Union Impressions: Rules vs. Work

All of the discussion in the Catholic blosphere, and the wider public square, about unions (and public employee unions in particular) has given me cause to think a bit about my attitude towards organized labor. There are a lot of rational political, economic and moral reasons I can give for why I don't like labor unions as they exist in the US, but as is so often the case with deeply held opinions, my most basic reaction to unions has a lot to do with my personal experiences relation to work and to unions. As such, it seemed like a good way to address the issue is through the lens of the experiences which have helped shape my opinion of unionization.

1. Most of my exposure to unions was through my father, who held a staff position at a community college for twenty-five years, retiring just a month before losing a multi-year battle with cancer. (In a state college, the major divide is between staff -- which includes basically everyone who is neither an instructor nor a manager -- and faculty, who are the actual instructors. Since he only had a bachelor's degree, Dad's position was classified as staff, and staff positions were represented by a state school employees union which is a member of the AFL-CIO.) The college was not unionized when Dad got his job, but it became a union shop half-way through his time there, via an election which he always wondered about the validity of. (Union members and non-union members were given different colored ballots, so it certainly would have been easy to cheat if someone had wanted to.) Not only were the union's politics diametrically opposed to my father's (he always used their "state issues" political mailing to decide how not to vote) but the union supported people for the college board of directors who hired a college president who eventually drove the college into the financial ditch, resulting in constant fear and occasional layoffs. His more daily frustration, however, was the effect of the union's vigorous protection of people who did not do their jobs well.

Key among these was the department secretary, who was supposed to support his department as well as another one. She was unquestionably a sweet and kind lady (and a loyal and enthusiastic union member) but she steadfastly refused to learn how to use a computer for anything other than her hour of reading the LA Times in her office every morning over coffee. She diligently went to the campus mail room, and occasionally did xeroxing, but the work of typing and formatting department schedules, announcements, tests, maintaining the mailing list -- in short, anything she could not do well with her electric typewriter and file drawers -- she simply insisted she could not do. The department could not get funding for another secretary, for the fairly logical reason that they already had her. And when attempts were made to pressure her to actually do her work, she successfully filed union grievances to the effect that she was being given a hostile work environment and unrealistic expectations.

So since Dad was the other person in the department who was staff rather than faculty, and because he wanted to see the department running successfully, most of the work the secretary should have been doing devolved on him. And since he already had a full work load running the planetarium, much of that work ended up happening on nights and weekend. (Unpaid, of course.)

Now, it's certainly true that if Dad too had filed union grievances, the union would have been happy to insist that he didn't have to do the department admin work either. But what they had no interest in was actually seeing that someone did do the work -- that things got done and the department functioned smoothly. Their job was the protect the person who wasn't doing the work, not to make sure the work got done. And so, since Dad cared about things working well, he got stuck with the extra work.

These other examples are briefer and much more minor, but this theme of caring about rules and rights over work continues.

2. As a teenager, when I was completing my Eagle Project for the Boy Scouts, I had to go down to a Park Service office in order to make a number of trail signs. The first task was to take a notebook full of text which had been approved by the naturalist who had planned the trail I was organizing the building of, and turn that text into a series of signs. There was an engraving machine that cut the text into sheets of plastic, which could then be mounted on poles, but my task was entirely non-mechanical: sitting at a computer and typing all of the text into a computer program which would then run the engraver. I showed up at 9:00 AM when the office opened, and one of the park rangers showed me into an office where the computer was and went off to do other things. And hour and a half later, he stuck his head in and announced, "Smoke break."

"I don't smoke," I said. "I'll just keep going." I hadn't seen anyone for the last hour-and-a-half, so it hardly seemed to matter if people were on break or not, and I wanted to get done so I could move on to the next thing.

"We fought for these breaks, everyone takes them," announced the ranger. "Come on. If you don't smoke, you can just sit around."

So I obediently went outside and sat around while one of two of the rangers smoked, and the rest stood around outside the building. After fifteen minutes, I was told we could go back in, and I returned to work.) An hour and a half later, I was called out for another smoke break. About an hour after that I was finished and told the rangers I had the file ready to go to the engraver. They looked at the clock.

