Bargaining in Grievance Settlement the Power of Industrial Work Groups 9780231878807

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Bargaining IN GRIEVANCE

SETTLEMENT

The Power of Industrial Work Groups

Bargaining IN G R I E V A N C E

SETTLEMENT

The Power of Industrial Work Groups

By JAMES W. KUHN

Columbia University Press NEW YORK AND LONDON

( w )

1961

Copyright © 1961 Columbia University Press Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-15466 Manufactured in the United States of America

To Frank and Ed astute bargainers

Foreword

is dedicated to research, and the Columbia Graduate School of Business shares profoundly in that scholarly commitment. Through research we explore the frontiers of knowledge, first, to claim for all people a better understanding of our world and society; second, to demonstrate to our students the excitement and rewards of careful but daring thought; and, third, to enrich our experience as teachers and scholars. No phase of modem society offers more intriguing challenges and opportunities for fruitful inquiry than those raised by our American industrial system, and it is only appropriate that the Columbia Graduate School of Business should sponsor Professor Kuhn's study of industrial life as a part of our research program. It explores a difficult problem with which both corporations and labor unions must contend in a democratic society: the fitting together of the needs of small groups with the responsibilities of large organizations. Effective management of unions and corporations is of vital concern to all of us, but so is the preservation of the rights and dignity of the individuals who belong to these great organizations. W e may not gain effective management nor preserve a desirable individualism if we seek these two goals handicapped by defective or inadequate theories of behavior. We must continually test our theories against experience that we may pertinently direct our efforts and meet the problems of an industrial society. EVEBY GREAT UNIVERSITY

We believe that Professor Kuhn's study does contribute a better and more accurate understanding of the American business system. Carefully and perceptively he analyzes collective bargain-

viii

FOREWORD

ing as orthodox theory suggests it should be carried on in the shop and compares it with the reality of bargaining practices in daily shop affairs. In so doing he examines the consequences of the conflict between organizational and individual or small group demands—unrest, lowered production, wildcat strikes, and work-rules disputes—and suggests how these untoward demonstrations may be met. COURTNEY

C.

BROWN

Dean, Graduate School of Business Columbia University New York July, 1961

Preface

of collective bargaining has long assumed that American unions can ably and legitimately represent the demands and needs of their members and at the same time fulfill their responsibilities to management and the community through the plant-local or business agent-local type of organization. The assumption rests upon the beliefs that the relationship of members to union locals is simple and direct and that shop stewards and foremen are passive agents of their respective organizations. Leonard R. Sayles and George Strauss in The Local Union (Harper, 1953) have pointed out that the local union and the plant shop are much more complicated organizations than those contemplated by the labor students who developed the orthodox view of collective bargaining. This study explores the consequences for collective bargaining and grievance settlement of the complex relationship among workers, work groups, and the local union; it also analyzes the force exerted by shop politics upon union authority and responsibility, and the pressures of conflicting goals upon the different levels of management. The study suggests that the differences between union (or workers) and management may often be overshadowed by the differing interests within either the union or management organization or by the common interests of management and union men at various levels in the plant. In accommodating the dynamics of the shop, the grievance procedure has become more than a judicial process; it has developed into a complicated system that truly extends bargaining, if not always collective bargaining, to the lowest levels of the shop. This barT H E ORTHODOX VIEW

PREFACE

X

gaining has been accompanied by slowdowns and wildcat strikes of which there is general disapproval, the orthodox view of collective bargaining hardly allowing any other judgment of such disruptive activities. This study concludes that, unwelcome as these disruptions may be, the process that fosters them promises more meaningful democracy in industrial life if union and management leaders will but meet the challenge that grievance bargaining poses to collective bargaining. This is the second in a series of research studies at Columbia's Graduate School of Business on organizational behavior. Professor Leonard R. Sayles's Behavior of Industrial Work Groups (Wiley, 1958) was the first study, and in it he wrote: In these studies we shall seek to break down the traditional boundaries that now separate what are essentially interrelated fields: formal organization and administration theory, human relations and personnel management, management decision making and production management, and collective bargaining. The basic objective of this work and the succeeding studies is to further our knowledge of the functioning of large-scale organizations embodying problems of the division of labor and extended hierarchies.

My study of the grievance process is based on field investigations of several years, and I am indebted to the officers and representatives of many companies and unions who took time from their busy schedules to explain their work and thoughts to me and allowed me to inspect their records and papers. Professor Neil W. Chamberlain encouraged me to make this study, and his scholarly counsel and insights, received from him since I was a student in his classes, have helped me greatly. Both he and Professor Sayles read and criticized a first draft of the manuscript, as did Dr. John Coolidge of Swarthmore. The Columbia Graduate School of Business financed the research and provided a stimulating atmosphere in which to work. I appreciate the encouragement and support of the whole school—its faculty and my colleagues. J A M E S

New York July, 1961

w.

KUHN

Contents

F O R E W O R D B Y C O U R T N E Y C. B R O W N

Vll

PREFACE

iX

INTRODUCTION I.

THE THEORY

1 AND P R A C T I C E O F GRIEVANCE S E T T L E M E N T

5

Grievance Records and Grievance Practice 9 T h e Compliance-Judicial Function of Grievance Settlement 12 II.

ADJUDICATION

IS NOT ENOUGH

22

T h e Administrative Function of Grievance Settlement Helper Functions of Grievance Settlement 35 IH.

IS P E A C E F U L S E T T L E M E N T

POSSIBLE?

28 39

T h e Demands of Adjudication and Administration 42 T h e Union Apology for Disruptive Tactics 46 Disruptive Grievance Tactics in American Industry 5 0 IV.

APPEARANCES

AND R E A L I T I E S

58

T h e Formal Grievance 58 T h e Real "Hot Tread" Case 6 2 T h e Problem of Disruptive Tactics 70 Implications of the "Hot Tread" Case 7 3 Bargaining in the Grievance Process 77 V.

T H E TACTICS O F F R A C T I O N A L BARGAINING

T h e Cost of Bargaining Tactics 86 T h e Timing of Bargaining Tactics 96 T h e Local Union and Disruptive Tactics VI.

98

I N D E P E N D E N C E AND D E M O C R A C Y IN T H E S H O P

Causes of Fractional Bargaining

112

84

111

xii

CONTENTS Willingness to Bargain

VII.

114

T H E INFLUENCE O F TECHNOLOGY

144

Ability of the Group to Flout the Local 145 Ability of the Croup to Flout Management 147 Other Causes? 163 VIII.

T H E C H A L L E N G E O F F R A C T I O N A L BARGAINING

The The The The

167

Challenge to Collective Bargaining 167 Experience of the Tire Industry 169 Challenge to Management 178 Challenge to Unions 184

NOTES

191

INDEX

201

Tables

i n

Number of Work Stoppages of Short Duration, 1951-59, and Number of Workers Involved 54 Characteristics of Strikes in Five Basic or MassProduction Industries, 1947-59

56

m

Leverage of Rubber Workers in Unauthorized Walkouts, 1944-54, Showing the Large Number of Workers Idled by a Small Number of Strikers 153

iv

Number of Work Stoppages in One Tire Company, 1950-56, as Recorded by the Company and the Local Union

v

158

Characteristics of Work Stoppages in the Rubber Tire and Tube and Electrical Equipment Industries, 1947-59 159

Bargaining IN GRIEVANCE

SETTLEMENT

The Power of Industrial Work Groups

Introduction

SETTLEMENT of disputes arising under a collective agreement is a worth-while goal. It builds the spirit of trust necessary for a workable relationship between union and management. To gain the benefits of peaceful settlement of disputes, American unions and managements have uniquely developed grievance procedures now commonly accepted and widely used throughout industry. The promise and the premise of the grievance procedure is that strikes and disruption of production become unnecessary once a collective agreement is signed. PEACEFUL

The Promise of Peaceful Grievance

Settlement

Through a grievance procedure, management and union establish a system of industrial jurisprudence by which they can carry on continuous collective bargaining and flexibly apply the general provisions of an agreement to specific daily incidents in the shop. A system of "laws" replaces the arbitrary decisions of individuals, and an orderly appeal to reason replaces the disruptive use of force and coercion in disputes. Claims made on behalf of the grievance procedure range from those which modestly promise that it can minimize and prevent "serious conflicts between the parties during the life of the contract," 1 to those which boldly declare that the grievance procedure "makes it absolutely unnecessary for the parties to resort to industrial conflict as the method for [solving] problems which arise under the terms of a labor agreement." 2 The most general view among labor students is that when

2

INTRODUCTION

properly used, grievance procedures serve as a "safety valve for the expression of employee dissatisfaction," 3 or as "a lightning rod that drives [sic] to ground dissatisfaction and resentments which might otherwise cause serious damage." 4 The grievance process not only eliminates friction but encourages harmonious relations between union and management, giving each a stake in industrial peace. 5 T h e promise of industrial peace held out by the judicial grievance system is an appealing one to the public: industrial peacc eliminates the "wasteful and unnecessary" loss of production caused by walkouts; the grievance system imposes responsibilities upon the union as well as upon management, thereby achieving a pleasing sense of balance; and adjudication of disputes corresponds to our deeply imbedded practices of civil jurisprudence. The promise of industrial peace—once the agreement is signed—is also appealing to union and management officials. Arbitrary, coercive actions taken by workers to force consideration of a claimed right or to rectify an alleged wrong may disrupt regular production schedules, throwing manufacturing sequences out of balance and causing shortages in one department and backups in another. Workers may thus easily embarrass management as it tries to fill rush orders or finish special jobs. Irregular, nonpeaceful actions of the workers also cause trouble for the union, by squandering the willingness and ability of the workers to strike for union-wide demands, a limited resource which may be needed when the union negotiates an agreement. To quiet the excited workers and help restore the disrupted flow of production, union officers must take time away from the union's important, regular business and from collective bargaining. Workers themselves should—although in fact they don't always—favor peaceful settlement of disputes through the grievance procedures, for they often lose earnings when they stop or disrupt the flow of production to enforce their demands. Negotiators of a collective agreement not only seek peaceful settlement of disputes through a system of industrial jurispru-

INTRODUCTION

3

dence, but legitimize only peaceful settlement under the agreement. They realize, apparently, that perhaps not everyone will willingly recognize or accept the value of the grievance procedure for peaceful settlement of disputes, for a union typically promises that as long as an agreement is in effect it will not "cause or permit its members to . . . take part in any strike, sitdown, stay-in, or slowdown, or any curtailment of work or restriction of production." A collective agreement thus does not simply promise peaceful settlement of disputes through grievance procedures; it demands it and calls upon both union and management to comply. Usually an agreement explicitly requires national and local union officers and shop representatives to disavow disruptive, nonjudicial clashes with management; it also implicitly obligates management not to provoke workers into by-passing or undermining the grievance system by needlessly disregarding rights established by the agreement. To promise peaceful settlement through grievance procedures is one thing; to demand peaceful settlement through grievance procedures is quite another. It may be that the promises of a system of industrial jurisprudence have appeared so attractive —not least to students of labor—that we have assumed the realization of the promise too early. In declaring illegitimate all settlements except those made peacefully through the grievance system, negotiators have assumed that the grievance system under collective bargaining is an adequate and acceptable means of settling all disputes arising in the shop. Is it in fact adequate and acceptable? Does it in fact fulfill the promise we have assumed it holds forth? To understand more fully the success—and failure—of the grievance system in American plants and to explore the varying patterns of grievance settlement among different industries, I studied grievance handling and grievance incidents in twenty different plants of nine industries: rubber tires, motor vehicles, steel, aeronautical parts and engines, control instruments, electrical equipment, cables, newspapers, and machinery. I investigated

4

INTRODUCTION

and compared the details of grievance work in four large tire plants and four large electrical equipment plants and in two special plants chosen later to test the conclusions of this study. The field studies in the plants of the other industries were less extensive, limited mainly to interviews with industrial relations officials or union shop representatives.

I. The Theory and Practice of Grievance Settlement

promises peaceful settlement of disputes arising during the life of an agreement because it allows union and management representatives to treat workers' complaints promptly and equitably. Sound procedures alone will not, of course, insure peaceful settlement. It is also necessary that the men who handle grievances in both union and management accept collective bargaining in good faith and perform responsibly the duties assigned to them. No one set of procedures can possibly be suitable for all the different plant situations among the various industries, but for prompt and equitable settling of grievances two characteristic features are essential to any procedure. The War Labor Board was the first explicitly to define these features, though it did not claim to have invented them. It had distilled the requirements of a sound grievance procedure, according to Dean Lloyd K. Garrison, from "the best practices of employers and unions, developed through years of collective bargaining and of trial and error . . . aided greatly by the first-hand knowledge of the industry and labor members of the Board, as well as by the contentions and agreements of the employers and unions who have appeared before us." 1 In the Board's view promptness in grievance settlement was best assured when immediate, initial attention came from those in the plant who had intimate knowledge of the complaint, and equitable settlement of grievances could be assured only if the parties reached final and binding settlement A GRIEVANCE PHOCEDUHE

6

GRIEVANCE

SETTLEMENT

of grievances not otherwise resolved through voluntary, thirdparty arbitration. American unions and management indicated their general agreement with the War Labor Board's definition of prompt and equitable grievance procedure during the labor-management conference held in 1945 at the end of the war. The conference unanimously recommended that all labor-management agreements specify a complete procedure for settlement of grievances and for arbitration of unresolved disputes. 2 During World War II management and unions had learned to use third-party arbitration at the insistence of the War Labor Board. In the years immediately following, unions and management throughout the country gradually developed grievance procedures incorporating both initial grievance handling by men in the shop and final arbitration. Around these features promising peaceful settlement they have since built up a comprehensive and complex system for treating grievances and adjusting shop disputes. The grievance procedures outlined in most collective bargaining agreements are more complicated than a casual reading might suggest, for the written procedure hardly hints at the involved and intricate practice. The most conspicuous provision of a typical agreement is that which provides for successive steps through which a worker and his representative may take a grievance if they receive no satisfactory answer. Most commonly, agreements provide for four steps, though some may list as many as six.3 Under some circumstances extra steps may be justified even though the more steps there are, the longer a final settlement may be postponed. In the interest of promptness the number of steps should probably be regarded as less important than having different people carefully review a grievance at each level. The participants at each succeeding step are higher-ranking officers of management and union. In early steps the provisions usually require but a single union representative to meet with a designated line officer. They meet, discuss, and try to settle prob-

CRIEVANCE

S E T T L E M E N T

7

lems as they arise. In the step before arbitration a committee of union representatives and one or more staff officers of the industrial relations or personnel department meet regularly. The first step might be likened to a voluntary fire department, ready and available only in case of trouble. The grievance-committee step not only helps put out fires, but is like a professional fire department that also seeks to prevent fires before they start. Variations in the use of the grievance procedure are numerous. Unions and management in each plant work out particular rules and guides which their experience has shown to provide the most prompt and equitable handling of grievances. To insure promptness, one agreement may require written answers to grievances within twenty-four hours; another, within ten days. Some agreements allow workers to bring up any matter orally or in writing, whether it concerns a provision of the agreement or not. In another plant, union and management may find that such freedom results in floods of trivial grievances that hinder prompt consideration of vital ones. The agreement then may limit grievances to certain issues presented formally and in writing. Some procedures specify meetings with union representatives and line managers to hear a grievance and to discuss the matter fully at the lower levels. Others require only that managers return a written answer to the grievers. Almost every plant has its own problems requiring special procedures if union and management representatives are to handle them with dispatch. First, the regular procedure may be shortened. If an intermediate supervisor can add nothing to the discussion of, or answer to, a grievance already taken up by a subordinate, he may simply send the matter on to the industrial relations department for final company disposition. In other cases a grievance may skip the lower steps entirely. A union representative may be permitted to carry directly to the industrial relations office a grievance affecting all, or a large portion of, the workers in a plant. A departmental foreman, for example, usually has no authority to make major changes in a time-studied piece-

8

GRIEVANCE

S E T T L E M E N T

work rate or a general rate applicable throughout the plant. To ask a foreman to answer such a general grievance only wastes time. For the same reason discharge and severe discipline cases go immediately to the industrial relations level where final company authority rests. Some grievance problems are of such a nature that their solution requires more than mere promptness. While the ordinary procedure might be prompt enough, it might not facilitate an informed, and thus fair, solution of disputes over particularly specialized and intricate problems. The larger local unions, for example, have expert compensation stewards who work outside the regular grievance process and meet with appropriate management experts to handle complaints and settle problems of workers concerning health, injury, welfare, and unemployment pay. 4 Every plant investigated in this study has a joint safety committee that adjusts and tries to settle complaints about safety before the matter enters the regular grievance procedure. Many agreements provide that rate problems should be investigated and settled, if possible, by the union time-study man; if not settled, problems go to regular grievance men. Joint apprenticeship committees handle problems which otherwise would go through the first and intermediate steps of the regular procedure. The above procedures are common to many plants, but other procedures have developed out of unique work situations. In one firm, disputes over classification of engineering employees are handled first by a special joint committee and, if unresolved, are then taken to the superintendent of the plant. In another firm, if workers feel that a day-rated job should have a piecework rate, the chief steward takes the matter directly to the time-study chief. Other matters that unions and managements in the plants studied treat through either supplementary or supplanting grievance procedures to assure themselves and the workers of prompt, equitable settlement are discipline for absentees, subcontracting,

GRIEVANCE

9

S E T T L E M E N T

company-paid grievance time for union representatives, and reclassification of workers. To make sure that union representatives will be able to use the regular and special grievance procedures at all times with dispatch and that they are well enough informed to act fairly in every case, the collective agreement provides special rights for shop representatives and local union officers. They are allowed a reasonable degree of freedom to leave the job and move about the appropriate area of the plant to investigate complaints and to negotiate with management personnel. Union officers and representatives who work in the plant receive special job security so that they may always be available to handle grievances of the workers. Details of the representatives' right to move about the plant and to enjoy special job security vary from plant to plant even in the same company and from company to company in the same industry, but unions have sought, and managements have given, some form of special rights almost without exception. Grievance Records and Grievance

Practice

Although all the grievance steps specified in agreements are described in nearly equal detail, they are not of equal importance when measured by the number or kind of grievances recorded and settled. One would expect from analogy with other appeals procedures that each successive step would deal with fewer cases than the preceding lower step, since settlement should winnow out all but the more difficult problems. Statistics in other studies show that the number of grievances presented and settled does indeed decrease as higher grievance levels are reached. 5 By far the largest portion of all grievances never progresses beyond the first step, where the worker presents a grievance in written form. The proportion of grievances settled at the first and at other steps varies greatly, however, from plant to plant. Grievance settlement in the plants investigated in this study

