Monday – Labor Day
For Labor Day I share a passage from Rachel Kranz’s Leaps of Faith, one of the best labor novels I know. (Full disclosure: I’m not entirely objective as Rachel was my best friend before she succumbed in her early sixties to ovarian cancer.) The novel’s title reflects Rachel’s approach to life, which was to have faith in the struggle for—well, for whatever one puts one’s mind to.
Leaps of Faith has several planes of action, all of which present significant challenges: a working-class actor trying to make a living in New York; his boyfriend suddenly discovering he must become a father to his 11-year-old niece; a director striving to run a small experimental theater company (as Rachel did); and a union organizer attempting to organize a strike against a city university.
Rachel put her faith in a better future to the test when she left her job as a reporter at Minnesota Public Radio and became an administrative assistant at Columbia University so that she could assist with efforts to form a union. While no one gave those efforts any chance given Columbia’s stiff resistance, the workers in fact prevailed by means of a very risky strike. As one of union members working with the clerical workers later recalled:
The strike, a culmination of five years of organizing, and its settlement were a clear victory for the 1,100-person, 80% female, 50% minority unit. It also demonstrated that women can be organized, Blacks and whites can work together not only for material gain but also to combat racism, and that strikes, led by the workers themselves, are still an effective weapon -even in the hands of service employees.
Throughout the process, Rachel worked tirelessly and never gave up hope, even when many around her did.
The novel provides a fictionalized account of those now-unionized employees eight years later. Once again they are considering a strike, this time to get a better contract. Union representative Rosie must walk a fine line between those who are fiery but unrealistic and those who are overly cautious. In a meeting early in the novel, we see the challenges she faces when she faces the workers:
“What I’m trying to say is that I don’t have any illusions about what we’re up against. They’re a monster, OK, they’re a giant. They’re the third largest landlord in the city of New York. Their budget is in the millions. Their trustees run the city. We all know that, but OK, we can remind ourselves once in a while.” I laugh, and a couple of people laugh with me, the way that some women do, just to stay in sympathy. “I remember,” I say, “writing those facts over and over and over again, one newsletter after another, when we were still trying to get the union Because in those days, if you don’t mind my saying so, it seemed really hopeless—only about three other private universities were even organized, and who were we to think we could organize this—leviathan? This behemoth?” OK, that was a bit much.
I lean forward on the podium, focus again on their faces. “The point being,” I say, “that we won. The point being, they only look unbeatable. The point being, we beat them. For the past eight years, every single contract we’ve gotten has been better than the one before. Every single contract, we’ve won something that they didn’t want us to have. Every single contract has made our lives better—OK, not as much as we’d like, not as much as we deserve—but better, definitely better. Am I right?” A few nods. Some people muttering to neighbors, which I welcome, actually. Let them disagree. If they wake up, they can think about what I’m saying, and then they will agree. Or at least we’ll be talking on different terrain.
When Rosie gives a realistic assessment of their present situation, it’s Rachel recalling her own experience:
“Now we’re at a very difficult point in the process,” I say. “Those of you who have been through it before know what I mean. There’s always this point, this space of time, when winning just looks impossible. When it looks like they’re so big and we’re so small.”
Rosie knows it’s important to acknowledge how hard the service staff have been working:
I fix my gaze on Tony, sitting in the front row. Patrice, next to him. Elena, next to her. “Look at you!” I say suddenly. “I have to say it, people, you are amazing! You’re working eight hours a day, sometimes ten, night shifts, weekends—and month after month after month, you’ve kept this going. You go to negotiations at night, and meet with your buildings on your lunch hour, and make phone calls to get people out for rallies, and answer all those questions everyone’s always asking, right? ‘Why isn’t the union doing anything?’ “Why is it taking so long?’ ‘Why don’t we have a contract yet?’ Am I right?” This does get a laugh, because yes, this is exactly what they’ve been going through, and they didn’t think we knew.
“And you’re starting to wonder yourselves, why it’s taking so long, and why we’re not making more progress. And you look at their negotiators, who are paid full-time to be at these meetings, who get to go home and sleep late the day after an all-night session, when you have to be back at your desks at 9 a.m. sharp; you look at their negotiators, who have MBAs and law degrees and really expensive suits…”
Then she provides the morale boost:
The point being, people, that if we let them psych us out, we’re going to act from a position of weakness. And I want us to come from strength. I want us to look around this room and see the incredible strength we represent, the way we’re all here together, all different types of jobs, all different races and backgrounds, male and female, gay and straight—when do people ever come together like this? This is what freaks them out. This is what blows their minds, because they can’t believe that here we all are, tougher, on our own time, these stupid little secretaries and file clerks and xerox operators, from their point of view, because—until we don’t show up Monday morning—they have no idea of the work we do, am I right?” This gets nods, agreement. “And they can’t understand how we can be holding out so long, how we don’t just cave.”
To be sure, this is only the first step in a long and very complicated process, during which mistakes are made. Rachel does a deep dive into union politics—which is not always pretty—and to the different personalities of the university work force. In the end, however, the workers get most of what they ask for:
[I]t’s a great offer. Not perfect, but better than I’d ever have expected. And the irony, of course, is that every single thing we did to get it was pretty much by mistake. We went on strike against the recommendation of the union; we rejected Olympia’s most divisive proposal by only one fucking vote; and then we had a resounding unanimous vote to continue the strike, which is probably what did convince Olympia to back down—but that only happened because I made probably the worst mistake of my organizing career, taking the proposal to the members like that. So was I wrong to trust the members? You tell me.
The last we see of the workforce, they are standing together and singing “Solidarity Forever.”
Rachel’s favorite writer was Bertolt Brecht, and at the beginning of the union section she includes his poem “The Learner” to capture the uncertainty of the change process:
Those to whom I had entrusted the letter
Threw it away. But those I paid no attention to
Brought it back to me.
Thereby I learned.
What I ordered was not carried out.
When I arrived I saw
It was wrong. The right thing
Had been done.
From that I learned.
The change process is messy, whether it involves getting a new union contract or building a coalition to win elections. Often what is required is a leap of faith.
