can foster the idea that they are personally responsible for the job security and
wellbeing of members at their sites and that the members are obliged to the rep,
obligations the rep can call on for votes or other support. Though it takes time and effort,
grievance handling is important to the cultivation of loyalty. The more loyal units a rep
has, the greater the number of votes she can control, and the larger her "base." The larger
a rep's base, the more power she has, and the more likely she is to achieve a position as
an officer. Paradoxically, becoming an officer detracts time and attention from the units
that make up the base. If the officer has to assign those units to another rep, she has to
take some other measures to insure the continuing loyalty of stewards, chief stewards,
and members to herself as well as to insure the loyalty of the rep who takes over her
responsibilities with the units of the base.
The president can manipulate reps is via the internal politics of promotions,
priorities, assignments to units, and differential budgeting which can threaten to shrink or
promise to expand a rep's base. The rep's control of the base contributes to personalism
in the politics of the local--reps have obligations to the president that he can call on. This
personalism interferes with strategic planning and action, for instance with budgeting and
results in rep rather than shop or industry focused strategies which fosters personalistic
relationships within the local and diminishes the ability for strategic planning, budgeting,
and action. Without strategic planning, there can be no political strategy and the local
can only focus on episodic events as they arise.
The source of power for reps is their base, which has to be cultivated with
continual personal relationships; this erodes when the rep becomes an officer in the local
and has to operate at one remove from the source of her power. At that point, the inter-
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office politics of personalism become more salient than they may be to reps who are not
officers. Thus officers, most of whom continue to act as reps for major units of the local,
if for no other reason than to continue their cultivation of a strong base, are jealous of
anything that might affect their relations with "their" stewards and members or the
president.
The International--the abstract; the macro
If we look at the labor movement from another perspective we see that the two
basic problems facing it are:
1. policy formulated against its interests
2. inability to control a sufficient portion of the market to dictate terms
The most egregious example of the first is the Reagan administration’s legacy of
breaking the air traffic controller's strike with replacement workers (Newman 1988).
Now it is fair to say that while workers can strike, they can also be immediately replaced
so that the strike is no longer generally available as a bargaining tool. Whether
replacement workers may be hired is a question of national policy and national policy is
set by politicians who are elected to office. Another example: ride around any major
urban area with someone from the United Electrical Workers or International
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and they'll show you abandoned factories where their
members used to work before NAFTA gave their owners the license to move to the cheap
and unorganized labor markets of the third world.
A less visible example is the composition of the national and state labor boards
that decide issues of interpretation such as unfair labor practices. The inclinations of
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these boards vary with their make up, and since they are appointed, their makeup and
inclination varies with the administration in office. In California Jerry Brown's board
was very different from Ronald Reagan's (Wells, 1996). Thus, the conditions for labor
unions are set by policy and politicians and unions have a strong interest in who is
elected.
Controlling the market for labor in a certain sector is economic rather than
political, or the attempt to translate an economic fact into political power at the
bargaining table. If a minority of workers in an industry are organized, management can
show that the salaries and working conditions they offer their workers are the norm for
the industry and that to offer more might put them at a competitive disadvantage relative
to other firms in the same business. For instance, if a school system contracts out its bus
routes to various companies and only a few bus drivers are organized, a company can
argue that to give them health insurance or other benefits would be detrimental to their
business, perhaps to the point of forcing them out of business and losing the jobs of the
workers. They may be right that generous benefits would put them out of business. On
the other hand, if all bus drivers were organized, all companies would be facing similar
demands from their drivers, and it would not be a disadvantage to offer more generous
benefits in line with those of the whole industry. Of course, the national government,
state, municipality, or school board could adopt a policy that all of their workers must
have generous benefits and achieve the same goal politically. But the alternative is to
organize more worksites in the industries where the local is strong to try to control the
market.
These two imperatives from a greater distance translate into two critical and
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immediate necessities from the point of view of the international: organize more workers
and gain political influence. One way to gain political influence is to organize more
workers. Thus organizing becomes a principal objective along with political activation of
the membership.