10

GRIEVANCE

S E T T L E M E N T

conforms to the general pattern found elsewhere; yet union representatives deny that the lowest grievance steps are significant. Chief union representatives complained—and top management officials admitted—that the steps below the industrial relations level are frequently mere formalities. In their view the grievance procedure in fact has only one step: the industrial relations staff officers recommend (according to the industrial relations men) or dictate (according to the union men) the grievance answers and settlements at all the various steps. That the problem of "answers from above" is not new is suggested by writings of local officers in the publications of local unions. As far back as union files go (fifteen years at the most in this study), either the president or the secretary of the locals has regularly complained that the industrial relations department chokes off any shop settlements and thus clogs the grievance procedure at the top. 6 This complaint arises both from the kinds of grievances that go to the top and from the meaning of "answers from above." Most grievances can be, and in fact are, answered at the lower level, for they concern issues on which company policy is well fixed and for which foremen have precedents. In effect foremen are not giving their own answers but rather those of the company. The foremen's use of precedence to answer grievances is one part of the "mere formalities" to which union representatives object. The other part is consultation by foremen and line supervisors with industrial relations officers over an answer to any grievance requiring basic interpretation of a collective agreement, i.e., an unusual application of an old policy or a broad general settlement. These are major problems involving company and union policy. Industrial relations officers prefer not to allow uninformed personnel at the lower levels to decide or change such policy. Major policy problems thus become the primary concern of the chief representatives of union and management. Since policy

G R I E V A N C E

S E T T L E M E N T

11

problems are always referred to the top, the chief union and management representatives concentrate their attention on these and apparently forget the great number of petty and minor grievances that stewards and foremen settle week after week on lower levels. However, these minor grievances are not necessarily insignificant to the workers who originate them. Nor are they "mere formalities" to the foremen and stewards at the lower levels. Processing of even minor grievances can be an important part of grievance activities, as will be seen later. As an indicator of the number of grievances, and thus of the workers' use of different grievance steps, the grievance record is a more reliable guide than are grievance handlers. However, as a source of any other information, the grievance record is unreliable or misleading. Since written grievances and their answers in the early steps are often brief and elliptical to the point of obscurity, only the few grievances that reach the industrial relations officer or the arbitrators reveal much of the situations out of which the problems grew. Unless the grievances for which there is a relatively full record can safely be assumed to represent the whole range of problems and the work situations from which all grievances spring, they present a distorted view of the grievance process. But such an assumption is likely to be misleading since written grievances are often shaped to fit the clauses of a collective agreement. Labor students are fond of classifying grievance issues, though, and seldom do they warn readers of the unreliability of the titles used for classification. Shop grievances appear in conventionalized forms appropriate to the particular agreement in force. If a worker cannot grieve over "down time" when a machine is broken, the matter becomes a legitimate issue of health and safety. Or, if an agreement does not recognize grievances on promotions, the steward raises the question under the cover of seniority. Written grievances may point to no other issue than that stated in the grievance. Very likely many grievances may be taken at

12

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S E T T L E M E N T

their face value, but it is difficult to sort these from others that are but symptoms of problems which an agreement forbids the participants to treat openly and formally. The Compliance-Judicial

Function of Grievance

Settlement

The basic appeals procedure for grievance settlement appears clearly and conspicuously designed for the functions of securing compliance with the provisions of an agreement and of adjudicating complaints and disputes arising under an agreement. The grievance procedure ending in third-party arbitration has a marked analogy to our civil judicial system, which labor students have long noted. As E. E. Witte has remarked: Arbitration of disputes over the interpretation and application of contract provisions resulted in considerable enthusiasm on the part of lawyers and college professors, in the years immediately following World War I, about the possibilities for the development of "industrial law." 7

Later on, in 1941, Sumner Slichter used the term "industrial jurisprudence," which has gained wide acceptance as an apt name for the system by which unions and management define their specific rights and obligations in the industrial plant. Rudimentary grievance procedures used in the early days of union organizing performed not so much a judicial as a compliance function. Historically the shop steward was a policeman, not a judge.8 In the early days of craft unions, the business agent or walking delegate visited shops and places of work to check conditions and to see that employees and workers abided by union agreements. Later, when industrial workers organized and first bargained in the thirties, the shop steward too began as a policeman, with no means of prosecuting the offending employer except to call a sitdown strike or a walkout. Management promised only to hear complaints and to dispose of them as it understood the rights involved, not to adjudicate the matter. 9 As recognition of unions continued and collective bargaining be-

GRIEVANCE

S E T T L E M E N T

13

came normal, union and management learned to appreciate stability in their relationship. The union found it useful to be able to enforce compliance without a major test of strength, and management found it desirable to consider the complaints of the workers and to right any wrong in a way that maintained production. Thus, to the policing duties of the union representative the peaceful grievance system added judicial work. For an elected representative of the workers to judge the worth of the complaints of his electorate cannot be easy, but that is what many international unions formally instruct their shop stewards to do. A conservative, well-established union like the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers describes what "a shop steward ought to be: (1) Impartial and fair; objective and business like . . . (5) Courageous enough to tell a man when he's wrong and to have guts enough to stand up to the company, and never pass the buck/" 10 Since the IBEW steward in the particular local to whom this description was to apply is an appointed official, he can perhaps afford a more judicial stance than the elected steward in the Machinists locals. The shop steward's manual prepared by the Machinists plainly and unmistakably calls attention to the judicial nature of the steward's job: [The grievance procedure] protects the democratic rights of the individual in industry in the same way that our judicial system protects his democratic rights in civil life. . . . Even in plants where the relationship between the employees and management is good, grievances may arise because of misunderstandings, incorrect application of policy by the foreman or worker, faulty interpretation of the contract by either side or some discriminating act. . . . [Not all complaints] are grievances technically, and you must leam to distinguish them from true grievances.11 Later, in an aside, after considerable discussion of what makes a "just grievance," the manual does add a reservation to the judicial note: "To be sure, you are the worker's representative and not an impartial judge, and you should always give him the benefit of the doubt in border-line cases." The manual prepared by the CIO Department of Education

14

CHIEVANCE

S E T T L E M E N T

and Research for the shop stewards of its affiliated unions implies for the steward a judicial role not unlike that made explicit by the Machinists union: "You may decide it's not a grievance when you've looked into all the facts. You can't take it up, and you must tell the worker so . . . [and] settle each grievance on the justice of the case." Facts rather than a walkout, reason and argument rather than interrupted production, mark the judicial approach to grievance settlement, and the unions officially instruct their shop stewards to use this approach. As one union writer put it: "The union keeps adding more power to its side in the various steps of the procedure, as does management, but the power is one of persuasion and discussion skill—rather than to 'pull a strike.'" 12 Some unions reject the notion that the grievance procedure has any judicial aspect and call upon the stewards to be militant policemen and bargainers. In its manual for stewards, the Mine and Smelters union advises: Look for grievances that involve more than one or two men—grievances that involve the entire department. There is no better way to make the workers union-conscious and give them faith in their own strength than to have them work together on a mass grievance. . . . Don't let grievances come from a mere handful of workers.

The manual instructs the stewards to go beyond mere policing. They should bargain through the grievance procedure to extend the rights of the workers: You are not an impartial judge but a representative of the workers. Don't forget that not every grievance is a contract violation. Many complaints concerning working conditions are not covered in the contract. It is the steward's duty to handle these grievances and to put up the best possible fight on them. . . . Remember! All of the workers affected by the grievance should be brought together, either on the job or at lunch time, or after work at some nearby location. At the meeting information can be pooled and common tactics agreed upon.

The advice of the Mine and Smelters union to its stewards is not typical of official advice put out by American unions, but it probably would sound more realistic to most shop stewards than

GRIEVANCE

S E T T L E M E N T

15

instructions to conduct their grievances in as judicial a manner as possible. A chief steward in one plant complained: "The hardest part of the job is when your own people fight you. You have to persuade them that what you're doing is right. When the contract is clear you have to go along with it, but the people want you to interpret their way." Shop stewards, beholden to voters for their position, probably need encouragement to maintain a judicial bearing, for they will be either strongly tempted or required to handle grievances politically. T h e political position of a union steward can compromise his judgment in the eyes of those workers whose grievances he tries to settle. If a grievance concerns a dispute between two work groups over distribution of overtime, or classification of new jobs, or bumping rights, for example, the members of one group may rightly feel that their union leaders are too committed to the other group to render an unbiased judgment. Further, whatever the union's professed stand on social, religious, sex, and color discrimination may be, union representatives as well as management may discriminate. In one large local of 8,000 members, the general grievance committee did not take to arbitration the discharge of two Negro workers who had been involved in a knifing incident in the shop. Other Negroes in the department were incensed over the committee's acquiescence to the discharges. One of the discharged men, they believed, had been unjustly treated: he had slashed the other worker accidentally, and if not, then under extreme provocation [sic], to which anyone in the department could testify. They pressed their point at a union meeting, overrode the decision of the grievance committee to accept the discharge of the one worker, and took the case to arbitration. The union won the case, the arbitrator ordering reinstatement of the Negro worker. The complaints of shop stewards sound more like those of politicians than those of judges. A common statement is that of an experienced, long-time division chairman in a large rubbertire plant: "I'm always open to criticism. You help a man a hun-

16

GRIEVANCE

S E T T L E M E N T

dred times and the next time you [try to] help him any and you can't, you're no damn good as far as he's concerned." The steward feels like a man in between, but unfortunately not between a plaintiff and defendant. He recognizes the validity of an impartial judgment, but as he tries to satisfy the conflicting demands that his supporters make upon him, he cannot always act impartially. The division chairman went on: "The members ought to play it fair. I think that there's two sides to a lot of these [grievance] problems. You take up a man's grievance on his sayso and he doesn't always have the right story." Another shop representative complained that workers expect him to help solve any personal or work problem: "They expect you to be a Mr. Anthony in settling their personal troubles and a Solomon in seeing that each one gets his fair share." Industrial relations officers, not shop stewards or line managers, must provide most of the judicial consideration of grievances that occurs outside of arbitration. While they can never forget that they represent the company's interest, their appointive staff position separates them from the immediate pressures and expediencies of the line and usually gives them enough distance and security to view the ordinary, daily grievances with some impartiality. Not every officer of every industrial relations department fulfills these requirements of fairness and impartiality, of course, and line managers and union representatives are far from devoid of all judicial concern. Nevertheless, in the plants studied, the industrial relations officers tend to assume a judicial role, with union representatives acting as plaintiffs and line foremen taking the position of defendants. Industrial relations officers conceive of their role as that described in the following two representative statements: I have to act as an arbitrator between the union and management and I get hell from both. . . . I'm the court of appeals; the lower levels are the magistrate's courts and arbitration is the supreme court. And:

GRIEVANCE

S E T T L E M E N T

17

I'm a company man, but I try to be a judge of the foremen and the union [representatives]. I try to take as objective a view as possible. The industrial relations officer is most clearly a judge when, at the regular weekly grievance sessions, the foremen defend their actions before him, and the union representatives appeal to him to support their interpretation of the provisions of an agreement. He is required to decide between two versions of an incident and rule in accordance with labor policy established in the plant by the union and the company. Ideally, as a staff man, he should be a consultant and advisor on labor matters for the line supervisors. He does advise foremen at all levels about proper ways to answer grievances, to apply company rules in new situations, and to interpret the collective agreement, but the line between advising and directing is an indistinct one when the advisor has power to punish and reward. That the industrial relations advisor has such power over foremen is undeniable. He and his related staffs have gained the right to set work standards and piecework rates; they determine the classification of jobs and job descriptions; and they mete out the major disciplinary penalties. These powers were once a source of no little authority for the line supervisors. Now a foreman may exercise them, at most, on sufferance of the staff men or, at the least, not at all. A foreman must always ask himself: Will industrial relations back me up when I recommend disciplinary action? Will it set the piecework rate at the level that I know will get the most work from the men? The more assuredly a foreman can answer yes, the stronger he is in the shop. The demand of industrial relations men to review grievance activities in the plant can, as in the following case, impinge upon the authority of line management to an uncomfortable degree. In a metal-working department of a large plant, union representatives were engaged in a fierce political struggle. Each was trying to outdo the other in proving his knowledge of the collective agreement and his militancy toward management. T h e departmental foreman and his subordinates were being flooded

18

GRIEVANCE

S E T T L E M E N T

with grievances and tripped up on every technicality. The foreman decided that he must retaliate in kind and therefore began taking a tough line toward all grievances and enforcing company rules to the letter. After a few weeks of receiving a torrent of grievances from the department and of noting the number of real mistakes and violations of the agreement by the foreman and his supervisors, the industrial relations director called the foreman in. (The mistakes and violations were probably not new occurrences; the union had not brought them up before because each side usually overlooks minor violations of its nominal rights.) According to the chief steward who finally won the political fight: [The director] put the heat on him. They [industrial relations] were spending more time with this one department of 300 workers than they were with all the rest of the 5,000 in the plant. They had better things to do. From then on they [the foreman and his supervisors] were to send up only exceptional cases, and they were to open up their contracts and read them. They got a real oil change. It's easy now to settle in the department. Hell, they don't know what cases are exceptional. We just about got things under control in there.

Whether the industrial relations officer was right in his action or not, he clearly had the power to control the foreman. In this case he used his power to deny the authority necessary for the foreman to maintain control of his department. Yet the industrial relations staff must be the defender of the long-run, over-all interests of management. The foremen in the shop are not in a position to take over this role, subject as they are to the necessities and pressures of daily production in one small section of a plant. In answering formal grievances, foremen can seldom afford to match wits with stewards on labor policy or interpretation of an agreement. They must guard themselves by following precedents and the advice of the industrial relations staff. For if all grievances were settled on a departmental basis, workers might be able to make piecemeal changes in plant or firm policy, thereby gaining concessions which would dwarf regularly negotiated benefits.

CRIEVANCE

SETTLEMENT

19

Certainly the check of a centralized industrial relations staff serves a useful purpose. As the company's full-time labor experts, familiar with the negotiations of the collective agreement, as regular participants in arbitration hearings and overseers of all labor activities in the firm, these staff members have the breadth of knowledge of labor policy (and sometimes the ignorance of that policy in practice) to justify their control of labor affairs in the plant. The director of industrial relations for a large electrical equipment company explained: "The supervisors are not adequately prepared to manage people and interpret the contract. They know nuts and bolts and the mechanical work, that's all." Another labor director defended his control over line supervision in this way: W e have to keep strings on the foreman. I see no way around it. H e has neither the time nor the talent to be familiar with the contract or to understand the effects of his settlements on the whole plant. It is important that he doesn't give the plant away or put us in conflict with ourselves in grievance settlements.

Another industrial relations manager also believed that staff restrictions upon the foremen were necessary: "How else can you stop a foreman from giving out answers which do not agree with the contract or are not in accord with company policy?" It is not that the industrial relations officer believes in following the collective agreement in every situation or in rigidly maintaining company policy. In all firms he "clears out" or "screens" cases that have been certified for arbitration. In trading off one grievance for another, merits of the screened-out grievances and rights of the workers concerned are not necessarily the first nor only consideration. He is also willing to modify a policy or a provision, or even contradict it, in order to solve a difficult problem. Every industrial relations officer has his file of local side agreements covering plant exceptions to the agreement. The role of judge, with its flattering characteristics of dignity and objectivity, is but one of several judicial roles the industrial relations officer fills. He must interpret the union and the workers to management and, in some respects, defend the union against

20

GRIEVANCE

S E T T L E M E N T

the designs or inadvertent aggrandizements of management. Almost all of the industrial relations men interviewed for this study were of the opinion that persuading higher management to fulfill its obligations to the workers and teaching it the limits acceptable under the collective agreement involve more trouble and effort than getting the union men to live up to their responsibilities. Because of the broad policy they may determine, top managers can put an industrial relations department in a disconcerting position. "When they hire a director of industrial relations they think that all their labor problems are solved. Only when it is a matter of a strike do they really listen to us," one director complained. A manager of a marginal plant belonging to this director's company had negotiated a wage cut with the union local under threat of extensive layoffs. The action was a violation of an understanding between the director and the union's national leaders, who interpreted the local plant action as a pressure tactic of the company to resist wage demands in the forthcoming contract renegotiations. They responded by calling for a strike vote in all the plants of the company. In another company, a personnel manager found himself aligned with the union as he argued loudly and at length against a plan of the superintendent to install a new and tighter work standard first in the large departments where the firm would realize the greatest savings in labor cost. The personnel manager's argument was that if the standards were first introduced in smaller departments of the plant, the company could adjust and test the new rates. Worker acceptance would thus be more likely, even if immediate wage-savings were not as great as the apparent savings under the superintendent's plan. In both of these cases the industrial relations officer was acting not so much juridically as judiciously. He did not wish to provoke the union or the workers without considering all the probable gains and losses, for one of his major responsibilities is to maintain workable relations between union and management. Once these

G R I E V A N C E

S E T T L E M E N T

21

relations are ruptured, he has the difficult task of re-establishing them. Grievance practice, if not procedure, then, has assigned the largest burden of impartial adjudication below the level of arbitration to the industrial relations staff. Upon the members of that staff devolves the major responsibility for maintaining the essential integrity of the collective agreement, avoiding contradictory grievance settlements and weighing the long-term gains and losses that today's decisions will cause. Exhorting stewards through union manuals to act judicially and warning line supervisors in company training classes to treat grievances with a proper degree of impartiality are not apt to produce very effective results. Since even an industrial relations staff cannot always meet its assignment of impartiality, one should not expect too much from the others who also handle grievances.