"Well, it's only fifteen minutes till lunch, and the engraver will take longer to run than that. How about you wait till after lunch before we start the run."

So I waited. Breaks are sacred, it seems.

3. Early married life found MrsDarwin and I back in California, where she, with her fresh theater degree, was trying to get backstage work at a theater. MrsDarwin found an internship at a regional theater for the summer season (one of their plays, perhaps appropriately, was a revival of a 1930s piece of union propaganda called "Cradle will Rock"). The union which deals with theater jobs is called Equity, and like all unions they look after their own. Members of Equity have to be paid a certain amount per hour. A theater which is an Equity house can hire non-equity people, but they have to be unpaid interns (often, as in this case, paid a little under the table via audience tips or money from the director's pocket.)

But what struck me even more than the irony of an entity supposedly around to ensure just wages mandating that other workers not be paid was the rigidity of union rules. I recall one night when I was hanging around, waiting to watch the show from the light booth, and MrsDarwin was bustling around stage to re-set after the rehearsal and before the show.

"Hey, are you going backstage?" she asked an actor who was ambling by.

"Yes."

"Do you mind taking your prop" (it was on the stage right next to him) "back to the props table while you're going by."

"Can't. Equity rules."

(MrsDarwin would like the record to show that being new at the time, and not knowing all the Equity rules, she hadn't realized that actors are, by contract, not supposed to move props or scenery under any conditions. Coming from college and amateur theater where everyone works together on everything, this hadn't occurred to her. -- Myself, however, I've never been in a work environment where it would be unreasonable to ask someone to drop something off somewhere where he was going anyway. I thought he came off seeming like a total jerk.)

---

The theme which all of these (and many other anecdotes and experiences I've heard from others) seem to me to underline is one of putting rules above desire to actually see things get done and done right. My approach to work (probably learned from my father, as the first anecdote illustrates) has always been that everyone should pitch in out of a desire to see things get done and come out right. This has led me to usually be the one who's willing to stay late, to take on extra tasks outside my normal responsibilities, and to volunteer to learn new skills. It's a tendency that's served me well. Sure, it sometimes means giving your boss more than he's paying for -- for a while. But it also allows you to build skills and experience for free. This approach to learning on the job and expanding my skills is a lot of what I credit by career advancement over the last ten years to, and it's served me very well.

But more than that, at some deep and emotional level, if I'm going to put the work in to do something, I always want to see it done right. It's never just a, "They pay me to be here for a set number of hours with the clock punched, and after that, who cares," kind of thing. And so the idea of bargaining so that you can do less, or protecting workers who don't work, just feels very wrong to me. I won't work because I want to follow set rules and never be asked to do anything beyond those. I work for a paycheck, yes, but I also work for the satisfaction of seeing things done. And that always seems to mean thinking like an owner -- not thinking like a union member.

The Dignity of the Working Man

It is perhaps not a bad time to devote a few thoughts to the dignity of work. Work is not always seen in a wholly positive light. Many of us don't like going to work, and the rigors of labor are reflect in Adam's curse, when after the fall he is told that he shall eat only by the sweat of his brow, struggling to win sustenance from an unfriendly soil.

Yet we also recognize that that is an essential dignity to labor. Through labor we meet the essential needs of life, and labor is frequently a service: Husbands and wives labor for each others' sake, parents labor to support children, we share the fruits of our labor with our churches, with the less fortunate, with our friends and family. We rightly take great pleasure and pride in serving others this way. As a father, even the most tiresome or repetitive task can be a source of satisfaction to me when I know that by this means I am providing for the needs and pleasures of my wife and children.

It seems to me that human relationships are not merely fueled by affection, but also by this sense of being provided for. Children know their parents work to care for them. Parents love their children in part because they care for them. It is the action of providing for others and being provided for which gives strength to these relationships.

It is placing value on work, and on the web of relationships between those who provide for each other in some sense, that provides much of my conservative skepticism of social welfare programs. On the one hand, it is clearly in keeping with the common good to make sure that members of society are not without basic necessities. On the other, it concerns me when the providing of basic needs is systematically done through an impersonal means. In small societies, such as are arguably most natural to the human person, these kinds of assistance are easily provided without resorting to impersonal means. Some closed communities such as the Amish successfully continue this approach today -- with each community of Amish maintaining an emergency assistance fund to which all contribute according to their means, and members of the community providing direct assistance when needed for smaller needs. But such approaches become much more difficult in a mass, urban society -- and I fear that systems working along the lines of "All households making less than X may fill out form Y to apply for subsidy Z" end up sapping both the natural sense of responsibility the comes from providing for others, and any sense of community cohesion.