Collision course
1996, there was a battle between the traditional labor bosses of the east coast and
the more forward-looking labor leaders of the west-coast and middle-west for the
presidency of SEIU that John Sweeney left when he moved from heading SEIU to the
preside over the AFL-CIO. The like-minded Andy Stern who replaced him committed
SEIU to a program of aggressive organizing and political activism and began to promote
new models for SEIU locals. At the same time, the International released a number of
their service-oriented staff and hired a new corps of organizers to support locals in their
efforts to organize around the country (Waldinger et al. 1998).
Reps in the locals were to train their stewards to take over most service functions
and dedicate more of their effort to internal organizing and supporting organizing new
units and political action (Fletcher and Hurd 1998). Instead of hiring new reps to service
new membership, reps were to stretch their efforts further with the assistance of stewards.
Instead of the reps being on call of each of their members, stewards were to resolve
worksite matters. Reps would spend their efforts with stewards. This would create a
greater distance between the rep and the members and insert a structure of stewards
between the members and reps. Those reps who were also officers or became division
heads saw the distance increase even further with the appointment of reps between
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themselves and the members. Now there was a level of reps and a level of stewards
between them and the members. The personal links would be broken, and with them, the
base and the power of those reps. Reps would no longer be able to cultivate personalistic
relationships with their base and saw the new moves as threats to their power.
One proven organizing tactic is to allow workers who have been in a union shop
to talk to those who aren't in a union. This does two things: It reminds union workers of
the benefits of their union when they learn about the conditions of their un-organized coworkers in other sites and it allows the un-organized workers to learn directly from
working people like themselves, not outsiders or paid agitators, what the union will do for
them. To accomplish this, locals pay their members their usual wages to work with the
organizers. This is analogous to the academic practice of a leave without pay when
someone else pays a university professor's salary to do research and the university
replaces the professorial functions in the meantime. Unions call it "lost time." Reps
know the most vocal and persuasive members of their units--they are the stewards. These
make the best member-organizers because they know the ins and outs of the local as well
as anyone and better than most. But the steward is also the pivot point between the rep
and the members of the unit, the rep's base. If that connection has already been eroded by
the increasing distance from the rep, or even worse, division director or officer, then the
removal of the stewards from the jobsite is a direct threat to the rep. The longer the
organizing campaign, the longer the steward is out on lost time and the greater the
possibilities that the steward will develop alternative networks, alternative avenues into
the local, means of access to information and resources that do not involve the rep. The
longer the steward is out, the greater the threat to the rep.
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Thus, one of the consequences of the new strategy of the International has been
dissension in the local. Of course, a president of a local could sabotage the international's
objectives by ignoring them, by saying that members elected him and they pay the dues
and they should decide how to use the local's resources. But the president of Suzan's
local is also on the Executive Board of the International, and as a member of the
committee that sponsored the initial study, one of the architects of it's long range plans.
He was not about to resist it at the local level.
This president created a new organizing department with its own director, budget
and staff. The director of organizing could use some of the budget to pay "lost time"
wages to stewards, and that put the organizing director on a collision course with the reps
and director of the division from which the stewards came. The director of that division
then had a direct interest in seeing the organizing director fail, in short, the scene was set
for sabotage within the local itself.
In my interviews with officers, reps, stewards, and members one of the questions I
asked was about the chief obstacles to the labor movement achieving its goals. One
poignant answer from staff people is that the labor movement gets in its own way, or that
the internal fighting gets in the way of a united front.
Politics in action
Anthropologists learn by participant observation. I learned about the local's
politics by trying to understand my own experience with the study.
Two of the public hospitals were the last worksites on my list. The chief steward who
had voted against the study in the first place was from one. The resistance in the
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executive board was from the VP and "her" stewards. The VP let the president know that
she didn't want any anthropologist poking around any of her shops. The president knew
she had her reasons, but he had asked for the study, which put him on a collision course
with his VP. He decided the study was sufficiently important for him to call in some
obligations and request her compliance. Nothing happened. More no-shows and refusals
to schedule.
I first interviewed the VP early in the study while she was in the process of
negotiating a new contract for the public hospital where everything later came to a head.