II. Adjudication Is Not Enough

secure at least a modicum of impartiality in the grievance steps below arbitration. The higher the step, the more likely it is that an issue will be heard calmly and clearly. At higher steps, experts from outside the plant—men from the international union or company headquarters—can consider grievances away from the passions and tensions of the shop. If a worker truly desires an impartial judge, he has the right of appeal to an arbitrator, at no personal cost to himself. The arbitrator guarantees a final escape from managerial bias and also from the biases and partiality of union representatives. The workers, having some reason to doubt the impartiality of foremen and stewards in the lower grievance steps, value arbitration highly. But even when they are satisfied with the impartiality of the lower grievance-handlers, they look to arbitration as an important right in itself, simply because it is the highest court in which they may receive a hearing. In important cases such as appealing from "capital" sentences —for example, a discharge—workers want to exhaust all appeals and make full use of their rights much as citizens desire to use the full machinery of the civil courts to safeguard their rights. If management fires a worker for sufficient cause and with ample proof, the union will often still grieve the discharge before an arbitrator. An industrial relations officer relating such a case complained: "The local president defended the union's stand and maintained that justice was to be done in the hearing, though he knew the employee had stolen the fan as well as we did. They lost the case and it was a waste of time." WORKERS CAN USUALLY

ADJUDICATION

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NOT

ENOUGH

23

A waste of time to the company, perhaps, but not to the union and its members. The hearing assured all workers of the serious concern of the union for their job rights. The more drastic the penalty, the more care the union takes to allow workers to exercise their full legal rights. The way in which workers use judicial grievance procedures suggests that they do not seek impartial adjudication alone. Whether or not impartiality is always guaranteed, these procedures both give the workers an opportunity to express themselves and also require the directors of their work lives to hear and to consider their problems seriously. Grievance hearings may, in themselves, be as important to workers as impartial grievance judgments. The compliancejudicial function does not necessarily fall short of its goal because line managers and shop stewards cannot often afford the luxury of acting impartially or because industrial relations officers sometimes find their managerial demands irreconcilable with the demands of impartial grievance settlement. The grievance system is a complex process, and to focus critical attention upon a single aspect of it may unduly magnify an inherent limitation until it looms as a major flaw. With such a distorted view of grievance problems, one might prescribe irrelevant remedies in hopes of meeting unrealistic standards. If workers use the appeals procedure to gain more than impartial grievance settlement, the system may not attain the efficiency that one could expect, but nevertheless it may work reasonably well, satisfying practical, if not theoretical, needs. Impartial adjudication may secure management's conformance to shop law already established and may render compensation if rights have been violated. It may protect workers' rights after management has acted; it does not necessarily protect them before. 1 In practice, securing conformance and rendering compensation have limits. Compensation usually can take only the form of money, which is not always appropriate to the injury. For example, if a worker does not receive a quick reply to his com-

24

ADJUDICATION

IS

NOT

ENOUGH

plaint, he may feel that he is being ignored and his problem unrecognized. He may know that he will be monetarily compensated for any loss of earnings if his grievance is valid, but through management's tardy recognition of his grievance he suffers a loss of the dignity and self-respect to which he feels he is entitled as a man, over and above what he may be entitled to as a worker. The guarantee of ex post facto justice—impartial and equitable though it be—is not all that workers or union leaders demand. In addition, they seek the kind of justice whereby managers consult with them before they act. It may be that using the grievance procedure to secure compliance and compensation after an action is taken is an early stage in the development of industrial relations, while using it to secure justice before the act may be a later, more mature stage. Prior consultation may arise from worker needs and desires that were not recognized or admitted by those who first developed grievance procedures. Workers on the job not only desire to, but do, participate in defining many shop rules, regulations, and rights, a large number of which originate as customary practices within the shop. Such practices grow out of practical modes of co-operation and accommodation that all parties find useful and necessary in shop life. They are embedded in informal, bilateral agreements. If management attempts unilaterally to root them out, it provokes swift and deep resentment among the workers. Merely challenging the changes that management makes in customary practices may not be at all satisfying to the workers, for management may be well within its explicit and formal rights. Even if the workers do make a successful challenge, there is no appropriate compensation for the injury involved, for that injury lies not so much in the change itself as in the way management makes the change. Men in the shop wish to be assured that when management changes work rules, it will consider their interests. And how better can management do so than by listening to the workers' views on proposed changes and by consider-

A D J U D I C A T I O N

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ENOUCH

25

ing the workers' interests as the workers see them rather than as management sees them? That workers do not merely seek management's compliance with a collective agreement is evident in many grievances. Typical of unwritten grievances and of a large portion of written grievances are the following, found in grievance files of various union locals carefully inspected in this study: Mr. L . of D e p a r t m e n t 6 8 1 seemingly chooses to operate our department without due regard to work classifications that exist between production and engineering divisions. W e request Mr. L . to b e instructed as to work of engineering and production employees. W e also request Mr. L . to attempt to solve these problems without continually agitating us. W e charge unfair labor practices of Mr. S., foreman of this department, for trying to inch u p on a verbal agreement pertaining to repair work coming from the welder. And m a n y other incidents that happ e n e d in the past where an indifferent attitude was taken regarding the protests of the representatives. J a c k Pauls, foreman on the first shift, has been unduly partial towards some of the workers in this department. H e has given great amounts of piecework to a certain number of workers and daywork to a chosen few, not to mention other things that could be cited here.

Each of these complaints was rejected, for the workers were in error or were uninformed, or the grievances were irrelevant to the real problem. But the supervisors concerned had to account for their actions by meeting with the stewards and had to provide the stewards with written answers for distribution among the complainants. The supervisors had to consider the opinion of the workers respectfully and carefully, however mistaken the latter were. Thus, the workers received their just due—an opportunity to express their concerns—and management thereby recognized their views as significant in the running of the shop. The consideration that management gives to grievances helps to explain why the workers do not consider the compliancejudicial function a failure, even though by far the larger proportion of all grievances and complaints is rejected by management and even though impartiality is often lacking in lower-level

26

ADJUDICATION

IS

NOT

ENOUGH

grievance-handling. Of overriding importance is the simple fact that the foreman meets with the workers, listens to them, and answers for his actions. A general foreman (second grievancestep participant) explained: "I usually disapprove the grievances, but what's important is that I take time out to hear the steward." An assistant in industrial relations in another firm similarly expressed himself: "Since I'm of higher rank, they [the employees] like to tell their stories to me whether I can do anything or not. A lot of times they just want to tell their story to somebody; I guess it makes them feel better." If the workers could obtain a hearing from the foreman only through the formality of the grievance procedure, they undoubtedly would receive little satisfaction. It is at best an unwieldy method of gaining a hearing since management and the union have designed the procedure primarily for other purposes. This formal procedure with its mandatory hearings and answers, forms and deadlines, inevitably lengthens the time between appearance of a problem and its settlement. Only problems and disputes of such importance that they must be decided by top officials of management and union can wait upon the careful deliberations of the full grievance procedures. But many small problems of interpreting the provisions of a collective agreement and the customary shop rules arise as the foremen apply them to the myriad complications of shop life. The possibilities for disputes over the details of an agreement are nearly infinite. As might be expected, all the parties concerned in minor shop disputes avoid confusion and delay by proceeding informally to hear, discuss, adjudicate, and otherwise settle or dispose of such problems. This kind of informal settlement is more direct and personal than formal settlement and thus is probably more satisfactory. If shop representatives and the foreman discuss a problem informally and reach an understanding, the workers can feel that their interests have been immediately considered. If the matter must go higher to an industrial relations officer, a chief steward's informal telephone call may still be able

ADJUDICATION

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NOT

ENOUGH

27

to settle the matter immediately and authoritatively. Nevertheless, although the parties do not always use formal procedures, these procedures are always available as a guide, and an alternative, to informal action. That informal grievance-handling should occur is not surprising; that it makes up the bulk of all grievance activities may be. The line foremen and shop representatives interviewed for this study reported that they disposed informally of 80-90 per cent of all grievances. 2 Higher union and management officials typically gave a lower figure, ranging from 30 to 50 per cent. 3 However, the figures that the participants gave were sheer guesses, reflecting their judgments and not necessarily the actual situation. Consistency of the estimates by participants at the different levels suggests, though, that, whatever the exact proportion may be, informal handling is a large part of all grievancehandling. The fact that so much grievance-handling is carried on informally suggests that the participants may not be simply carrying out informally the activities prescribed formally in the agreement—that is, compliance and adjudication—but may in fact be engaged in other activities under the guise of the formal system. Certainly informal handling allows great flexibility of action, since transactions are made orally and rules are nonexistent or are only casually enforced. The participants may feel free to take up any shop issue and deal with it in a way that meets their immediate needs and interests. If the formal system does not contemplate all the forces and influences bearing upon the participants—and it probably cannot—informal handling may be necessary. Indeed, such handling may even be required to achieve the successful operation of the formal procedures. One might suggest that informal grievance-handling is actually more than a convenient, faster, more efficient way of settling grievances: it may in fact be a necessity, arising both from the logic of an active union organization at the place of work and from the demands of the workers.

28

ADJUDICATION

IS

The Administrative Function of Grievance

NOT

ENOUGH

Settlement

When management first accepted the grievance system, it may not have intended that the union join in the administration of an agreement. Even today among industrial relations officers one hears statements such as the following: "The only job of the union is to protest when management doesn't live up to the demands of equity or the terms of the contract." Or: "Management knows enough how to handle its own problems. W e get along without the union poking in everywhere." These remarks may either express convictions about the role that the union should play or merely exhibit the aggravated feelings of men who have spent long sessions arguing with union representatives over seemingly trivial issues. But, whatever may be or may have been the desires of management, the working of the grievance appeals system and the presence of expert and protected union representatives in the shop have inevitably led management to share its administrative duties. For the most part, a collective agreement spells out the rights and duties of the parties to it in general terms. Few of its provisions apply automatically or without some person in authority making decisions about the nature of a given situation and the meaning of the agreement. Agreements are administrative documents as well as codes of law. In many areas they provide guides and set standards, purposely leaving room for variation and interpretation. Application of an agreement thus raises daily problems in the shop. Applying and interpreting customs, precedents, and shop rules also create problems requiring discretion. These problems, stemming from administration of an agreement and shop code, make up the bulk of informal grievances. Union and management representatives conduct their administrative work through, and under cover of, the grievance procedure. In practice an observer cannot easily categorize every grievance action since the different functions overlap and the

ADJUDICATION

IS

NOT

ENOUGH

29

representatives perform more than one function at a time. But for the sake of clarity in analysis one may distinguish formally among the different functions. Shop stewards and union officers join in administrative activities in two ways: as informally recognized, expert problemsolvers and as members of administrative bodies set up under the collective agreement. Many stewards—particularly those who work full-time, or nearly so, on grievances—become expert interpreters of the collective agreement in contrast to foremen and line managers. A common attitude is put as follows by a line steward: "Any steward who knows his stuff can talk rings around a foreman. If he says the foreman's wrong and talks enough, whether he's entirely accurate or not, he's apt to buffalo him." A chief steward expressed another widespread opinion: We're considerably better informed on industrial relations, grievances, and arbitration than the foremen are, and it helps us in dealing with them. We tell the foremen what the awards are and oftentimes how grievances were settled. You might say we have to educate them in the contract and handling of grievances.

A typical explanation for this lack of ability to match the stewards is given by a foreman: You're tied up with stuff in the shop all the time and you don't have time to study the contract. I don't study the grievances and arbitration cases at home like I guess I could. But then the contract can be very confusing, and you're not sure whether youll have the right interpretation or not.

Foremen expressed themselves similarly even in firms that ran large and expensive training programs. In one plant a departmental foreman said that he had asked the union's division chairman to answer the examination questions given him in his training course. The training officers, pleased at the high scores of their foremen students, were probably measuring the knowledge of the shop stewards rather than of the foremen. Not only are many shop stewards better informed about grievance matters than foremen, but they also have a better knowledge of the intricacies of plant bureaucracy. Unlike foremen, who may

30

ADJUDICATION

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ENOUGH

feel that their position obliges them to follow official company channels and that their work requires them to stay on the job, the full-time stewards or committeemen meet and work with many managers at various levels of both line and staff. Frequently they can perform more easily and quickly jobs that the line or staff men cannot—or prefer not to—handle. The stewards' knowledge of plant affairs and their opportunity to do favors can tempt them to take extra rewards. Petty corruption in the form of accepting favors and special treatment from managers for their own or their friends' enrichment certainly exists. For example, the wife of a chief steward in a large plant kept her job during a major layoff even though women of greater seniority lost theirs: as a "payoff" for past favors, a manager in the records department had changed the seniority record of the wife and arranged for her transfer to another department where she was unknown. That some foremen resent the loss of their administrative authority in the shop to the steward is indicated in the following statement of a shop foreman: I called Maintenance a dozen times a day to get that wind-breaker built [at the end of the welding line near an open loading-door] to keep out the cold. I couldn't get anything accomplished. But let the union steward call the chief steward who gets in touch with Maintenance, and I'll tell you, that breaker got up there pretty quick. W h a t do you think the foreman feels like when this happens? Well, we're losing our authority.

Other foremen make use of the ability and knowledge of the grievance-handler to ease their own work. The head of a local union with about 2,000 members said: They shift a lot of work on to us. YouH find the stewards doing things that the foremen ought to do. If a problem comes up—a man is sick, or a worker has a shortage in his check, or a guy's been drinking too much—they send it to the chief steward.

In every plant studied, foremen used union representatives to help solve problems of absenteeism, sloppy work, quitting early, loitering on the job, and drunkenness. A shop steward can talk

ADJUDICATION

IS

NOT

ENOUGH

31

to an offending worker as a fellow worker and defender, while the foreman is always suspect. Besides solving minor problems of individual workers, shop stewards perform other useful services for line management. Foremen have lost much of their pre-union authority to staff officers and in matters of discipline, placement, classification, rates, transfers, and promotions may, at best, retain only advisory power. To win back some control of their shops, they find the aid of shop stewards invaluable. An experienced union representative who has done favors here and there for key bureaucrats among staff agencies and who knows how to cut through red tape can, for example, get a worker transferred to a "bottleneck job" for a foreman faster than management can. Or he can persuade a worker to use part of his spare time on the job to perform an additional task for the benefit of the foreman, such as recording intermediate pieces of work completed. If the task is not a part of the job specifications, the foreman thereby avoids both staff interference in his department and the time-consuming paper work which even such a small change is apt to require. With the aid of a shop steward, a foreman may be able to rearrange jobs within his department or to persuade workers to change shifts or places of work as production orders vary. Even if a staff manager must authorize such changes, he has only to recognize the completed action, and thus the foreman maintains an area of freedom and flexibility. Not only the foremen, but the rest of management, too, use stewards and other union representatives to help them apply the provisions of a collective agreement to new situations and to help solve work problems. When starting up a new line, opening a new plant, making major changes in production methods, or initiating piece rates, management finds it well worth while to have top union representatives or local officers informed and acting as advisors both to the workers and to themselves. Together they can detect many incipient problems. "Grievances are problems to be solved and not arguments to be

32

ADJUDICATION

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NOT

ENOUGH

won," is the way in which one head of an industrial relations section summed up his experience. Most managers and local union leaders encountered in this study would agree with the findings of Harbison and Coleman 4 that the grievance machinery can be used to prevent trouble as well as to deal with it once it occurs. It is not just for the sake of service to management that union representatives join management in administering an agreement, enforcing shop rules, and helping to solve work problems. The position of authority that they command by virtue of a collective agreement as well as their leadership of the workers leads them to expect to join in such activities as a right. Through joint administration and problem-solving they have the opportunity to extend the interests of their constituents and to enhance their own prestige. In some cases they may participate to a surprising degree in activities that management often regards as its own special concern. Through helping management to increase production, to fill orders more quickly, or to make full use of new work methods, union leaders in the different firms observed in this study have, on occasion, gained an important voice in plant or company policy. In one plant the grievance committee joined with management in devising a plan whereby a large, profitable government contract was met in record time, thus assuring a bonus payment to the company. The committee suggested that the company subcontract the items which in the plant had a tight rate, leaving the looser-rated items to its own workers. The loose rates and the unlimited overtime on the contract order induced the workers to a full measure of effort. In another firm, a division's product had recently been of poorer quality than other goods competing on the market. The union representatives were concerned and proposed remedial action. They worked with the engineering staff to modify equipment and machinery and to change methods of work. Management accepted much of the advice of the union representatives,

ADJUDICATION

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ENOUGH

33

including recommendations for changes in piece rates. Production soon picked up, and the quality of the product rose. When union representatives participate with management in administering policy to the benefit of both parties, as in the preceding cases, there is great incentive to work jointly, whatever the limitations imposed by the collective agreement. Such joint administration is almost always informal and usually on an ad hoc basis. A major exception is the administering of bumping rights. Not to bring the union formally into the regular application of so intricate a provision as seniority rights is to invite trouble.® However, few managements are eager to have the union formally join in administration of shop affairs on a regular basis. When pressed by local union leaders, management has explicitly agreed to some joint administration, but only in areas of little importance to it or to the union. The usual array of explicit joint administrative committees includes: safety, apprenticeship, absenteeism, and community drives. In all of these, union representatives turn their attention listlessly to nonpartisan problems. Workers are always willing to serve on such committees since they get time off the job (with pay) to attend meetings and to make inspection tours, but the prestige of office is slight, for the issues that come up are of peripheral concern to the workers and to the union. Undoubtedly the reason for the popularity of these committees among management is that they are showpieces, giving the appearance of joint administration but in reality treating nothing of substance in plant affairs. Some companies have experimented with joint administration in more substantial areas, such as rate inequities, job classification, job evaluation, and worker-training. These experiments have had a small success in some plants, but more often the joint effort has failed either immediately, because the union and management leaders could not agree on how to begin, or later because the union became bitterly divided over which policy to pursue. Once a union leader explicitly takes up an administrative role

34

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NOT

ENOUGH

in an area affecting the relative prestige and position of workers or work groups, he is in a dangerous position. He may alienate some workers without having the administrative power to mollify those against whom he discriminates. T o protect himself he has to make sweeping demands for all workers or refuse to approve any changes. There is some evidence that although union representatives may spasmodically participate in the administration of almost any management policy, they learn that regular, continuous administering of important plant affairs produces great strain upon them and upon the fabric of the union organization. 6 In several cases local leaders interviewed for this study have turned administrative work back to management. One local union negotiated for, and secured, an intra-plant inequity fund to be disbursed by the union. After three months of hearings and meetings (two months longer than the union-management negotiations), the union executive committee reached a settlement: the powerful skilled mechanics, who had been "flirting" with another union, received an extra bonus of three cents an hour. The semiskilled workers protested this increase "to men who loaf all over the plant on day rates." The real uproar developed, however, over a bonus of two and a half cents an hour given to only one of six machine crews because of the "productivity increase" of that crew. The workers forgot about the rest of the inequities settlement, and, in the words of the ex-president of the local: "All hell broke loose. W e tried to explain the basis of our settlement, but they wouldn't listen. W e finally had to backtrack. That's the last inequities settlement I made. The company will do it from now on." Another firm agreed to a joint skill-classification committee. A skilled job was defined as one requiring at least three weeks of training time. All of the work groups with any possible claim to a skilled classification tried to get it since semiskilled workers could not bump skilled workers. A division chairman described the subsequent troubles of the union as follows:

A D J U D I C A T I O N

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NOT

E N O U G H

35

It turned into a big political deal and got to be a real sore spot in the union. If it was near an election or this was an important group and the division chairman felt that he had to win votes here, he would recommend that the job be described skilled. The work groups had too much power over us; we couldn't withstand these pressures. And the company went along because they wanted less bumping-in and transfers. Now under the new contract we changed it and got rid of this problem within the union.

Summarizing, then, it is doubtful that union representatives always wish to assume regular, explicit, administrative duties. They may prefer to avoid the difficult internal problems posed by such administration. There is at least some reason to suppose that union leaders recognize limits to the scope of their formal administrative activities in the shop. Informally, however, union representatives have become important participants in administering the collective agreement and shop rules. Their work in helping to apply standards and to interpret general rules to daily work situations in the shop complements and makes easier their responsibilities as shop policemen. Through their administrative activity, union and management representatives can work together regularly, effectively, and peacefully to dispose of many daily problems to the gain of all. The means to secure peaceful and harmonious relations in the shop appears to be readily available, through a grievance process that encompasses responsibly-used judicial-compliance and administrative functions.

