First Sparks

The very first union business agent I ever knew was my father, but I never saw him handle a union grievance. On the other hand, in his capacity as manager of our household enterprise he handled my grievances with great dispatch, turning them all down at the first stage of the process. Once I asked for an increase in allowance from a dime per week to a quarter; his response was to snort and turn back to the sports page. I took the matter to the second stage of our process, an appeal to my mother. She promised to give me some change when she could but would sign nothing. Finally I brought the issue to arbitration: my grandmother agreed that I was being treated badly indeed, awarded me a cup of tea and half a dollar in liquidated damages. It goes without saying that the settlement was not binding on the parties.

The second business agent I encountered was a fellow I’ll call Pete, whom I met while working as an expediter in a factory. Pete was my co-worker, and also the steward over a few hundred workers of various classifications. I have always been grateful for his example and guidance. Pete was the very worst union representative I have ever seen or heard of in all my years of contact with trade unions. He was a living catalog of what to avoid, and his story is worth knowing for that reason.

One of the products that every factory generates is paperwork. Somebody has to manage all that paper, which consists of orders, reports, analyses and various forms of correspondence. That’s what I did at this particular factory, which was in the business of producing electronic devices. It was a big plant, with a couple thousand workers. It was a union plant and so it had the usual union structures within. Pete was the steward for my area. I knew this right from the start because he wore a badge that told the world his position.

As I wrote in the Introduction, one day a man came into our office looking for Pete, who had been dealing with this fellow’s grievance. Pete was out sick, and the guy wanted to know when his hearing would be scheduled. I looked into Pete’s file drawer but the contents were a mess of scattered papers in no particular order. The guy asked me what he should do. I said, “Let’s find the form,” and we both had a look. It turned out that the poor fellow had failed to file his grievance within the time limit prescribed in the contract. Pete had simply let the matter slip, and it was too late to do anything.

At lunch that day I fished around in the file drawer and found a lot of grievance forms old and new. I arranged them by date and studied them. Here’s what I found:

1. Quite a few of the grievances had been neglected until they were past the deadline for
submission or some particular response.

2. Pete wasn’t in the habit of making reference to contract provisions.

3. Most of the writing on the forms was illegible; spelling was atrocious and grammar worse. In fact, Pete used three different spellings for the same term: ‘grievance’ was spelled ‘grivance,’ ‘grievants’ and ‘grievanse’ interchangeably, as though the writer hoped to at least get one out of the three correct.

4. There was no description of the events or the claimed violation of the agreement, except in a very general way: “Overtime no seniority” was about all you could gather about a particular violation.

5. There was nothing written about any particular plan of action and no records were kept of outcomes.

Overall it looked more like a third-grader’s homework rather than the records of a union steward. When Pete came back I asked him about the grievance of the guy who had come into the office. He got a hard look on his face and told me to mind my own business. I was young and green and didn’t know enough to mind my own business, so I proceeded to contact the people whose names had appeared on the grievance forms to find out what had gone on. Thus began my first real lesson in union business.

I talked to half a dozen people around the plant who’d filed grievances through Pete. They all told similar stories. If a worker came to Pete with a grievance, he would schedule them for a conference during which he would listen to their complaint, scribble a few notes and then tell the grievant that he’d see about the matter. After which time very little or nothing would be done. Anybody who had been disciplined and appealed through Pete would find that the discipline would rarely be challenged. Pete never explained anything. He never included the grievant in any discussions.

Finding this out distressed me greatly. I mentioned the matter to a friend who had worked in the plant many years and he told me this story:

Pete glad-handed enough so that he was elected steward when the previous steward retired. He gained a reputation as somebody who would give management a hard time, mainly because he complained about his own job constantly. Because of this reputation and the fact that nobody else wanted to do the work, he kept being re-elected steward. Nobody liked his work, but nobody would run against him. Anybody who wanted their grievance done better would do it himself or hand it up the line to the senior steward.

As if that didn’t leave a bad enough taste, I happened to be sitting next to a secretary from Human Resources one day in the cafeteria. We got to talking and she told me worse news. The company was very pleased to have Pete as steward. He lost about 85% of the grievances he bothered to take up, mostly because he didn’t know what he was doing. She added, “It doesn’t help that he can barely read and write.”

I hadn’t come to that conclusion before, but the evidence was inescapable: Pete was practically illiterate. One of his boasts was that he would never work on the computer station; that was how he avoided admitting that he couldn’t type, spell, write or even find letters on the keyboard. In short, we had a steward whom you couldn’t expect to research the contract because he couldn’t find the right section, much less explain it to anyone. And the company thought this was just great—why wouldn’t they? They were fighting a one-armed man. All that Pete had was swagger. He spent about a quarter of his day just chewing the fat, another quarter going to and fro, and the rest of the time smoking in the corridors.

At the same time as I discovered Pete’s methodology I enrolled in my first labor studies courses. If you have any familiarity with that subject, you know these deal with union basics such as contracts and grievances. I learned what I didn’t know and moreover, what ought to have been done in our plant. Back at the shop I began to assist fellow workers in understanding their rights and in processing complaints and official grievances—but that’s another matter. What matters now are the lessons I learned from working around Pete. Let’s have a look at these in detail.

The first mistake Pete made was in deciding to run for steward, or perhaps in accepting a nomination. His lack of reading and writing skill alone should have convinced him that he had no place in a job where writing reports and taking down testimony would be common tasks. Pete had been able to fake his way through the paperwork for the job itself, so he thought nothing of faking another role too.

Next, Pete was completely unorganized and he couldn’t keep a schedule. Union business runs on schedules and deadlines.

Finally, Pete was not the sort of a person who should work as a steward, and probably not in any other union position either. He had a poor attitude toward work and a grudge toward the company that employed him. He really didn’t like helping people, particularly people who had problems. He just liked cruising around the plant wearing a steward’s badge, avoiding work.
Finally, about that grudge. There are plenty of unionists out in the world who think that the workplace is an extension of hell run by Satan and his minions. Pete certainly thought that. Let me give you an idea of Pete’s hell.

It was a very large firm with numerous locations, employing over ten thousand union members in many different sites around the country. The firm paid quite well, had very frequent raises, advanced current employees whenever possible, encouraged further training and paid for just about any sort of outside education you could imagine. It was a clean shop and nearly everybody was pretty pleasant. The grievances that came up usually arose from personal disputes or errors; management didn’t have any war against the union, though they bargained hard in negotiations. Comparable nonunion shops were paid substantially less that we were. It was a good place to work.

Take a look at the first sentence of the last paragraph. Over ten thousand union jobs. And a company who never, not once, put out any article, broadcast or other public indication that they were against collective bargaining. And then, when you’ve digested that, think of old Pete, swaggering about, talking trash about the company while unable to process a grievance correctly.

Which brings us to an important point: What is the real role of a union business agent? Is it war against the company?

M. M.