She told me how some of the negotiating team would only think in terms of short term
goals of wages and benefits. They did not think to the future, to the restructuring of
health care, to the creation of new job classifications and elimination of familiar ones, to
the necessity for training, and how to build these contingencies into the new contract, if
need be, at the expense of short term goals so that the jobs and the union would still be
there twenty years down the road. This frustrated her.
The VP negotiated the contract her way, but the chief steward and some of the
rest of the negotiation team were not convinced. They even committed an unthinkable
breach of solidarity in urging members not to ratify the contract when it came to them for
a vote. The chief steward was very popular and had been in her office for years; the
members could not imagine the union without her. The president told the VP that she
could not tolerate this kind of disloyalty, that she must replace the chief steward and her
followers. That the VP did, but at a cost I would learn more about later.
The more the resistance, the greater the obligation incurred. The President used
more of his political capital with the VP to get me an interview with the chief steward at
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one county hospital. To the surprise of the VP, I managed to enlist the aid of the chief
steward. But I met the same familiar resistance from the VP with the second public
hospital. I met again with the president and explained that this was my last trip to
Chicago for this study, that if he wanted to include the hospital, he would need to get me
into it.
I finally got the message to be at the hospital one morning to meet with the new
chief steward who took me to an office where I began to interview the three stewards
who came. For the rest of the morning, I was in that small room with no less than three
stewards as new ones came in and others left in a continuous chain. I was hearing about
the repercussions of the actions the VP described to me in her interview months earlier.
People were not content to merely answer my questions. They elaborated their answers,
elaborated each other's answers, moved the discussion in other directions. Any
anthropologist knows that you learn more from what people tell you than from what you
initially think to ask. I followed that wisdom of our craft that morning and heard stories
of factionalism, fractiousness, and divisiveness. I didn't need to do any fancy statistics to
learn that there was a consensus. Everyone nodded, elaborated, or chimed in with "that's
right."
News of those interviews reached the downtown office with the speed of light and
all the distortions of the grapevine--news that I had been stirring up one faction of
stewards, saying the president had sent me to investigate the recently ousted chiefsteward and the VP. The VP was nervous about strife at the hospital and aware that the
unpopular contract was undermined by loose ends and ambiguities. Because this unit
was important to her political position in the local, to her base, and to her relationship
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with the president, the last thing she needed was some anthropologist confirming her
worst fears or writing or talking about them to her boss or doing anything that would
further alienate the members. With an election was coming up, the president would be
calling on her for those votes in a solid block. She had already suffered the humiliation
of a rebellion.
The VP’s angry and dramatic response persuaded the president that his political
calculus had been wrong--this study wasn't worth threatening the VP's base or putting her
on the spot. He needed her support to translate the ambitious program of organizing and
political action from the international into action at the local, as he did within months
with a new organizing department and organizing campaigns, authorizing lost time for
the VP's chief stewards. It was worth more than any study could tell him to have his VP
loyal rather than risk the kind of active or passive sabotage our study experienced. The
president even staged his own office drama to repudiate the study and make public to all
the staff his continuing support of the VP. From that point on he cultivated his VP at the
cost of the study and its credibility at the local.
By doing the study, I learned about the internal politics of the local, something I
could never have hoped to do had the politics been a focal point—something that could
not have been so clear if I had simply relied on my interviews with staff for data about
internal politics. And that illustrated, perhaps more than the gap between the outlooks
between members and leaders, the on the ground problems with the International's new
program even when the president of the local supports it.
Some months later, with the election won, and the rousing speeches about
organizing and political action from the local and international officers heard by the
23
activist members and stewards at a banquet in Teamster Hall, the president hired a new
organizing director. The job had suffered from high turnover. Resistance to letting
organizers work with healthcare stewards had been a theme among departing organizing
directors. It wasn’t just me, or Suzan, anthropology, or the study. A year after the study,
the local had a staff retreat where most of the recommendations from our study ended up
in the planning process. Our study had been on the mark.
But there's a difference between planning in retreats and everyday practice. That's
the distance the International is worried about. That's the distance marked by sabotage
and pseudo-compliance--listening, agreeing, and then doing what you know works
because it has always worked. That's the distance between focusing on the microlevel
personalistic organization and one that looks to the future with more ambitious goals of
returning a measure of economic and political power to working people. That's the
distance this work documents.
24
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