Helper Functions of Grievance

Settlement

Besides the two major functions within the grievance process —judicial-compliance and administrative—one may identify two helper functions: communication and training. In carrying out these functions, representatives of both union and management contribute to the smoother working of the major functions and help all of the people in the plant concerned with industrial relations to appreciate the complex problems faced by both management and the union. The contribution of the helper functions to

ADJUDICATION

36

IS

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ENOUGH

the grievance system, in practice, may be a good deal less than most personnel textbooks assume. COMMUNICATION

In a broad sense, all the grievance activities that bring union and management representatives together perform communicative services. The whole process can provide a line of communication from workers in the shop to top management. Top managers can receive much information about the state of affairs in the shop if they pay attention to the grievance problems and disputes that reach their desks. The union can also use grievance channels for gathering information about the affairs of management and for expressing itself to management. In turn, management can implement its policies that do not fundamentally conflict with the interests of the workers much more effectively if the union representatives accept and understand them clearly. The communicative function helps the other grievance activities by explicitly providing information not otherwise available to the men at different grievance levels. For example, if workers are fully informed about their piece rates, changes in job elements and standards, and methods of timing, many problems and misunderstandings can be avoided. Real conflicts of interest will remain and cannot be eradicated by information. However, information given to the top officers of the local by management on such matters as layoffs, production changes, and introduction of new machines can clear away many obstacles and turn the parties to the more intractable problems. The burden of communicative activities, narrowly defined, probably falls on management. Since the latter initiates most shop actions, it is the source of most of the information that the workers and the union want and need to know. Most companies have no regular policy of providing information to union officers or representatives. The parties exchange information informally as they happen to meet or whenever a management official be-

ADJUDICATION

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ENOUGH

37

lieves that certain information is pertinent to the interests of the union or the workers. Informal channels are probably a good means of exchanging information, but they are highly dependent upon personal relations. Changes in personnel disrupt these channels and can leave gaps in the flow of information at critical times. While a few of the foremen interviewed favored more work information for the union representatives, none seemed too concerned one way or the other. No union representative had any complaints about the kind or quality of information he received from management. Most felt that they knew well enough how to get the information they felt they needed. TRAINING

Most union locals and companies have some kind of training program for their representatives. Some programs are extremely elaborate, with extensive use of the latest visual-aid materials. But almost all are of less value as aids in training than the expense and talent involved would seem to promise. The foremen and shop representatives who must deal with grievances daily, but not as full-time professionals, want training in methods and exposure to knowledge that will be useful and pertinent to their problems. Their handling of grievances is largely informal and involves a good deal of administrative problem-solving and giveand-take. The training that these men receive is all too frequently given by men who have had litde or no experience in the shop, or who knew shop life as it was in the past. These teachers propound the high-level complexities of arbitration and judicial procedure. If they pose "shop problems" to the grievance-handlers, the problems often relate to incidents which are as unfamiliar to the ordinary foreman or steward as an arbitration hearing would be. Even with good teachers and relevant materials a training program will be only spottily successful. To many foremen, grievances are but a hindrance to their real work of getting production

38

ADJUDICATION

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NOT

ENOUGH

out, the work on which they are judged by their superiors. They cannot be bothered with the complexities of industrial relations. They try to run their own shows, and if they get into trouble they ask experts in the front office or the shop steward for help. The larger share of union representatives show a similar lack of interest. They hold office not so much because they care about grievance work as because they desire its prerogatives. Training sessions, on top of the demands of grievance work on the job and regular steward meetings, are a nuisance to be avoided if possible. If unavoidable, they are to be endured but not entered into. The apathy and lack of interest that lower-level foremen and shop stewards show toward training should not discourage unions or companies from sponsoring training programs but rather should serve as a warning against expecting any quick, measurable changes in grievance-handling. A minimum training program, such as group discussion of the meaning of the provisions of a contract, under the guidance of a top grievance representative or of local union or company negotiators, receives the highest commendation from foremen and shop representatives. Better understanding of an agreement gives them confidence that they can confront a problem or dispute with some understanding and sophistication.

III. Is Peaceful Settlement Possible?

AND MANAGEMENT CANNOT, of course, secure peaceful settlement of shop disputes and harmonious adjustment of daily problems simply by incorporating a grievance procedure into the collective agreement and promising to live in the spirit of friendship. Not only must all concerned accept the judicialadministrative system in good faith and perform their grievance duties responsibly, but they must also persistently attend to the complicated functioning of the system. Simple neglect of shop problems or lack of attention to grievance disputes by any representative can impair, if not break down, peaceful settlement, even if such was not the intention. In operation, the grievance system makes large demands upon the effort, honesty, patience, and understanding of men in management and the union. Slip-ups do happen, and men who handle grievances can become careless in their manner of settlement even where the union is fully accepted and foremen and shop representatives are well trained. Workers will sometimes walk out or interfere with production because of a single incident which seems to them particularly unjustified or damaging to their rights and integrity. In one plant a foreman ordered a heavy reel of belting moved by a defective overhead crane. The committeeman refused to follow the order, arguing that without the safety clutch, which was broken, the men were risking their lives. The foreman sent the committeeman home, and immediately the whole department walked out in protest. In another firm a walkout occurred when a foreman insulted the local's vice-president. The local union had only recently, UNION

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after a bitter struggle, ousted the Communists from office when the foreman called in the vice-president to help settle a dispute in the machine shop. During a heated discussion the incensed foreman had turned to the union officer and yelled: "The capitalistic system is here to stay and you might as well get that through your head. You commies don't come in here and tell me how to run my department." "Well, we shut him down," the vicepresident of the local said in telling the story. "The men had started walking off before I got to the switches." Similar incidents produced strong reactions among workers in other plants. The decision of a plant manager to keep the plant gates closed during lunch hour, enforced with no prior announcement or discussion with the union, provoked a walkout. A disgruntled worker, suspended for three days on a proven charge of insubordination after a full hearing before his union representative, misled his fellow workers into believing that he had been discharged without a hearing. The crew downed their tools and were leaving the building when the union representative caught up with them and explained the real situation. Of greater concern than an occasional slip-up is the more avoidable breakdown of regular grievance activities. When complaints remain unanswered, grievances unsettled, and problems unsolved, the workers become sensitive and tension builds up. A foreman may fear to admit his mistakes and blame shop changes for the extraordinary number of grievances, or he may blame the impersonal industrial relations office for its red-tape delay in answering grievances. (Union representatives prefer to charge industrial relations with willful delay.) A divisional superintendent in one large plant explained that "The cause of slowdowns, walkouts, and big problems is a long-time build-up of dissatisfaction over changes, rates, working conditions—almost anything. But it takes a while to build up." A foreman in another plant said that his experience led him to believe that "When the company [i.e., industrial relations] acts slowly in handling grievances, the men get impatient and tired. They begin to talk

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41

about closing up the shop. And if they don't go that far, you will still know about it." Like the other men responsible for maintaining peaceful settlement of grievances, foremen prefer to shift blame for failure from themselves to others. In the industrial relations office, staff men complain that line supervisors refuse to take any responsibility for settling matters at their own level: Higher supervisors rally to the defense of the offending foreman. The grievance is denied as ridiculous in the first step, and that answer is sustained in succeeding steps until the industrial relations department is involved. The buck is passed to us; then we have to battle by telephone, and if we grant the union's demand, the blame is on us. Soon the climate is set. Grievances pass rapidly through the supervisory steps and are forgotten. The union becomes accustomed to rejecting the answers of supervisors. The major problems are lumped with the minor problems in a flood of paper work and all remains there for months awaiting belated negotiations.

So a staff officer explains a situation that irritates workers and supervisors, undermines peaceful settlement, and leads to disrupted production lines and even walkouts. An industrial relations staff does not always contribute to peaceful settlement. It may duck its responsibility to decide against line supervisors and may send troublesome cases to arbitration, thereby unduly delaying grievance settlements. Or it may interpret an agreement so strictly as to scare line supervisors away from shop settlement and choke off the quick, informal negotiations that dispose of most shop problems. Or it may simply let grievances pile up unattended through carelessness. Union representatives can also help bring about a breakdown of judicial and administrative activities, simply through inattention to their own work or through using grievances for their own political ends. A politically ambitious steward may be tempted to demonstrate his militancy by pushing every problem to the point of arbitration and may thus overload the grievance machinery. 1 Or a weak union representative may be unwilling to turn down worthless grievances. In fact, any of the men concerned with grievances can contribute in his own way to a break-

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down of the grievance process. All must be ready and willing to meet the demands that the process continually makes upon them. The Demands

of Adjudication

and

Administration

As conditions of work change, grievance procedures may also need to be changed. Students of industrial relations have warned that to insure peaceful grievance settlement, unions and managements need to be imaginative in developing new and special procedures for handling problems that arise from new production methods and tools and from varying work materials.2 A successful grievance system requires union and management representatives to concern themselves quite as much with preventing disputes as with settling them. Top management, in not evaluating the meaning of a pattern of grievances or looking for their general significance, may ignore a valuable line of communication from the workers.3 A lack of preventive work by management may allow shop tensions to build dangerously high and make constructive peaceful settlement impossible. Union leaders, too, may concentrate too narrowly upon immediate grievance settlement and fail to use the full potential of the system. Top union officers must guard against robbing shop stewards of a reasonable degree of spontaneity in the use of the grievance system.4 The national union and central management may concentrate control of industrial relations, a situation which drags out the lines of grievance settlement. Central control works against prompt action and can lead to settlements that show little understanding of local conditions and that may thus embitter the grieving workers and shop representatives.5 Long-term contracts, like centralized control, are convenient for head officers of the union and the firm, but they make flexible, expeditious grievance adjustment necessary at the local level. Unions and managements generally have sought to realize the promise of peaceful settlement by improving the grievance procedure as well as other related methods for handling shop

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43

problems. Today nonpeaceful settlement of grievances is seldom due to outright rejection by management or union of the use either of a grievance system for handling shop problems or of arbitration as a final grievance step. In some industries it is true that managers and workers appear to have accepted peaceful settlement less than wholeheartedly. Clark Kerr and Abraham Siegel have suggested that in these industries the peaceful conventions of the wider community are not effective.6 Then, too, certain unorganized or newly organized employers resist any kind of union participation in the shop, granting at best the form but not the substance of a grievance system. Despite exceptions, though, so many unions and managements do accept the grievance system today that when grievance settlements are not achieved peacefully, the fact is popularly taken to indicate a failure of the parties to meet the system's demanding conditions rather than a failure of the parties to accept the system itself.7 For this study, early grievance provisions of a number of companies were compared with present provisions of the same companies to find out how the parties have changed their grievance procedures to meet new and changing problems. The number of changes indicates that the unions and managements have tried over the years to improve the grievance system and to contribute more effectively to peaceful settlement. For example, in the Jones and Laughlin agreements with the United Steel Workers (earlier, with the Steel Workers' Organizing Committee) between 1941 and 1956, the parties changed the provisions to specify the information that must be contained in a written grievance, to make clearer the time limits within which grievances may be filed and answered, to regularize arbitration procedures, and to allow the waiving of grievance steps by mutual agreement. In the B. F. Goodrich agreements with the United Rubber Workers between 1945 and 1956 the parties changed the grievance provisions to speed up the handling of grievances and to provide for penalties if the workers interrupt production. Their more recent agreements have reduced the time limit for

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answering grievances and have given top priority to important general grievance problems. The company also now compensates stewards for time spent on grievance work. The intent of most of these changes in both companies, and those found in other agreements too, has been to facilitate prompt, equitable handling of grievances. 8 However, the most important improvements in grievance-handling have probably not been procedural. The changes that may have contributed most to peaceful settlement of grievances and shop problems have been in the attitude of the grievance participants and in their preparation for grievance-handling. T o induce shop representatives and foremen to confer constructively and to settle departmental problems reasonably among themselves is no easy task even under a perfect procedure. They must be trained in the technique of grievance-handling and through experience gain a thorough understanding of their obligations and their rights. They must be familiar with the collective agreement and have an up-to-date knowledge of the modifications and interpretations resulting from grievance settlements and arbitration decisions. But they must also learn to respect the spirit of the "law" of the shop, to live within its restrictions and to enjoy their right to confer. The president of a local union described grievance-handling after the first agreement went into effect in 1941: When we first organized we didn't have much experience in settling grievances and we went by the book. No matter what the case was, we took it up step by step. If a man took a problem to the superintendent before he had taken it to the lower step, it was refused, and he was told to start below. Now we settle without writing at whatever level the problem happens to come.

Certainly most problems have to be settled at the first steps if the general grievance committee and industrial relations officers are to deal effectively with the less numerous but broader problems of policy and contract interpretation. Most unions and managements have come to see the wisdom of not emphasizing technicalities and formalities. At one time the

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45

management of a certain tire company refused to process grievances if names were misspelled on the written forms. Its director of industrial relations said that the company had since learned the hard way that its aim should be to facilitate, not to obstruct, settlement of the workers' problems. A local union president expressed a similar opinion: "From my experience, IH say that it's better to give a bad answer to the men than to give no answer at all." When the union organizes workers and establishes representatives at a place of work, it promises to right wrongs done to the workers, to settle complaints, and to stop arbitrary treatment by foremen. If the union does not make these promises explicit, they are certainly implicit in the appearance of a worker-controlled organization in the shop with special rights and protection. A union in the plant guarantees that management will direct workers according to rules and regular procedures, not according to whim and favoritism. Workers, like stewards and foremen, have to leam what they can accomplish through the grievance procedure, what are its full potentialities—and its limits. At first they often have an exaggerated notion of what they can properly expect to accomplish. Accomplishments may come with particular difficulty in a newly organized plant where the lower supervisors resent the loss of their authority and where the union representatives are less than proficient in carrying out their duties. A machine plant, organized in 1954, experienced at first a large number of "quickie" walkouts, slowdowns, and interruptions of work. The local president, looking back, explained the trouble in the following way: We couldn't handle the grievances, and the company wouldn't give us answers. After a sitdown we'd get them settled pretty fast. The people, being new to the union, expected more than we could get from the contract. They didn't want to wait for the grievances to go up the regular way. You got to remember that there'd been forty-eight years of unattended grievances. A lot of them you'd think the workers were nuts for bringing them up, but when the union came in they opened

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up and let go. All of us, the foremen and stewards and men, were all ignorant of the contract and that added to the confusion too.

Later, with more experience under the grievance system, workers learn what problems can be treated, how much time it takes, and the kinds of settlements that they can expect. Thus, they build up reasonable expectations concerning the grievance system and come to rely upon it to protect their rights, through tradition, past practice, and the collective agreement. They become used to having management treat their complaints with seriousness and respect. If these mature expectations are denied or frustrated or if the workers come to feel that arbitrary, discriminatory treatment is replacing the regular system for maintaining their rights, they may then feel they have to make known the neglect of their problems and to protest the failure of the grievance system in the only effective way they can: by disrupting work and production. No matter who is responsible for neglecting or ignoring their complaints—whether union or management—the workers become dissatisfied and doubtful about the basic assumption of peaceful settlement if their shop problems do not receive prompt attention. Peaceful processing of grievances makes sense to workers only as long as it assures them that they will be recompensed for any wrong done them by management. If they file grievances with their representatives or simply complain to them and nothing happens, they argue that management has unilaterally rejected the mutually agreed, jointly decided terms of work. A common excuse heard from workers is that such rejection of an agreement by management releases the men from their promise not to interrupt production.

The Union Apology for Disruptive

Tactics

For the record, union representatives defend disruptive tactics by blaming management for frustrating the legitimate expectations of the workers. In one arbitration brief a division chairman

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47

defended a wildcat strike with the following typical union argument: When a grievance is not being processed in good faith, it is sometimes necessary for the workers to take forceful action and assert their rights by work stoppages so that management will know that the existing conditions are intolerable.

A spokesman for a work group in another plant told management at a grievance hearing: You can't expect to have peace and harmony in the plant when large numbers of grievances go unsettied for long periods of time . . . Delay in the settlement of grievances results in the distrust and hotheadedness which finally breaks out in work stoppages.

In support of their claim that management negligently or willfully delays grievance settlements and thus provokes the workers, stewards and union officers invariably point to the current backlog of grievances. Any backlog of grievances at the industrial relations or arbitration level is taken as a sign of management's sabotage of the grievance process and of lack of good faith in dealing with the union. Support for this claim is difficult to find in the grievance records. Backlogs of grievances vary considerably over time. Sometimes they are higher and sometimes they are lower than whatever is currently considered to be the proper level. Whether the backlog is high or low, however, union representatives always complain about it. (Backlogs among plants of the same size examined for this study varied within approximately the same range year after year. The length of time for processing grievances did not vary in a systematic way among the plants of the different industries studied.) The protest by union representatives that management refuses to settle grievances fairly and promptly is a continuing and longstanding one. Many of the news-sheets put out by union locals have warned ever since the locals began that the grievance process was about to collapse from misuse or lack of use. While illogically pointing with pride to grievance settlements achieved

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by this division chairman or that president, these news-sheets at the same time emphasize the failure of the grievance system to meet the indisputable needs of the workers. Typical of protests made time and again are the following headlines and lead sentences: Company Delays Time Study Two-four Weeks. The union time-study engineer cannot keep up with the backlog of grievances at Plant B where management is cutting rates day and night. We are processing piece-rate grievances as quickly as possible but we are pushed to the wall. Our grievances are gradually being brought up-to-date, do not lose patience. You have seen us all in the foundry, day and night, forcing management to comply with the contract they agreed to. Surely some of the responsibility to live up to the agreement lays [sic] with them. Even as they emphasize management's lack of concern for the workers' grievances, union representatives complain of management's attitude toward pay-rate settlements. Their complaints sometimes reveal what might be guessed: that the protest is not so much against delay and neglect as against the settlement upon which management insists. One chief union representative told a director of industrial relations in a given grievance session: "When you cut rates arbitrarily [even though empowered to do so by the agreement] you're distinctly forcing people to stop work." The president of another local warned the plant manager that "Many walkouts would be avoided if the company would consult with the union [i.e., in this case, wait for union approval] before revising piecework standards or working conditions." If there is delay in settling a rate case, it is as often the result of the union's stalling as management's slowness. Workers and stewards try to postpone final decisions in hope of further adjustments. If union representatives can convince themselves and the workers that they have no adequate grievance procedure or that management refuses to use the one they do have, they can rationalize their disruptive tactics as a protest and thus as a not un-

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49

justifiable action. Even national union officers have some sympathy with walkouts, slowdows, and other disruptive tactics if used to protest a breakdown of judicial and administrative procedures. They may not literally sanction them, but they look upon them tolerantly. In effect, shop stewards argue, workers do not violate the grievance system and the union promise of peaceful settlement when they disrupt production; rather, they resort to disruptive tactics only to support the peaceful system and its full and efficient use. In using such an argument, of course, the workers are always right. While workers and their stewards may try to justify their disruptive tactics in terms of a protest against management's mishandling of grievances and neglect of job problems, such excuses are valid only occasionally. A few flareups—brought about by neglect of grievance work, misuse of authority, or lack of reasonableness—would be understandable, but the effects of disruptive tactics are so serious that either management or union or both parties will try to remedy matters quickly. Unauthorized action taken by workers can, in fact, pose a serious challenge to the authority of the local union. Hence, any disruption in the shop should alert line and staff to examine carefully their grievancehandling and encourage them to take steps to improve it. Once management shows a real concern for peaceful grievance settlement and makes a determined effort to remove possible causes of workers' protests, it should soon uncover support within the local unions. Union representatives, adept at politics and more peaceful negotiation, discover enlarged opportunities for their talents and set about enlarging their influence and improving the union's handling of grievances. An honest effort by management to treat grievances fairly and promptly brings forth an honest effort from the local union and weakens the hotheads and "radicals" who prefer to use walkouts and disruptive tactics in any situation. Before company and union officials had fully accepted, pre-

