> Who was recently quoted as stating: "When you're involved with
> customers, you can't have a class struggle"? :)
> <<<<<>>>>>
>
> andy stern, i saw it in george will column that was fairly
> positive, will's 'approval' is probably reason enough to be
> cautious re. stern...
"Bitch | Lab info at pulpculture.org" wrote of service work:
> Smith's works suggest that, because some service work tends to
> bring workers in contact with middle- and upper-middle class white
> collar workers and professionals, service workers often see their
> customers as the enemy and their employer/managers as 'on their side'
<snip>
> A few years ago, I looked at this w/ regard to cafeteria workers in
> a well unioned factory There, cafeteria workers sided with mgmt
> policies whenever these policies enabled them to make their
> customer's lives a bit more difficult and perhaps their work
> easier. All of this was exacerbated by anti-unionist sentiments in
> general, and a kind of resentment among cafeteria workers that the
> unionized factory workers were relatively well-paid and had the all
> important bennies, as well as the protections against managment
> abuse of overtime, blatant disregard for labor laws and the like.
> Then, of course, there is the gender issue: factory workers were
> mostly men who saw themselves as a notch above in the social
> order;cafeteria workers, were largely women and resented that fact.
Statistics doesn't bear out the sort of distinction between service and production workers implied by Andy Stern's quip and research cited above, as far as unionization is concerned. The remaining strongholds of US organized labor in terms of union density are service workers in the public sector: police officers, teachers, librarians, etc.: "Two occupational groups -- education, training, and library occupations and protective service occupations -- had the highest unionization rates in 2004, at about 37 percent each. Protective service occupations include fire fighters and police officers" ("Union Members in 2004," <http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ union2.nr0.htm>).
Also, in terms of willingness to engage in concerted and even militant union activities, too, the recent notable strikes still fresh in our memory involved service workers (defying laws against strikes in the case of public-sector workers), some of which ended relatively successfully for workers involved: TWU Local 100 in NYC; teachers in British Columbia; grocery workers in California; etc.
It seems to me that people who have the hardest time getting organized are not service workers (not even customer service workers) in general but "unskilled" service workers who can be relatively easily replaced and who work in the low-profit margin industries in the private sector (perhaps the most cutthroat corner of capitalism) in particular. That has more to do with objective rather than subjective difficulties, though. I doubt that cops, fire fighters, teachers, librarians, etc. have a higher level of class consciousness than retail workers.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>