dorothy sue cobble, still at rutgers i think, was actually promoting something similar. she's looked at unions in the service sector, waitresses, showing how they differed significantly from the the craft union model that influenced labor organizing in the 20th c. she suggests that some of the problems that we see with unions might be better addressed had we looked at the history of waitress unions (at one point 25% of all waitresses were unionized)
The Prospects for Unions in a Service Society http://www.cpn.org/sections/topics/work/civic_perspectives/unionism_service1.html
Midway through teaching one of my first Douglass College undergraduate courses -- a 1990 honors seminar on "The Future of Work" to first-year women -- the question of the relevancy of unions surfaced. "So, how many of you have ever belonged to a union?" I queried, knowing that many of them had extensive work histories and that close to a quarter of the New Jersey work force was still unionized (Johnson 1995). The class giggled at such a far-fetched notion. "What? Unions for babysitters?" someone finally said as I looked at them quizzically, unable to interpret their laughter. The rest of the class was now emboldened. "Yeah, that's ridiculous." "Of course, we haven't belonged to a union. There aren't any unions for waitresses or salesclerks or fileclerks." "Part-timers can't join unions. Can they?" "And what exactly do unions do for people who don't work in factories anyway?" The objections and skeptical questioning continued at a torrential pace for the rest of the session.
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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.
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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.
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This chapter is in part what I would have liked to have said to my students. It is also a continuation of my on-going 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.
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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.