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pared for, and used the grievance system, one could legitimately blame disruptive tactics and the absence of peaceful settlement upon poor grievance-handling. Today that excuse can hardly cover all incidents of nonpeaceful grievance activity. There are still shortcomings in the grievance system—in adjudicating disputes, administering the agreement, and solving shop problems —but managers and union men throughout industry generally work honestly and in continuing good faith to overcome these. A fair observation, I believe, is that the judicial and administrative functions in almost all unionized firms have greatly improved over the past fifteen to twenty-five years and are not susceptible to basic improvements. At least neither union nor management men nor labor experts have suggested any such improvements. Therefore, regular use of nonpeaceful methods in grievance settlement should not persist. One might think that the wildcat strike, for example, should disappear from all American industries. With maturity of collective bargaining, continued improvement in grievance work, and general acceptance of arbitration, there seems little excuse for the nonpeaceful settlement of grievances. Disruptive Grievance Tactics in American Industry Though evidence of disruptive grievance tactics and nonpeaceful grievance settlement is more suggestive than conclusive, it is persuasive enough to raise the question: why, after twenty years of experience with the best grievance procedures which able men could devise, do American workers regularly engage in grievance tactics which are disruptive to production and destructive of harmonious shop relations? Unauthorized walkouts—or the threat of them—the most dramatic of the disruptive tactics, are a familiar and even routine part of grievance negotiations in such industries as coal mining, city transit, construction, automobile, steel, metal-working, and

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51

longshoring.9 According to Gerald G. Somers, wildcat strikes are a frequent tactic of the coal miners and an important influence in their grievance settlements. The number of wildcat strikes is not declining but continues to play a significant role in local labormanagement relations in the industry. Through "wildcats" the miners apply pressure to the regular grievance machinery on behalf of claims which have little or no basis in the agreement. In a steel union local of 14,000 members, Joel Seidman, Jack London, Bernard Karsh, and Daisey Tagliacozzo found that workers take aggressive action, such as departmental walkouts or sitdowns and slowdowns, to put pressure on departmental supervisors for concessions. Seidman and his co-researchers found that the workers of a 3,400-member metal-workers local engage from time to time in a kind of guerrilla warfare, flooding the grievance machinery, deliberately walking out of grievance meetings, imposing a ban on overtime, conducting slowdowns, and calling "quickie" walkouts. They report that, as almost every time-study man knows, workers resort to slowdowns particularly when they are dissatisfied with the established piece rates. After examining the slowdown as a union tactic throughout a number of industries, Seidman concludes that the slowdown is commonly used where the nature of the work and the type of wage payments allow workers to bring pressure upon management by limiting production. George Strauss notes that in making on-the-job agreements, union business agents and workers in the building trades use the threat of walkouts, mass absenteeism, grievance strikes, slowdowns, and legalistic observance of all rules and safety codes to gain terms favorable to themselves. Often the men seek and gain extras not allowed by the over-all agreement, such as wash-up time, higher pay-rates, and special bonuses for rainy days. In an earlier study of grievance work in auto plants, Neil W. Chamberlain found much evidence that lesser union officials use their power to frustrate or countermand the work assignments of

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management representatives through group walkouts. With such actions they force departmental settlements favorable to themselves and to the workers immediately concerned. On the New York transit lines Lois MacDonald noted that workers used pressure tactics to gain job concessions. Wildcat strikes and slowdowns or refusal to work overtime and to take on added duties were the usual tactics. Even after improvements in grievance procedures, workers continued to use these tactics, though not with the same freedom and abandon as before. Melville Dalton, reporting his observations in three large plants, called attention to the pressure tactics and bargaining involved in handling many grievances and shop problems. Workers frequently threatened or initiated wildcat strikes. Union representatives took advantage of tight production schedules to force foremen to make concessions, or they threatened foremen with grievances which, if carried to higher levels, would reveal to top managers the mistakes or general ineptitude of the foremen. Charles R. Walker, Robert H. Guest, and Arthur N. Turner, in their study The Foreman on the Assembly Line,10 examine the pressures that workers can and do impose upon foremen in an automobile assembly plant. Absenteeism and a general lack of co-operation can quickly force a foreman to find out what kind of grievance settlement pays off. ("It's very easy for the men to rebel, and then things go to hell before you know it, and the foreman is left holding the bag.") Leonard Sayles and George Strauss in their field studies of twenty local unions in a wide variety of industries describe as common practice in daily grievance work the whole range of disruptive tactics already mentioned. A shop steward threatened to throw thirteen grievances at a foreman and embarrass him in front of top management if he did not settle a problem "right." Other groups follow the practice, they report, of "corkscrewing" production a little bit, taking it up and taking it down, thereby putting some pressure on the company to hurry things up. The way to get action, the workers feel, is to cut down on production.

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They report that dissatisfied workers have found such self-help techniques as sitdowns, slowdowns, and mass absenteeism excellent means of exerting pressure on management. While a number of the writers mentioned here ascribe the use of the disruptive tactics to untrained, immature leadership, weak grievance procedures, and random aberrations in the grievance activities of workers, the evidence appears too persistent and too widespread to be so easily explained. The only comprehensive data that provide a measure for any type of disruptive tactics are those for work stoppages collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since the BLS does not attempt to separate legitimate from illegitimate work stoppages, the data do not directly measure the incidence of wildcat strikes, walkouts, sitdowns, stopwork meetings, and other variations of the strike tactic. However, data on work stoppages of short duration (one to three days and under a week) may indicate the relative incidence of illegitimate work stoppages, if one can assume that work stoppages used to force grievance settlements are characteristically of short duration. Such an assumption is in fact reasonable, because the nature, purpose, and consequence of wildcats should induce wildcat strikers to leave their jobs for only a short time. Since grievance procedures are designed to give workers a voice in plant decisions affecting their rights and an opportunity to air their complaints, wildcat strikes appear to be a substitute means of expression when regular procedures are inoperative or when the workers have no orderly, peaceful procedure for calling attention to their problems. The wildcat strike then becomes a dramatic gesture of protest to gain attention, a purpose which is accomplished by a work stoppage of a few hours or, at most, a few days. 11 The possible costs of a wildcat strike are a serious matter to the workers involved and should keep them from continuing the strike for long. They lose wages; they receive no compensatory pay from the union; and they are subject to possible severe disciplinary penalties from management and perhaps from the

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union. Management and union also suffer from a wildcat strike. The consequences should therefore spur both to act swiftly to get the strikers back to work in the shortest time consonant with an appropriate resolution of the issue. If the immediately involved parties do not settle the strike quickly, the national union and top management of the firm will soon be drawn in and add their pressure to end the work stoppage quickly. Assuming, then, that short strikes indicate the relative incidence of illegitimate strikes, one finds no long-term decline. Whether measured by incidence or by the number of workers involved, work stoppages of short duration since 1941 show cyclical fluctuations but no clear trend up or down. (See Table I.) Table I Number of Work Stoppages of Short Duration, and Number of Workers Involved

1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950

Work Stoppages *

Workers Involved

1094 1271 2468 2780 1925 1169 838 866 976 1422

635,000 432,000 941,000 1,002,000 830,000 933,000 406,000 323,000 414,000 604,000

Work Stoppages *

b

1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959

1611 1555 1424 965 1296 1144 999 997 906

1941-59, Workers Involved

b

669,000 671,000 675,000 362,000 941,000 358,000 324,000 400,000 244 000

* All known work stoppages arising out of labor-management disputes involving six or more workers and continuing from one full day or shift up througn three full days are included. * All workers made idle for one shift or longer in establishments directly involved in these stoppages are included. Sources: Data for 1941-50 taken from Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Labor Statistics (1950 ed.), Bulletin No. 1016. Rest of data from Bureau of Labor Statistics, Analyses of Work Stoppages, Bulletins Nos. 1090, 1136, 1163, 1184, 1196, 1218, 1234, 1258, and 1278.

In good times short work stoppages increase; as unemployment rises, short work stoppages decline in number. During World War

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II, when long work stoppages were inadmissible, short work stoppages reached an unprecedented peak. In 1944 the BLS recorded 2,780 work stoppages of one to three days, in which a little over a million workers were involved. They dropped off sharply in the immediate postwar years when unions were engaged in long, severe economic strikes. In 1951-52 they reached a second peak when the economy was booming; they dropped off in 1954 and rose again in 1955, only to decline through 1959. If the use of illegitimate work stoppages in the grievance process is approximately indicated by one- to three-day work stoppages, 12 this most dramatic of disruptive tactics is not a disappearing phenomenon. Some industries show a consistent strike record that suggests a high incidence of short strikes over at least the past thirteen years. Five basic or mass-production industries—primary steel, bituminous and anthracite mining, tires, and motor vehicles—have had not only strikes of short duration, but also high worker participation in strikes. The frequency of the short strikes is highest in coal-mining and tires. (See Table II.) In eight years out of thirteen, work stoppages in the primary steel, anthracite coal, and automobile industries averaged less than a week in length; in nine out of thirteen years, the work stoppages averaged less than a week in the bituminous coal and rubber tire industries. All of the above five industries contend with many more short, illegitimate walkouts—i.e., wildcat strikes—than the BLS figures indicate. Of such walkouts in the coal-mining industry Somers writes: Unfortunately there are no complete records of local work stoppages in the coal industry. Many of the suspensions are for very brief periods and are not noted outside of the mine involved. However, the existence of a significant number of local stoppages can hardly be disputed. . . . The possibility of a strike before, during, or after a grievance settlement is one which neither the coal operators nor the arbitrator can afford to take lightly.13 The American Iron and Steel Institute reports that during 1956-58 the steel industry lost 729,200 tons of production in 788 wildcat

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Table II Characteristics of Strikes in Five Basic or Mass-Production Industries, 1947-59 INDUSTRY

DURATION *

PARTICIPATION RATE *

Man-days Idle per Worker Per cent of Invoiced b Workers Primary steel Bituminous coal Tires and inner tubes Anthracite coal Motor vehicles

FREQUENCY *

No. of Work Stoppages Production Production per 10,000 Workers Involved

4.29

23

2.0

4.45

43

11.4

5.46

92

4.8

5.03

29

4.7

6.71

20

1.3

• Figures are medians for 1947-59. b "Man-Days Idle per Worker Involved [in work stoppages]" is an average and is thus more sensitive to strikes of long duration than to those of short duration. In any one year the incidence of short strikes could be completely masked by a few long strikes involving a considerable number of workers. " Blast furnaces, steel works, and rolling and finishing mills. Sources: Work stoppage data taken from Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletins on Analyses of Work Stoppages, 1947-59. Data on production workers taken from Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Payrolls, 1947-48; Employment and Earnings, Supplement Issues, May, 1955, May, 1958, and May, 1959.

strikes and that during 1953-55 the industry lost 7.7 million manhours of work through wildcat strikes, the equivalent of a threeday shutdown of the whole industry.14 Replies by industrial relations directors of most of the rubber tire plants to personal inquiries indicate that wildcat strikes are, and have been, very common occurrences in almost all their plants, ranging from as many as one hundred in one year to no more than one or two. One large plant recently lost 238,000 manhours in wildcat strikes, or the equivalent of nearly a week of lost time for all its employees. For the industry as a whole only one figure is available: that for 1951. In that year the industry reported 3.5 million man-hours lost in 182 wildcat strikes.13 In the

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last two or three years a number of industrial relations directors reported considerable decline in the number of wildcat strikes, but they are by no means a thing of the past. From the automobile industry no direct evidence of illegal work stoppages is available, but responsible union and management officials report that wildcat strikes are a continuing problem in the plants and are a device not infrequently used by the workers. While wildcat strikes are the most dramatic tactic used by workers in the grievance process, they are certainly not the only one. In every plant studied in the course of my research, even where wildcat strikes were no problem, union and management representatives used nonpeaceful, disruptive tactics to force grievance demands upon each other. Moreover, all those concerned with grievance settlement commonly assume that some such tactic will be used. Though at times reluctant to admit it, or so used to it that they are unaware of the implications of their actions, management and union officials in all of the plants studied bargain over grievances and more often than not settle grievances or their underlying problems on the basis of their relative bargaining position in the shop. They may refer or appeal to their rights under the agreement, but they are not apt to respect the letter of the agreement, or even its spirit, if the shop bargaining position does not support it. Grievance bargaining and its disruptive tactics are not an occasional, anomalous event in the shop; they are normal practices within the grievance system, making up a significant, if not the largest, portion of all grievance work. To illustrate grievance bargaining and the disruptive tactics involved, a case history is related in some detail in the following chapter. It represents not so much a typical grievance situation common to all plants as a revelation of the typical forces that play upon the participants and lead them to try to force a grievance settlement in line with their own parochial interests.

IV. Appearances and Realities

THE FOLLOWING STORY is told as the grievance records appear to describe it and as the men involved disclosed it in all its complexity. The persons, the plant, and the type of product are all disguised. Since the information was given in confidence, the incidents are related as if they had happened in a tire plant, but in meaning and significance they could be duplicated in any of the industrial plants studied.

The Formal

Grievance

Grievance records of the case, including the arbitration hearing and decision, reveal a rate problem arising from an alleged health and safety hazard on tread-tuber Line No. 3. The incident occurred during the second shift of May 20, 1960, when the tuber crew was working on treads for tubeless, earthmover tires. Earthmover treads are considerably thicker and heavier than regular passenger tire treads and hold the heat generated in mixing the rubber stock considerably longer. Under normal circumstances, a water spray cools the rubber strip as it moves from the sausagegrinder-like extruder (or tuber) along a 25-foot conveyor line, past a cutter blade which slices the continuous strip into lengths ready to be built into green tires. Shortly after work had begun on the earthmover treads, at about eight o'clock, the nozzles behind the cutter blade became choked, and as a result very little, if any, water sprayed the rubber strip. This condition is not unusual; it occurred on a number of occasions before and after the incident of May 20. The tuber

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men have a glove allowance in their regular rate to enable them to provide their own gloves. The company provides asbestos pads for extra hand protection if the treads are hotter than usual. Shortly after 8:00 P.M. the committeeman for Line No. 3 complained to the supervisor and shift foreman about the "hot treads." He asked that the men be transferred to Line No. 5 to work on its regular tread stock for 14-inch passenger tires until the nozzles were fixed. The supervisor replied that No. 3 "was the first preference line and he had no choice but to get all the production he could off it." 1 The shift foreman issued pads to the crew. At about 8:15 P.M., two men reported to the plant hospital, one with a sinus headache and the other with a pain in his back. Both returned in about forty minutes. Then between nine and ten o'clock most of the crew complained of burned hands and fingers and reported to the hospital. They returned to the line with ointment and gauze bandages on their hands. The committeeman called the division chairman at his home at about a quarter to ten. The chairman arrived half an hour later to find, in his words, "the men really looking like they had been in combat. They should have been sent home since their hands were thumping so they could hardly work. The supervisor did let Nicols, the employee whose hands were most badly burned, goof off the rest of the shift." 2 Five working days later, on May 27, the committeeman filed a written grievance with the division foreman, charging that the employees had not been able to make normal production because of their burns from the "hot treads." He asked for payment of the off-standard rate of 90 per cent of base rate for that part of the shift during which the men had worked on the "hot treads." He also charged the company with violation of the safety and health provisions of the company-wide agreement. The participants were unable to settle the grievance among themselves at any step, and the union grievance committee certified the case for arbitration. An arbitrator heard the case on Feb-

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ruary 9, 1961, and gave his decision a month later. Through all the grievance steps the arguments of the union and of management were essentially the same: The union maintained that the employees could not with any facility use the cumbersome, rigid asbestos pads when they had to handle the thick and heavy earthmover treads. For the company to require them to load "hot treads" with only gloves for protection would, and did, lead to bodily injury. In either case, the men could not maintain their usual rate of work, through no fault of their own. The company produced evidence from the company doctor who examined the hands of Jack Nicols on May 21, the day after the incident. The doctor found only slight redness on some of Nicols' fingers and no blisters, though by union admission he was the most seriously injured. The company claimed that Nicols had been negligent in maintaining his gloves and had tried to work with a pair full of holes. There was no evidence that any of the men with good gloves had any burns. The company also called the arbitrator's attention to a safety report made a few months before the incident of May 20 in response to some earlier complaints. The relevant portion of the report stated: ' T h e temperature of the materials [earthmover tread when nozzles not functioning] is not excessive. W e find it fair and reasonable to require employees to handle materials of this type with gloves." The arbitrator denied the union's request for off-standard payment and ordered a study of performance delays in handling "hot treads," if any such existed. Should delays be found, they were to be allowed for in the job standards. The grievance records for the tread-tubing department further reveal that on May 23, the next working day after the "hot tread" incident, each of the other shift crews of tuber Line 3 filed grievances. One grievance claimed that on May 20 the foreman had worked an operator out of his classification. The other complained that on May 20 the foreman had refused pay for fifteen minutes of guaranteed 90 per cent on off-standard conditions. On May 27 when the division supervisor and union representatives formally

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discussed the "hot tread" grievance, the tuber crews filed three more grievances. One complained that a recent dismissal of an employee for overloading the tuber had been unfair since the foreman had, before and since, himself requested more than normal loads; the second protested the recent closing of a nearby storeroom in which the men ate their lunches; and the third complained that on May 19 a helper had worked out of his classification. The only other information provided by the grievance records is that for about six weeks after the incident the number of grievances filed, and of conferences held, at the first and second steps rose considerably above the customary number. In the weeks following the denial by the industrial relations manager of the "hot tread" grievance at the third step, the number of grievances dropped back to normal. None of the grievances filed while the "hot tread" grievance was active in the first, second, and third steps reached the industrial relations office, and most of them did not go beyond the first step. A cursory review of the records of the "hot tread" case gives the impression of judicial handling of a grievance. Successively higher levels of management and finally an arbitrator judged the workers' claim to rights under the health and safety provisions of the agreement. A closer study of the records, however, raises doubts that the union representatives and workers viewed the case as strictly a judicial matter to be decided on the basis of previously held rights. First, why did the first two men who went to the hospital not complain of burns from "hot treads"? Only after the complaining workers learned that earthmover treads were a priority production item and were reminded by the two men who first went to the hospital that sick calls were legitimate did they disrupt production. Second, did the workers mean to influence the "hot tread" decision by flooding the division foreman with grievances after the tread incident had occurred? Third, was the matter of "hot treads" worth the effort and cost to the union? The union's evidence was hardly compelling or even con-