Clearly, compromises along these lines need to be made somewhere. It is essential that the most basic needs of members of society be met somehow, though hopefully in a way that preserves both dignity and work ethic. But the ideal most certainly is that through our work we provide for both our own families and for those nearest to us who are in need. Without work being tied directly to providing for those we love, it becomes drudgery of the most pointless sort. And without the sense of purpose that comes from providing for others, we too quickly become mere pleasure seekers.

Thoughts While Digging

The urge of the father to provide sustenance for his family is strong and instinctual, and although in practice the hours I spend with databases and spreadsheet are what put food on the table, one feels at times the urge to actually produce food. Thus it was that a couple weeks ago I resolved to cut down one of the trees in our back yard was wasn't growing well and put in a pair of apple trees as well. When visiting nurseries to look at apple trees, I came across the display of seeds and thought: I bet the kids would enjoy working on a vegetable garden too.

Now cutting down a 4" diameter tree and putting in a pair of eight-foot saplings is relatively easy, but digging out a 5'x25' area of Texas sod (ours is St. Augustine grass, which forms a thick and heavily interlaced mat) requires a mattock and a lot of hard work. Acquintances who had heard of my mad endeavor had recommended that I rent a gas-powered tiller, but given that I was working with such a small area, I was determined to do things manually.

It takes, I can now inform you, roughly six hours of labor to break and turn over 125 sq/ft of sod. This includes a few periods in which one stops and catches one's breath, but these can be minimized if you conform your mattock-swinging to the rhythm of a sea shanty or spiritual. Singing is a bit much, lest one run out of breath. But a sort of wordless rhythmic chant works well. My own preference is a sea shanty called "Haul away" (at least, that's the only title on it that appears on the mix CD someone gave me ages ago.) Our eldest daughter calls it my "piratey song".

Slogging away with a mattock, even to self-provided rhythmical accompaniment, leaves one's mind rather free and restless. I found myself thinking on how, in the history of the human species, this was a much more normal form of work that what I normally do "at work". Those of us who work behind desks and in other not-very-physically-demanding roles often take on hard labor of this sort from time to time as a sort of recreation. We feel there is a sort of basic dignity in producing something "by the sweat of our brow".

This respect for hard human work is perhaps exemplified best in American mythology by the story of John Henry and the steam hammer. The kids have a recording of Denzel Washington telling the story of John Henry which JulieD was kind enough to give to us -- a great piece off a series that NPR had going back in the day.

Our sympathies are naturally with John Henry and the steam drill seems like a dehumanizing force. There noble steel-driving men are about to find themselves displaced by a pile of steam driven metal designed by an over-paid engineer from back East. Spending a few hours swinging a mattock is enough to make you wonder how ennobling swinging a sledge hammer really was, however. Doing that kind of thing for an afternoon gives you a solid workout while efficiently removing all the skin from the your left thumb -- doing it for a living seems like a quick route to being broken and unemployed (or perhaps in John Henry's vein: dead) by forty or so.

We naturally respect hard work as honest work, and yet, if technology allows us to treat ourselves or others less like a draft animal, is that a loss?

The steam hammer that John Henry defeated put the remaining steel-driving men out of work. For men who didn't have another way to make a living other than swinging a hammer ten or twelve hours a day, being replaced by a machine meant a loss of the dignity of earning a living through work they had the strength and knowledge to do. And yet, did it, in the end, mark any loss of dignity for humanity no longer to have to consign people to living in work camps and driving steel spikes with sledge hammers?

Replacing the less skilled labor of many with the more skilled labor of a few invariably means taking away the living of people who at best will need time and help to find another way of providing for themselves. And yet -- "good old days" romanticism aside -- I can't help thinking that freeing people from the necessity of unskilled labor is, in the long run, a good and humanizing thing.