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vincing. The actions of the committeemen and workers suggest that another problem was really at issue or that the grievance process was being used for purposes not disclosed through the formal grievance. The Real "Hot Tread" Case Both the committeemen and the shift foreman agreed when interviewed privately that the immediate cause of the trouble was a dispute over allowed time, not over "hot treads." The tuber machine had broken down at the end of the day shift, at 4:00 P.M., and while the maintenance man repaired it, the foreman had had the four-to-midnight crew on Line No. 3 clean up the line and work area. For such work during a breakdown the men are guaranteed 90 per cent of usual earnings. The tuber went back into full service at seven forty-five. Eight o'clock to eight-twenty is a paid lunch period, but the men had eaten lunch earlier and were prepared to work straight through to midnight so that they might make their full daily earning. 3 Shortly after eight o'clock the committeeman asked the shift foreman to give the men 90 per cent up through the usual lunch period so that the crew could "make out" in spite of the nearly four hours that they had not been on piecework. "I told him," the foreman said, "that I'd give them fifteen minutes, that is until eight o'clock at 90 per cent. That would be four hours. I thought that would be enough time for them to make out. They certainly could make the base rate and we don't guarantee earnings. 4 If he didn't like what I'd given him, well, he could take it higher up." The committeeman, feeling that he had received a brush-off, was highly incensed at the foreman's attitude. He had, of course, no grievance which could possibly be sustained at a higher level. When, ten to fifteen minutes after the foreman had turned down the committeeman, the tubermen found themselves handling "hot treads," about which they had complained before, they protested to the supervisor. After they learned that the treads were

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a preference run, two of the men found they needed to go to the hospital. Then when Nicols complained of burning his hands, the whole crew convinced itself that its health and safety were being jeopardized. Under other circumstances the foreman's curt refusal to discuss the matter further and the committeeman's reaction to this refusal might not have been sufficient to produce what amounted to a covert work stoppage. But, as will be explained, the shop management and the union's shop representatives were already quite ready to provoke and to be provoked. As members of the crew took off for the hospital, the committeeman, fearing that he had instigated a walkout, put in a call for Charlie Howard, the division chairman. At the same time the shift foreman called the division foreman, Buchanan, at his home. Buchanan told the foreman that he did not believe that there would be an actual walkout if Howard arrived at the shop in time. He agreed wholeheartedly with the foreman that he should make no further concessions on the allowed time. Charlie Howard arrived about ten-thirty. After talking to the committeeman and the crew, he was not convinced that the men had received any serious bums, though they undoubtedly had been inconvenienced. Explaining his stand later, he said that if the men had not been in bad shape when they left for the hospital, "they sure were convinced of it when they came back. The nurse was pretty dumb and had put Unguentine on and bandaged their hands in yards of gauze. They were pretty worked up after that." However, he argued with the shift foreman that all the crew should be allowed to go home. The men were injured, he maintained, and they could not get out much production for the rest of the shift anyway. When the foreman refused to shut down the line, Howard talked the men into returning to work. He promised to take the matter up with Buchanan the first thing on Monday, and he asked that a delegation of the crew as well as the committeeman come with him. On Monday, the next working day, Howard, the committeeman,

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Nicols, and two other crew members showed up at the division office to discuss the incident with Buchanan, the shift foreman, and the supervisor. The arguments were loud and long. Howard let the other union men do most of the talking. They were worked up about the burns and kept telling Buchanan how everyone had been covered with ointment and bandages. They wanted offstandard rate for the whole time that the "hot treads" were running. Nothing was said about the down-time allowance which had caused the original dispute. Buchanan told the union men that he would look into the matter but doubted very much that there was a legitimate complaint, since the company had investigated "hot treads" before. As the union men left Buchanan's office they threw onto his desk the out-of-classification and the off-standard grievances prepared by the shift crews, with the remark, as the foreman remembered it: "You don't need to go poking around looking for trouble; here's something that should keep you busy for a while." On Wednesday Charlie Howard stopped by again to talk with Buchanan about the "hot tread" matter. He suggested that the difficulty could be solved if the company allowed the extra twenty minutes for down-time work that the men had originally asked for. Buchanan remained adamant and told Howard that he was being unreasonable since the foreman had already given fifteen minutes to the crew. The department was on a strict labor budget, and he had to answer for any costs that didn't meet standard production expenses. He resented being told how he should run his division. Howard, with some heat, protested that he was not trying to run the division. He was simply trying to help Buchanan out. The boys were pretty worked up, as they always were about a safety problem. They had already been upset about the discharge of Sametti (another worker), and they were pressing him to grieve it. Sametti was guilty of overloading the tuber, he knew that. But then, Buchanan had ordered overloading lots of times himself. Now, he understood why Buchanan overloaded; he had

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to get the production out and that meant slipping by some of the regulations. Industrial relations would think it a bit peculiar, though, that Sametti should be fired for overloading when the division foreman had, at other times, not only allowed but actually asked the crew to overload the tuber to meet production schedules. Buchanan roared that Sametti had been fired for generally poor and careless work and Howard knew it. Howard waved a copy of the dismissal letter and pointed out that the letter referred only to the overloading offense. He left after a few more exchanges and said he'd be back to talk it over tomorrow. Buchanan immediately called the superintendent about the overloaded tuber. The superintendent thought that it would be embarrassing to have industrial relations find out that shop management did overload the tuber in emergencies. Someone had slipped up in not giving the full record of the dismissed man as the reason for discharge. The "hot tread" complaint in itself did not sound very strong to him. He thought that Howard was bluffing on it. Buchanan then called the assistant director of industrial relations and explained the "hot tread" complaint to him, saying that the real trouble was the crew's pique over allowed time. He wanted to know how well the complaint would stand up at the third level. The boys were worked up over it and pushing Howard on the safety angle. The assistant director gave his opinion that the union had no case at all on "hot treads." The matter had been thoroughly investigated only four months ago. Then he reminded Buchanan that Howard was having political difficulty in the tuber department and probably felt he had to fight for a worthless grievance. He was not in a strong position, and Buchanan should remember it when dealing with him. Meanwhile, Howard had met with his committeemen in the tuber department to determine their next moves. If they were to file a "hot tread" grievance, they had to turn it in on Friday, the fifth working day after the incident. Howard believed that they

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needed to put more pressure on Buchanan to force him "to see reason" and settle. They had him scared on the overloaded tuber, but in his present mood Buchanan was just as apt to cut off his nose to spite his face. One of the committeemen had an out-ofclassification case. He had not protested at the time that the supervisor had used a helper on the line to work on a special run on the 19th. He had not planned to say anything since they had been allowed to shut down the line twenty minutes early the next day, but if Buchanan was going to crack down, he was too. Howard suggested that they bring up the matter of the lunchroom. 5 Only if Buchanan were reasonable about the "hot treads" were they going to accept some other eating arrangement. On the morning of the twenty-seventh Howard talked with Buchanan and tried to settle the dispute. He offered to forget about the overloaded tuber and to settle the lunchroom matter amicably if the company would adjust the allowed time that the men had asked for on the night the trouble began. If they could not settle and Buchanan was going to go by the book, he and the boys would have to do the same. Buchanan refused the offer and that afternoon the union and management shop representatives met formally, as required by the grievance procedure, to discuss the "hot tread" grievance. They reached no settlement and the "hot tread," lunchroom, and out-of-classification grievances went into writing. Neither the division chairman nor the division foreman was happy about the state of affairs in the tuber department. As Buchanan explained: We had worked out a good relationship and ran this division to suit management and the workers [before the local reshuffled division chairmen for political reasons and Howard took over]. All of us were happy with the way things were done. . . . Now I bet I spend a quarter of my time on grievances; and difficulty is that they cut into production work. They take precedence over everything else. All we've had is confusion.

As the assistant director of industrial relations had suggested, Howard had little political support in the tuber department. He

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needed to win cases, yet he could not easily turn down poor complaints without making a bad situation worse. When he had taken over the department six months before, he had found that Buchanan and the former division chairman had made a dozen written and more unwritten supplementary agreements, all of which were unauthorized and a number of which contradicted the collective agreement. The local union president denounced the departmental agreements when Howard made them known. Buchanan and his subordinate foremen retaliated by strictly enforcing the rules on wash-up, quitting time, and smoking, whipping up bad feeling on both sides. The employees in the department had benefited from the special agreements on job line-up 0 and out-of-classification work,7 and they blamed Howard for the loss of benefits as well as the loss of their own illegal, but insulated, bumping and seniority group. The week after the union had filed the "hot tread" grievance, Buchanan and Howard were faced with another sticky problem. Their handling of it indicated that the pressures each had been applying to the other made a détente welcome. Shortly after the beginning of the second shift at 4:00 P.M., the shift foreman gave an order to Niçois, who ignored it. He may have misunderstood it, for the plant was noisy, though Niçois had a deserved reputation for "goofing off." The foreman, irritated when he later saw Niçois ignoring the order, accused him of insubordination. Tempers flared, and as Niçois turned back to his job, he called the foreman a "lying son-of-a-bitch." The foreman immediately ordered Niçois to the office, where Buchanan was preparing to leave for the evening. Buchanan listened to the story. He could not let Niçois get away with insubordination, but the foreman had been short-tempered and had probably provoked him. He was not anxious to rile the tuber men on top of the "hot tread" matter and his strict enforcement of the shop rules. If he imposed a penalty on Niçois for cussing out a foreman—under the circumstances explained to him—he

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might have real trouble. Production in the department had been below standard ever since the "hot tread" incident, and he knew the crews were giving him a mild slowdown. Another provocation and his production schedule would be shot. Further, he knew that if he imposed a penalty on Nicols, the case would go straight to industrial relations. T h e union almost always took discharges on up, whatever their merit, and forced a foreman to have an airtight case. Two months ago, he had fired an employee for drinking on the job and found out how careful a foreman has to be. Industrial relations had not sustained him since he had not actually seen the man drinking from the can of beer, though he had seen it at the employee's work place. He decided to call Howard at the local union headquarters. He explained the incident to Howard and said he did not want to fire Nicols, but that something had to be done. Howard replied that if a foreman had called a steward a son-of-a-bitch he would be plenty sore and really go after the company on it. He suggested that Nicols ought to apologize, at least, to the shift foreman, but that he was not going to tell Buchanan what to do. "Remember," he said laughingly, "we don't own the plant, we just run it. If you want me to help, 111 talk to Nicols—you don't need to tell him you called me." About fifteen minutes later Nicols called Howard and told him the story. Howard advised him to apologize and forget the whole thing. Nicols wanted to know what he was paying dues for. "You asked for my advice," Howard replied, "and I'm giving it to you, Nicols. You do it your way and when you get your discharge slip I'll fight it to the top." Faced with the apparent alternatives of possible discharge or apologizing, Nicols apologized as curtly and briefly as possible. His heart was not in it, but form had been respected. Howard realized that he had not gained Nicols' or any other tuber's vote by helping Buchanan settle the incident quickly. They were still sore about the "hot treads," and he had not been able to get anything for them out of the case. He hoped to make

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a few yards in another way by getting Buchanan to help him. Industrial relations was ready to reconsider a pending rate grievance that the tread loaders had been pushing. The loaders were a more important group politically than the tubers because they worked all the tuber lines and also mingled with the transportation men who carried away the "bear traps," shelved dollies in which treads were loaded. When the loaders favored a candidate, they were able to talk up their man to a lot of the workers. The company had refused to adjust the loaders' rates when a new type of bear trap came in, although the loaders argued that the different design required extra effort of them. Howard felt that the men's major complaint was simply the change and not any extra work. A small settlement was all he needed to assuage their feeling. The time-study chief had denied any adjustment at the third step. On Howard's recommendation the grievance committee had certified the case for arbitration, and Howard was now trying to "clear it out" (that is, settle the grievance informally with industrial relations before he presented it formally to arbitration). He had persuaded the director of industrial relations to take a look himself to see if the job did not justify an adjustment. He told the men to "beat it up" when he sent word that the director was on his way. They were to work hard and to make the job look as difficult as possible but to stick strictly to the job description. He did not want Buchanan or the shift foreman to point out that —what would be obvious to them—the men were "beating it » up. The show of activity by the men did impress the director, but, being a bit dubious, he asked Buchanan if the men had been working that way right along on the new "bear traps." Buchanan understood what was going on and, feeling now that he and Howard might be able to work out some of their problems, he was reluctant to make it impossible for Howard to win an adjustment. He replied evasively that the loaders were a good bunch and did a good day's work all the time.

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After a bit more negotiating Howard and the director "cleared out" the grievance "with no precedent," adding two cents to the base rate. They also "cleared out" four minor classification grievances of individual workers "without prejudice" (i.e., the union dropped them but could bring up similar cases involving the same kind of complaint). With better relations established between Howard and Buchanan, fewer shop problems appeared as written grievances. Later disputes over off-standard work and down-time allowances were settled amicably with some give-and-take by both sides. The union dropped the lunchroom, Sametti's discharge, and classification grievances as the union representatives and management men in the shop worked out informal settlements at the suggestion of Howard and Buchanan. Meanwhile the industrial relations director heard and denied the "hot tread" case, and the union certified it for arbitration. Howard delayed taking the "hot tread" case to arbitration for nearly seven months. He could have dropped it entirely except that Nicols and some of his friends kept after him about it. He finally scheduled it for early February. The only chance of winning depended on the testimony of Nichols, who had received the worst burns. After promising to appear, Nicols did not show up for the hearing, claiming that he had suddenly become sick. Howard was sure that Nicols wanted him to lose the case, or perhaps Buchanan had discreetly hinted to Nicols that testifying before the arbitrator would not improve his already poor record.

The Problem of Disruptive

Tactics

By usual standards the grievance procedures available to the tuber men are good ones. The tuber men cannot and have not complained that the procedures give inadequate protection to their rights under the agreement. The procedures are simple, and through them the union representatives and various management

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officers handle grievances expeditiously. A complainant has to file a grievance within five working days of the incident, and he is entitled to an answer within five days unless by mutual agreement the union representative and management officers extend the time. Even before a grievance is filed, the foreman at the first level discusses the problem promptly with the union representatives. The grievance meetings, formal and informal, take priority over almost every other shop responsibility. As Buchanan said: "[Grievances] take precedence over everything else." Buchanan met with Howard, the committeeman, and some of the tuber crew the next working day after the incident to discuss the situation. Two days later Howard explored the matter further with Buchanan, and he tried to settle the problem informally once more on May 27 before he finally filed the written grievance. The union and the management representatives handled the grievance with dispatch, both clearly meeting their responsibilities. While respecting and using the formal procedures, they did not feel limited to them if they thought that informal action would help. The formal procedures ended with an appeal to an impartial arbitrator. If the workers and union representatives were dissatisfied with the answers of management, they had the right of appeal. The "hot tread" case took nine months to reach the arbitrator, but only because Howard purposely delayed what he knew was a weak grievance. An important grievance could have been arbitrated within a month of its filing. Procedurally the grievance system for the tuber men is as adequate as reasonable men can make it. Yet the men and the union representative did not view the grievance procedure as a means of securing the foreman's compliance to the agreement. Use of the appeals procedure, ironically, became a bargaining weapon to help the workers gain a benefit which the company rules did not provide nor the collective agreement guarantee. The work group and its representatives, the committeemen and Howard,

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sought concessions, not compliance. The dispute over the allowed time adjustment was not a matter that could be appealed, for the agreement was not relevant to the issue. The sick calls made by the tuber men on the evening of May 20 effectively disrupted the production of the preference run of the tubeless earthmover treads, and for a number of weeks following the "hot tread" trouble the tuber men imposed a mild slowdown that hurt Buchanan's production record. The grievance procedure became then not a means for peaceful dispute settlement, insuring uninterrupted production and undiminished earnings for the workers, but rather a device for interfering with production at a cost to the foreman and the workers. The workers used the grievance procedure to reinforce disruptive tactics that they had either already employed or felt free to use. The tuber men not only struck at production directly, but they also made more difficult the foremen's job of trouble-shooting on the line and tending their production problems. They flooded Buchanan with grievances to "keep [him] busy for a while." The paper work and interminable conferences with the committeemen that the nuisance grievances entailed were a sore trial for all the foremen. Not that the workers simply dreamed up the nuisance grievances; for example, one of the supervisors had used a helper instead of a tuber man on a special run on May 19. Usually the workers overlook such minor violations of the agreement because in return the foreman reciprocates with minor concessions and both sides gain some measure of welcome flexibility. Strictly following the rules limits flexibility and, in addition to the other interferences in production, hampers the foremen considerably. Howard used the grievance system to apply further pressure to Buchanan by threatening to reveal the overloading of the tuber and to embarrass him before the industrial relations officers. Whether the line managers follow their own directives in the use of machinery is a matter about which, one might think, the industrial relations staff would have little concern, but the griev-

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ance procedures give union representatives a means to develop additional restrictions and limits to the foremen's authority. Buchanan and the other management officials were not helpless in their grievance bargaining. They did not disrupt production, but not all of their tactics were designed to demonstrate to Howard and the workers through reason and adjudication the lack of merit of the grievance claims. Buchanan had enforced the work rules originally in retaliation against union pressure, and the assistant director of industrial relations suggested that Buchanan use Howard's lack of political strength among the tuber men to his own advantage. Implications

of the "Hot Tread"

Case

Why, in the "hot tread" case, were peaceful and judicial means of dispute-settlement ignored, by-passed, or used for purposes antithetical to the original one? Why were force and disruptive tactics used to gain favorable terms of settlement of the dispute? The workers and union representatives used disruptive tactics not because the grievance procedures were inadequate for the purposes for which they were designed, nor because of any unusual degree of immaturity, ignorance, or carelessness on the part of a union or management official or the workers. The "hot tread" case reveals three characteristics of the behavior and organization of the people in the workshop that greatly affect the nature and scope of the grievance process. First, grievances do not arise only from the complaints and injuries of individual workers. Decisions made within the work group determine in large part what grievances are, the timing of them, and the forcefulness with which they are pursued. If only individual workers filed grievances and if only they were affected by the settlements made, foremen and higher management could judge the merits of a worker's complaint without being unduly bothered by the effect of a single worker's reaction in the shop. The reaction of a whole group of workers to the settlement, how-

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ever, may be a matter of pressing concern to management. In treating such grievances, expediency as well as merit becomes a consideration in grievance settlement. Furthermore, grievances affecting the group have a higher political potential within the union than grievances of individuals. A group grievance receives higher priority from the politically responsive, elected union representatives. Howard refused, in effect, to help Nicols press his grievance concerning his run-in with the foreman, but he worked long and hard to get what the workers demanded in the "hot tread" dispute, even though this probably possessed less merit than Nicols' demand. It is worth noting, too, that later neither Howard nor the director of industrial relations felt any compunction about dropping the four minor-classification cases affecting individual workers in order to settle the rate grievance of the tread loaders. The second characteristic that determines the nature of the grievance process in practice is that authority in the shop does not reside solely with shop managers. The appeals procedure and—even more important—the presence of protected union representatives enjoying special rights have created more than an enforcement agency; they have created a second center of authority at the place of work: the union representatives. As leaders of the work group, these men share with the foremen control of shop operations and work activities. A collective agreement limits the power of foremen by setting forth explicit rules of action and by establishing an industrial relations staff which takes over many of the foremen's former functions. Buchanan, for example, was constrained from disciplining Nicols because of limits imposed by the industrial relations staff and because of the necessity to work with Howard and the other representatives. Nicols, the other workers, and the union representatives were all quite aware of the limits of Buchanan's power. He could not arbitrarily fire them or punish them. As long as they acted within the rules (or in such a way

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that proof of infraction was difficult), they could challenge Buchanan's restricted authority by acting on their own. The elective and protected office and the special rights of a union representative allow him to inform and to assure the workers of their strength as a group and to take advantage of any natural, informal unity already existing. From such assurance comes the ready use of the slowdown. Union representatives can direct or at least tacitly support group actions which, in their expert knowledge, they believe will secure group demands. Howard, of course, was the chief counsel of the tuber men but not fully their leader as they set the strategy of the slowdown and nuisance grievances. With the tread-loaders, however, Howard was undisputed leader as well as counsel: he led them in their tactics as he did not lead the tuber men. The group leaders and union representatives have in the shop an authority with which the foremen and other managers must contend. The foreman can ignore it only at his risk, for the work group and the representatives can punish or reward him. He cannot get rid of this rival authority since it is protected by the company and the union in order to insure his compliance with the provisions of the collective agreement. Foremen find that matters which they are supposed to decide, alone, such as allowed time in this case, are in practice matters of joint concern and joint consideration. The third characteristic that determines the nature and scope of bargaining within the grievance process is that the different people and groups within union and management pursue their own goals, goals which may be unrelated or even contradictory to the goals of the other people in their own party. As already mentioned, Howard, unlike the workers, was interested not so much in the particular merit of any of the grievances arising from the group demands as in the political effects of winning or losing them. His particular goal certainly did not always coincide with the goals of the workers whose grievances he traded off.

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Buchanan likewise revealed that his goals and those of the other line managers were not the same as those of the industrial relations staff. He valued a workable relationship with Howard above the lower labor costs on the tread-loading job and tacitly conspired with Howard to get a higher piece rate. Production was so important to line management that it was willing to countenance Buchanan's violation of the rule regarding overloading of the tuber even though violations created precedents and would undermine the goal of industrial relations to secure uniform practices in the plant and to establish clearly defined work rules. The most remarkable feature of the "hot tread" case is that the union as an organization was not involved, and no union representative was concerned as a union leader. This, despite the union promise to keep its members from "engaging in any activities which interfere with the company's normal operation." The workers did not act as union members, nor did the committeemen or the division chairman act as union representatives; the crew members acted in their own interests as tuber men first, and the representatives acted as the tuber men's spokesmen. The union had established no rights under the agreement that allowed the union to demand a say in the adjustment of allowed time. No one acted as if any union concern was involved in the continuing slowdown and harassment of Buchanan and his foremen. Neither did anyone act as if the trouble involved company policy. The trouble was largely a shop problem, local and personal, and not a conflict between union and management. The settlement depended first of all upon the personal accommodation that Howard and Buchanan gradually reached and later upon an understanding between the tuber crew and the tuber foremen, but in any case not directly upon any larger solution. The scope of grievance negotiations may well get narrower than that of union-management negotiations. The "hot tread" case suggests that the grievance process is to a considerable extent independent of overreaching institutional aims and is quite responsive to the immediate, parochial interests of the workers and

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supervisors in the shop. The various men who handle grievances exploit those interests and the various goals pursued by the different people involved in grievance work to secure local, autonomous settlements. The men who handle grievances for management and the workers are typically negotiators, daily adjusting the provisions of the collective agreement and plant rules and codes to fit local needs and desires of people involved in the production process. They are politicians, reconciling conflicting demands and shaping them into current policies which workers and management can accept. The presence of active union representatives in the shop with special rights and the increased security of the individual worker resulting from the limits on the discretionary powers of the foremen have created a broader range of activities in the grievance process than the union and company negotiators contemplated when they established the grievance procedure. They designed the grievance arrangements in the shop to secure compliance with the agreement. However, the altered power structure in the workshop does not allow shop management to carry out its programs solely by itself, as originally conceived. The grievance process in reality includes all the varied activities of representatives of union and management in the plant that establish, maintain, or apply the local shop terms of work. Thus defined, the grievance process encompasses more than the judicial forms and theory allow. It is, in fact, continuous shop bargaining, with all the benefits and faults implied therein. Bargaining in the Grievance

Process

Students of labor and practitioners of the art of industrial relations have recognized that bargaining is an intimate part of the grievance process. Their guarded and disapproving discussion of grievance bargaining suggests that it is likely to lead to trouble, and if it does not, it should. As best, it entices the union away

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from solving shop problems in the interest of more production. At worst, it subverts the agreement and interferes with the output of the plant. Managers will usually tell an outsider that grievances are settled only on the basis of facts and the provisions of the collective agreement. If so, both the facts and the agreement are amazingly tractable. Union representatives daily convince managers that facts and agreements are not what they first maintained them to be. Until they are confronted with specific evidence—and sometimes even then—industrial relations staff members often deny that they or any others in management bargain over grievances. An outsider cannot easily refute their denials. The grievance records give few hints of bargaining, though many grievance settlements appear inexplicable until one discovers the bargaining context in which they were made. Since bargaining over grievances does not have the legitimacy that judicial settlement of grievances enjoys, management in particular is anxious to keep all grievance bargaining informal. In bargaining over grievances management takes an attitude like that of the union leaders toward much of grievance administration: informally it is acceptable; formally it causes too many difficulties. Thus a final settlement may appear in the form of a foreman's answer to a grievance or a case dropped by the union, but in reality each may be a bargained agreement. Local union leaders and shop stewards discuss grievance bargaining much more frankly, and they do not try to rationalize their work in terms of preconceived grievance systems. The following remarks of a union leader who directed the grievance tactics of his local for over ten years are representative: The realities of life do not always allow you to settle grievances peacefully and according to simple interpretation of the contract. The grievance process is year 'round, continuous collective bargaining. The contract is like a rubber bag. You probe it this way and that—what you need is leverage. The company doesn't view all the grievances judiciously because it cannot. TTirough its prerogatives and initiative

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it usually has more leverage than the union. We have to resort to undercover bargaining tactics to get any leverage to penalize the company. You've got to move the situation, and you don't do it by being nice and talking sweet. I have always felt that the successful leader is the resourceful man who is able to find new ways to put the pressure on whenever the company is able to block the old.

One may or may not approve of grievance bargaining. It may have good or bad, or both good and bad, consequences. If it exists, one needs to understand why, rather than to deny it and to explain it as something it is not. Only by understanding the causes and workings of grievance bargaining can one judge its effects and sensibly curb those which are undesirable, if any. For the sake of clarity the bargaining activities in the grievance process might better be called "fractional bargaining."8 Any single bargain involves the workers only as members of work groups, not as union members. The union representatives participate more as the leaders of their work groups than as union leaders. Fractional bargaining as a part of the grievance process exists, simply, because union representatives and management have the ability to raise the cost of disagreeing and to lower the cost of agreeing to their own terms,9 and because the work groups and management encounter issues which each desires to settle on its own terms. A factory is a highly interdependent organization that demands co-operation between management and workers and among the workers if it is to accomplish production at all. To produce goods efficiently requires a high degree of co-operation. Before entrance of the union into the shop, management could hire, discipline, and fire workers at will without having to answer to anyone. By and large the foremen and supervisors enforced cooperation. The man who withheld, or was suspected of withholding, or sought to get others to withhold, co-operation stood in danger of losing his job. Now the collective agreement imposes limits upon the authority of management to discipline and dismiss. Under the aegis of the

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agreement, workers can openly group themselves around the privileged union shop representatives and collectively act to serve their own interests. The work group existed before the union appeared, but the shop representative can now give the group a continuity and unity of action that it did not have before. Further, the legal character of the agreement allows the work group a greater range of permissible activities (or a greater range of activities that management finds it difficult to declare impermissible). Even work groups acting autonomously within the union may expect and receive at the place of work protection of its members from arbitrary action of management. Under certain conditions permitting the use of bargaining tactics, such a work group may be able to bargain on its own in defiance of, or at least at odds with, local union policy and yet still receive the protection won by the whole local. Many locals in the rubber industry are faced with this problem. Management, too, has the ability to bargain fractionally. As mentioned by the union leader quoted above, it retains the initiative in most shop activities. Until the bargainers reach a settlement, the decision of management holds. Its range of discretion in ordering the use of workers, plant, equipment, and production materials is wide. The uses within this range are not all equally desirable, of course, since some may be quite costly, but management is far from being helpless in coping with the tactics of the work group. Bargaining issues arise from a number of sources. One source is the range of discretion that is permitted both by the agreement in the application of its provisions and by shop rules and customs.10 This is explained by the following examples: Foremen can discriminate through discipline and commendation of workers or in assigning work among a crew. The line between allowable and improper discrimination is a fine one, but workers and foremen measure it so closely in the shop that only slight changes take on a significance which an outsider may

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find hard to understand. In emergencies collective agreements allow supervisors to perform work normally done by a member of the bargaining unit. Union representatives and foremen may define an emergency quite differently in different cases and in any given situation may bargain over which criteria should apply. Or, an agreement may assure stewards "reasonable time to investigate grievances." When foremen are pressed to meet production schedules, "reasonable" time may become a shorter time by the clock than when work is slack. To the stewards "reasonable" time varies with the grievance and not with production. Another source of bargaining issues lies in the fact that the collective agreement fixes only the method of settlement, or the standard to be used, without determining the specific settlement itself. In the case of piecework rates, bargaining is essential since standards are not subject to independent verification and, when applied, leave final rate issues unresolved, though perhaps narrowed.11 Setting rates through the approved method, with union review and recheck, does not complete the rate settlement. The workers and the rate-setters must come to an agreement upon the amount of effort which corresponds to the new rate.12 There is no reason to expect that in practice the time-study man's judgment concerning the proper effort will agree with that of the workers. Effort is a subjective experience, and for workers it is a collectively accepted tradition or norm. Managers must either accept the traditional or group-determined norm or persuade the workers through negotiation to change their standard of effort. Even if workers are paid by day rates, an effort bargain must be struck when management changes the standard speed of a machine or a production line, for the change in speed requires a change in worker effort. Still other bargaining issues can arise from any management activity with which the workers become dissatisfied and feel they have the power to negotiate: changes in the conditions of work, implementation of a new policy which has unintended

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effects upon a particular group of workers, or pursuit of an established policy which is no longer appropriate to the work group or its leaders due to changes in the needs and desires of workers. Neither top union leaders nor management officials have looked with particular favor on fractional bargaining. It poses a threat to the union, for localized gains tend to stimulate latent rivalries and divisions among the workers. Managers fear that workers will use it to whipsaw them. Once a work group gains more liberal pay and working conditions, other groups argue that they should receive the same benefits. Gains in one department tend to spread to others and push the general level of worker benefits up—never down. Notwithstanding its possible dangers, fractional bargaining has benefits which one should not forget. Lost production and higher costs are easily counted; increased human satisfactions accruing as intangible benefits to working men from fractional bargaining are less easily figured. Fractional bargaining, even when it undermines the decisions and policies of higher management and the union officers, permits members of the work group to act more as men and less as machines. If there are sacrifices involved in output, efficiency, and use of resources, they may be worthwhile losses for the gain enjoyed, if one notes both carefully. If one reaches the conclusion, or simply maintains, that fractional bargaining is bad and must be stopped or limited, attention should be directed to the causes and not to the manifestations of it. Heaping blame upon the local union and its leaders, exhorting the union members, and inserting firm language in the collective agreement may be no solution at all. Fractional bargaining exists because it can exist and because at least some of the participants benefit from it. All managers, supervisors, workers, and union officials act within a coercive system of loyalties and responsibilities that demands certain behavior. In order to change their behavior one does not merely adjure the participants; rather one uses coercive tactics to counter the prevailing pressures or

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changes the structure of the system in which all concerned must act. T o limit or suppress the undesirable aspects of fractional bargaining, management must be willing to pay a price: it must be willing to raise the cost to the grieving (i.e., bargaining) work group of disagreeing with management's own decisions and, if possible, lower the cost of the work group of agreeing to the decisions of management. Fractional bargaining, which disrupts the orderly processing of judicial grievances, the solving of work problems, and the administering of higher decisions and which interferes with efficient production, is predominantly a management problem. If management is not willing to resist the demands of work groups and more than match their bargaining power, one can hardly condemn the local union for refusing to discipline groups that insist upon using disruptive tactics. The local union is a political body and in part a creature of the work groups. Its authority is particularly apt to crumble if it resists the group too strongly.

V. The Tactics of Fractional Bargaining

in the grievance process seeks to negotiate bargainable issues by influencing the willingness of others to settle on its own terms. The tactics that force the opposite bargainer to a settlement or that induce him to settle are the necessary, regular activities of union and management representatives. The tactics that the workers use are the most conspicuous since they cause obvious loss of work and production. These losses may lead an observer to overlook the benefits to management that workers can offer in their bargaining. EACH PARTY

Against the foremen and lesser line managers union representatives use minor tactics such as nuisance grievances, strict and literal interpretation of shop rules and provisions of the agreement, and the social freeze. A division chairman in one plant pointed out that for minor grievances social pressure is a useful tactic: "I try to keep up a little flattery with the foreman. Anything good the boys say I pass it on so he'll appreciate a good reputation. Then if something comes up and he's reluctant to settle on what the boys think are reasonable terms, I ask him if he wants to lose that reputation out on the floor." Workers and union representatives may support their grievance demands more strongly with major tactics such as bans on overtime, overloading the judicial procedures, refusals to cooperate in administration of the agreement, slowdowns, or stopwork meetings and walkouts. Management responds to these pressure tactics with its own measures. Foremen can enforce the shop rules strictly and discriminate among workers in job positions, quality of materials, or

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job assignments. They can discriminate with considerable freedom if they are careful to keep within the letter of the agreement. A complainant cannot easily prove discrimination and often must drop his grievance before it reaches the industrial relations or arbitration level.1 Higher management can force grievances to arbitration (which is costly to the union), change or reduce employment opportunities of work groups, and suspend or discharge workers. As means of securing settlements, the inducements which management and the union representative offer each other to make their demands more attractive are more important over-all, perhaps, than the pressure tactics. A shop representative can considerably lighten a foreman's work if he gets the crew to cooperate in filling overtime demands, in pushing through special jobs, or in meeting production deadlines. He can help the foreman avoid costly production errors or embarrassing mistakes in applying the collective agreement. A shop steward can often smooth the way when management wishes to introduce new work methods, machinery, or layouts. He may persuade the workers to try out a new rate for several weeks instead of the few days required by the agreement. (The longer the workers work under a rate, the more likely they are to "make out" under it.) And a shop steward can provide valuable aid to the industrial relations officers by keeping them informed about shop conditions generally. Managers in turn can help union representatives. A foreman can help a shop steward by not fighting him on every issue, by favoring workers important to a steward's political support, or by helping him to take some credit for benefits the company grants the workers. Supervisors and officers at all levels may trade off enforcement of certain rules for the workers' or representatives' special effort, aid, and help. Even industrial relations officers give up grievances in the trading before arbitration to make settlements more attractive.

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The Cost of Bargaining

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Tactics

A pressure or an inducement tactic involves cost to the user as well as to the recipient. Consider the slowdown, a common pressure tactic. 2 Production declines—an obvious cost to the firm— but workers' earnings fall off too. Even if the workers do no more than slow down to the base rate, which is somewhere around 15-25 per cent less than usual earnings, they may lose as little as $12 and as much as $30 a week. Extended slowdowns of seven to eight months or longer, when workers lose as much as $500 in earnings, are far from unknown. Even short slowdowns require a high sacrifice from those workers whose earnings are at most about $5,000 a year. Inducing the other party to agree also involves a cost, as is shown in a situation to be described below, where a chief committeeman dropped two cases slated for arbitration to settle a third. To understand such a settlement one should remember that managers and union officers know from experience that the decisions of arbitrators are costly and unpredictable. They can encumber the union as well as management with restrictive interpretations. Always aware of the drawbacks to arbitration, either side may use the threat of it to win concessions from the other if the circumstances are right. 3 In this particular case the grievance involved back pay for thirty-two workers. The committeeman felt fairly confident that he could win the grievance in principle from the arbitrator, but for political reasons he needed to win a substantial amount of back pay for the workers along with the principle. A few months earlier he had tried to settle another dispute involving the same workers and back pay. Through an error in handling the grievance and lack of evidence he had had to drop the grievance. Both he and the men thought that they had been "done out" of wages rightfully owed them by the company. At the first opportunity—offered by the present dispute—the committeemen in-

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tended to recover enough back pay to make up for the pay not received earlier as well as for the pay he believed to b e due in the case at hand. T h e committeeman explained the case as follows: We started out with something like a demand for $2,231.21. We figured it out to the exact cent because that looked like we had more precise records than we actually had. I figured from the first that I would accept a cut by half or even more. I wanted at least $400 for the group. There were two lines and two shifts and this would give $100 for each line—about $12 for each man. I think it was reasonable and it was about what the men were owed. Jack Butrup, head of time study, was handling the grievance. I knew he didn't have any records on the exact time the men had spent so he wouldn't be eager to go to arbitration. He suggested he might make some small adjustment. When I gave him the $2,000-plus figure he was really set back on his heels. He swore he wouldn't settle on that, the arbitrator could settle it. I got the grievance committee to certify the case to arbitration and put it at the top of the list like we had a good case. Jack called me up several times during the next four days, and we bargained a bit. I came down to about $800 and told him either that or arbitration. If we took it clear up I was going to ask for the full $2,200 and he knew we'd gotten bigger awards before. On Thursday, the day of the arbitrator's hearings, Jack's assistant looked me up in the shop real early. He said he wanted to discuss some cases. Well, hell, there wasn't cases worth anything, and I thought I knew what was going on. Finally the assistant asked me if I was going to stop by Jack's office to talk over these grievances. I told him, no, I was going to the hearing. Then he told me that he thought Jack would like to see me first. I guessed then that he was ready to settle. I saw Hobbs, a member of the grievance committee, up in the office, and I told him the story. I had to have $400 and would like more. Butrup was putting up a fight but he was ready to settle. I went in to talk to Butrup and put on a good show, but he wouldn't come up to $400 at all. I cussed and swore and called him a cheapskate. He was trying to cheat the men out of their fair pay and we'd prove it and so on. If he wouldn't settle fairly for eight hundred I'd take it where I could get a fair deal. I steamed out of the office like I was real mad. Hobbs had been watching me and came over and asked Butrup and me what the matter was. We told him. He asked if $600 wouldn't be about right. Butrup said he'd settle for $450. I swore and said by God I wouldn't settle for less than $520. Hobbs asked if I wouldn't "clear out" [i.e., drop] my other two cases that I'd had certified to arbitration. [One involved a worker who claimed that a particular rate under which he had worked some months earlier was inadequate. The

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other was a claim by a worker that another man had been called in in his place after a layoff.] It would have cost us $ 6 0 0 - $ 7 0 0 to take those two cases on up [to arbitration], and they weren't strong cases anyway. I'm not sure you're right to settle like this, but the cases are confused and not convincing a lot of times. Settling these matters takes some kind of compromise if you're going to make it work. Butrup said he'd buy that settlement. W e dropped the two cases and I got nearly $5 more for the boys than they had coming.

On the union's side there was a cost involved in settling the matter: The two individuals whose cases were dropped may have suffered a loss of the right to a full hearing of their complaints and possible vindication. In turn, their possible loss may have levied a cost upon the committeeman if, disaffected, they threw their political support to another candidate at the next election. The committeeman calculated that whatever political losses he suffered from the two individuals' grievances would be offset by political gains he would make among the crew of thirty-two. Managers also pay for their bargained gains since the tactics used to force acceptance of their terms impose a cost upon the firm. If they introduce worker-displacing machinery, move jobs to other plants, or give up production contracts to force recalcitrant workers to accept tighter piecework rates or higher production standards, these tactics cost the company money and convenience. Drastic measures reducing employment are often successful in convincing workers that they had better accept management's terms, but the burden of added investment in new equipment and the costs and delays in scheduling production may be high. Disciplinary layoffs or discharges for workers involved in slowdowns or work stoppages, too, may be effective in getting management's terms accepted but at possible loss of efficient production and of trained employees, as is shown by the following case: In the support assembly department of a plant which produces refrigerators the foreman and time-study experts set a standard of sixty-seven leg supports per shift for a crew of twelve. The men would agree to no more than fifty-seven units, and to force their

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terms they slowed down production to forty-four. The shop representative and management negotiated the matter for several weeks. When the workers remained adamant, management closed the line and contracted the work out. Few of the men immediately concerned lost their jobs, but many bumped to lower classifications. The company had to bear the expense of shuffling workers through the complicated bumping process and of allowing equipment of that particular line to lie idle. After several months the union representatives approached the director of industrial relations. They had investigated the leg-support job in the subcontracting firm and believed that their department could match or better the rate of sixty-five units turned out by the workers in the subcontracting firm. The company reinstated the job, and the workers produced at the rate of sixty-seven units. To induce rather than force the workers and the union to accept its terms (i.e., by lowering the cost to the union of agreeing to the demands of management), management must also expect to pay a cost. For example, management may promise not to contract out the installing of new ventilation equipment and remodeling of the plant if the union will agree to modify the strict rule of seniority in promotion of skilled maintenance men. The company gains increased flexibility of control over its workers, but it may suffer delays in the remodeling and perhaps obtain a less satisfactory job than an outside contractor would perform. Or a company may agree to be lenient about workers washing up early before quitting if the union will allow, for example, welders, who are in short supply, to work out of classification. As the wash-up period inevitably tends to lengthen, a large number of man-hours can be lost from productive work. Since the tactics of fractional bargaining may well involve losses to the party that uses them as well as to the party toward whom they are directed, each must consider the cost of forcing or inducing the others to accept its terms as well as the cost of accepting the terms offered by the other party. A plant superintendent, in order to keep a more flexible work force, may not want to

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agree to the demand of a work group to use men only in their primary classification. His position may stem from managerial principle rather than careful calculation of all the costs. But if the workers are in such a fractional bargaining position that they can impose a high cost upon him if he disagrees, his refusal to accept their terms may be unwarranted, considering the occasional use he makes of the principle. When members of either management or union accept what appear to an outsider to be unfavorable shop terms, it may be that the alternative terms were still more unfavorable. Under certain conditions the work groups or management are simply unable to secure the terms they desire at a reasonable cost. From the objective circumstances of work and production a grievance bargainer may not be able to calculate the ability of the other participant to resist or accept his demands. He can at best make only shrewd guesses as to what the tactics employed will cost either himself or his opposite bargainer. Many costs are not subject to any quantitative or even objective statement. How much does it cost, for example, to give up the managerial principle mentioned above of assigning employees to any job covered by a primary classification, even though the job may be less skilled? * One manager may conclude that for him to give in on this matter would encourage workers to demand more serious restrictions on his flexibility of action. Another might figure that the concession would give workers in the lower classification a greater sense of security, resulting in fewer grievances and less harassment of the foremen, with improved production the end result. As difficult to judge as the full costs of fractional bargaining tactics is the actual willingness of the various grievance bargainers to bear the costs. A highly skilled group of workers under slight supervision and secure in their position is much less sensitive to changes instituted by management than another group whose members were once considered highly skilled but now are attendants to automatic tools. Members of the latter

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group, hearkening back to the "good old days" when they were respected, and now feeling both envious of the higher-skilled men and fearful of any further decline in status, may consider that the cost of inflicting a penalty upon the company is justified when a satisfied, secure group would not. 5 Or a group of workers may be reluctant to engage in a slowdown in the month of December since loss of earnings will adversely affect their Christmas. In the middle of a hot summer month the same workers may quite happily back the same slowdown, enjoying the reduced pace of work. Personal attitudes are also important in the way they affect the willingness of bargainers to accept the cost of using or accepting various bargaining tactics. If union representatives (or workers) and foremen provoke each other by personal offenses or emotional outbursts, each may in anger or resentment be willing to pay the cost of using or resisting a tactic that ordinarily they would not consider. An older foreman who remembers preunion days may glory in fighting the demands of a shop steward while a younger foreman may be comfortable only if he and the steward are on friendly terms. Similarly, a steward who is a passionate union man may be much more willing to make sacrifices for possible shop gains than the steward who desires his office only because it gives him superseniority. The costs and opportunities considered by the men who bargain over grievances are quite different from those which concern the men who bargain over the terms of the collective agreement. Fractional bargainers negotiate over their own interests, not necessarily those of the company or the union. The bargainers are numerous and varied and their concerns are more immediate and limited than those of the local union or the company. Among the bargainers there will be some who are able to negotiate for their own particular demands from a stronger position and with more conviction than the central negotiating bodies would display in making those same demands. Some will nego-

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tiate with less. The strategy of management and union representatives in fractional bargaining is to focus their tactics upon the most vulnerable bargainer of the opposite party. In the setting of piecework rates, a major fractional bargaining issue, foremen are more vulnerable to fractional bargaining tactics than the time-study staff. Foremen want to maintain full production in their departments and to keep stable relations with their men. 8 A loose rate may penalize the company by increasing labor costs or may hurt the time-study man by revealing his ineptitude, but it does not bother the foreman particularly. A second-level foreman gave the following opinion of the proper wage rate: I'll ask time-study to fix up a rate if it's not right. Now, what's right is elastic. W e have to get out a large quantity of goods. You got to throw the workers a bone. If they only make a half-hour bonus in eight, they're not going to break their necks to get production out. I like to see them get a couple of minutes bonus on every piece. It pays for me in the long run. I get the job done two or three weeks earlier. I try to point out to the time-study what we lose in these tight rates. But whether you get the rate changed depends on the time-study man. He's got to understand your problem. You get an inexperienced man, and it's easy to clobber him and get what you want.

This foreman is concerned with efficient production, but his standard of comparison is a limited one. He is interested in departmental efficiency. The time-study staff is more likely to be concerned with efficiency as judged by the standards of the whole firm or of the market. In some firms the foreman participates in setting piecework rates by selecting the workers chosen for study, advising the timestudy experts about the frequency of unusual work conditions, or deciding the method of job performance. By careful selection he may be able "to adjust" conditions so that they justify the "fair" rate that he and the union representative have already negotiated. Recognizing the vulnerability of the foremen to union tactics, many managements exclude the foremen altogether from setting rates. Nevertheless, even if the foreman is denied a role in setting

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rates, he may influence the earnings of the workers. The more exactly the time-study staff sets rates, the more allowances it must provide for abnormal delays, irregular materials, and unusual conditions. Since foremen must be given power to make the allowances, workers shift some of their attention and tactics from changing rates to adjusting allowances. The "hot tread" dispute was basically a dispute over such an allowance. As long as a foreman is vulnerable to the pressures of workers, they will attempt to exploit whatever discretion he may have to improve their pay or working conditions. The ability of foremen to affect earnings through rate allowance is limited, of course. They may be able to raise a rate which is just a shade less than the workers demand, but they cannot transform a really tight rate into an acceptable one. To try to force foremen to do what they cannot do is useless. Union representatives must direct their tactics against the staff agency that sets the rates. In many firms the older foremen and workers tell how foremen used to use "pencil rates" or "marked-up rates" to insure workers their usual earnings. Centralized accounting now reveals such fictitious production figures and further reduces the foremen's powers, which time study already had diminished. As staffs have taken over many of the functions once controlled by foremen, the union has had to develop broader tactics that would reach the staffs and influence their decisions. How much management gains by having staffmen set rates is debatable. First, the foreman is shorn of more of his already much diminished authority, and his ability to maneuver against union pressures on other matters is lessened. If he can affect the rate, he may be able to gain concessions in return for his influence. Second, rate bargaining continues anyway; workers will bargain with whoever sets the rates. As we shall see, tactics used against staff management may be even more costly in the long run than the cumulative rate adjustments made by foremen. Union representatives try to negotiate settlements with individual staff members by using tactics directed at the individual.

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They may simply bamboozle an inexperienced time-study man or, more likely, suggest a deal. If a crew gets a loose rate, the union representative promises that the boys will not "knock hell out of it" and push earnings embarrassingly high. As another inducement he may also give the time-study man some information about work simplification on another job that will look good in a time-study report. Said one shop steward after explaining the details of such an agreement: "We all gain something. The timestudy man expects to be there only a short time, and he knows I know more about the job than he does. He's interested in production, and you can usually do some negotiating." 7 Opportunities to adjust the rates by working on individual staff members, while not infrequent, are hardly sufficient to satisfy the workers' apparent demands for adjusting almost every new rate.8 Some tactics can be aimed directly at staff managers. Union representatives may refuse to co-operate in administering the agreement or in solving common work problems. They may also snarl judicial procedures, but since the cost to the union may be as high as, or higher than, the cost to the staff, union representatives prefer to use these tactics only as a last resort. The most feasible way to reach staff managers is to direct a tactic toward line management generally. If the penalty—say, lost production—is sufficient, line managers may demand that the issue be settled on the workers' terms, and since they usually rank staff managers, their demand is heeded. The head of the time-study department in one large company expressed a feeling common among time-study men: "The production boys are always jumping down my throat to loosen up the rates a bit to get full production out of the men." An industrial relations manager in a tire company explained why he negotiated grievances with the representatives even though his policy was against it: "We took a stand that we wouldn't talk about the grievance when the men were out, but we didn't stick to our resolve. The plant manager would call me up and ask what the trouble was all about. I'd tell him it was a matter of one or two cents on a certain rate.

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He'd say, what the hell, give it to them, we've got a hundredthousand-dollar order to fill. We'd give in. I think we have only ourselves to blame for the conditions that exist." A production manager of another tire company said: "Whenever the workers walked off, we'd tell industrial relations to settle immediately. We always made concessions to get production going. So I guess the union thought this was the way to settle matters." Clearly, if line management is not willing to counter the workers' tactics with their own—which of course entail a cost to the firm—the staff agencies must accede to the demands of the workers. Even in those situations where appearances would lead an outside observer to believe that line management does not capitulate to the bargaining pressure of work groups, the reality may well be the contrary. Management in such cases may try to maintain the form, if not the substance, of its policy not to negotiate grievances while being coerced by a work group. What often develops is the kind of situation described by a president of one large local union. The spray-finishers in subassembly called a stopwork meeting between shifts to protest the extra work "required" by new paint-spraying equipment. The company had not increased the rates, though the spray-finishing department now turned out more production than before. According to the time-study man, the new equipment required less effort than before, and, but for company policy, the spray finishers should have taken a cut in rates. The president of the local felt sure after talking to the protesting men at the shop meeting that they would be satisfied with an increase in the base rate of three cents, which would give five cents extra to the higher-earning men. He told the plant superintendent what the trouble was and what would settle it. The superintendent was ready to grant the increase, but the director of industrial relations wanted the men back on the job before any settlement was announced. The president did not relish his assignment, but he went back to the shop to persuade the outgoing shift to leave and the incoming shift to get to work. After a lot of talking, rough words,

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and dispute, he convinced the men that he might be able to get a three-cent increase in the base rate if they got the line going again. He would promise nothing, though. The men returned to work after about four hours, and the next day the local president and the time-study men examined the finishers' rate and "discovered" some missing elements in the time study and agreed to add a few allowances which just happened to total a three-cent increase to the base rate. Management men try to play off workers and union representatives against each other in the same way that union representatives try to play off line and staff. The political needs of union representatives do not always coincide with the workers' desires. A foreman may dissuade a worker from filing a complaint by threatening to crack down on his petty infraction of the rules or to examine closely the quality of his work, even though the steward may be eager to file the complaint and enhance his reputation as an aggressive representative. Or a supervisor may get a committeeman to drop an embarrassing grievance in return for a favor to political friends of the committeeman; for example, choosing them for bonus-paying easy inventory jobs about to come up. The industrial relations staff can also get rid of bothersome grievances or put off complaining workers by helping out union representatives who "play ball" and by being tough with those who are stubborn.

The Timing of Bargaining

Tactics

The best opportunities for workers and union representatives to secure concessions come when production deadlines or rush orders make line management vulnerable. If a firm sets monthly deadlines for departmental production, the foreman can expect union representatives and workers to increase their harassment as the deadline approaches. At the beginning of the month he may have been allowed to disassemble a faulty mechanism to find the cause of the trouble or to help a worker in his job, but closer

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to the deadline, when he is sweating out his quota, he dare not so much as pick up a hammer if he has denied an extra delayedwork allowance or refused to lengthen a lunch hour by a few minutes. One first-level foreman admitted that his monthly deadline put him in a bad spot: "I almost always need overtime to clear production at the end of the month. The stewards know that they can force us into bad practices, and the overtime ban is their best weapon." A foreman in another firm complained of his plant manager's practice of displaying in the shop a large sign with the number of days left in which to complete the current order. This information was used by the workers to gauge the effectiveness of their harassing tactics. Foremen also have opportunities to press their terms of settlement of issues in dispute. Periods of slack production, when orders can be filled out of stock if necessary and layoffs are possible, allow them to apply pressure to shop stewards and workers. A foreman may tighten up on smoking breaks or hold stewards to a strict accounting of their time off the job. He may be more than ever tempted to stretch or evade provisions of the agreement that restrain him from transferring, promoting, or holding workers arbitrarily. If the workers complain, he can tell them to file a grievance if they don't like the way he does things; he knows that they dare not cause serious trouble as long as work is slack. Opportunities for the different parties to use bargaining tactics arise not only from changes in production and in the amount of work available but also from changes within the union. At election time the opportunity to gain attention spurs ambitious representatives to fight hard on every grievance. They seek out grievances and make a point of arguing long and defiantly at conferences where their constituents appear. A foreman may discover that making a candidate look good to his constituents on such an occasion may induce him to settle on terms that he might spurn at other times. Before renegotiation of a collective agreement, union repre-

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sentatives may exploit the opportunity to build up strike sentiment. They may be intransigent in settling grievances that otherwise could be settled with dispatch and at the same time blame management for the delays, thereby gaining strength among the workers. Neither shop managers nor work groups enjoy a superior bargaining position all the time. A tactic that brings success one time may be useless another time. A work crew may get a rate allowance when foremen are pressed for production, but foremen can tighten up when orders are slack. Foremen may be pressed into agreeing to work practices that contradict and undermine management policy elsewhere in the plant or the firm. Contradictions do not necessarily cause serious damage, for with change in production pressures or changes in personnel the shop bargain may expire or become irrelevant. Through opportunistic shop bargaining, foremen and stewards have carved out for themselves an extra measure of discretion that the centralized authority of management and union had in other ways increasingly limited.

The Local Union and Disruptive

Tactics

A few dissatisfied workers or even a single union representative can often implement disruptive tactics. A shop steward can flood his foreman with nuisance grievances in the hope of getting some petty concession that would help him personally. He may continue such a tactic without gaining much support among his fellow workers. A committeeman can carry on a vendetta against a foreman, fighting every grievance regardless of merit, showing up the foreman's errors to higher management, or refusing to cooperate in solving real work and grievance problems, and still not reflect the general attitude of the whole crew. A foreman may take every opportunity to enforce working rules strictly on the shop steward or to discriminate arbitrarily among his working crew without expressing the attitudes and intent of the company or even of his immediate superiors. When the source of

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disruptive tactics and shop-bargaining maneuvers is very localized and personal, the resulting problems may be troublesome but manageable. However, more serious, refractory problems present themselves in managing a plant and running a unified local union and in maintaining the integrity of the judicial and administering functions if the members of a work group support shop bargaining and the use of disruptive tactics. Tactics involving a work group as a whole greatly enlarge the range of coercion. If a single worker or even a very few workers stop working, slow down, refuse overtime work, or snarl up special jobs, management may at worst be inconvenienced but not coerced into an undesired concession. If all the workers of a whole department use any of those tactics, management may well be forced to submit unwillingly. Such group bargaining can effect more significant, longer-lasting changes in wage rates and conditions of work than can individualized fractional bargaining. Some work groups can secure gains through fractional bargaining that even the local union cannot obtain. They can do so because the bargaining power available to them is not dependent upon the bargaining power of the whole local in plant negotiations (or even of the international union in firm-wide negotiations). The bargaining power of the various work groups and their managers in a plant is not a simple fraction of the total bargaining power of the local union or the company. Some groups have more strength to enforce their demands than the whole union has to enforce its demands, and some have less. The weaker groups must depend upon the local union to get such benefits as they enjoy. Not so the stronger groups; these can act quite independently of the local, deciding autonomously upon their fractional bargaining tactics and seeking their own goals. How a work group can possess greater bargaining power than the local union and how it can use that power for its own advancement is well illustrated by an incident in a plant whose workers produce heavy electrical equipment and a variety of

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special machinery. The plant management had been lax in its administration of the incentive rate system in the postwar years. As the market grew more competitive, top management decided that labor costs would have to be cut drastically if the firm was to stay in business. The engineering department recommended a new incentive pay system, Motion-Time-Method, that would raise standards by 25-30 per cent. In the 1959 negotiations the company spokesman insisted that the new agreement provide for installation of the MTM standards. The president of the firm spoke to all the employees in a series of mass meetings in the town hall. He explained that the plant was highly inefficient. The buildings were old, multistoried, and crowded. If the company could not cut costs, primarily labor costs, the whole operation would be moved away. The vice-president of the local described the workers' reaction: The company had a tight squeeze on us because everybody remembers when the [neighboring] woolen factory closed down and moved south. Some four thousand men lost their jobs. I'll tell you the city and our people were scared by it. They even got tax concessions from the city. They contended that a lot of water had crept into the standards, and I think this is so. W e recognized that a new plant in the midwest would be more economical too. There were a lot of men in the union who didn't want to lose their jobs. They kept saying that [the company president] would carry out his threat. W e all remembered the strike in 1956. 9 The vote to accept the company proposal was two to one. The old timers wouldn't even chance calling the company's bluff.

None of the local leaders of the union opposed the new agreement, with its provision for new work standards, though their acceptance of it was hardly joyful. The overwhelming vote of the members to accept the company's proposals indicated that most of the workers recognized that they had no desirable alternative but to agree to the company's terms. The bargaining power of the local union was no match for that of the company. Getting the local union to agree to include the new standards in the collective agreement was one thing; getting workers in the various departments of the plant to accept them was another.

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Company officials first installed the new standards in those departments where only small adjustments were necessary. The local union leaders attended special classes set up by the company to study the theory and application of MTM. They worked conscienciously and honestly with management to iron out problems as they arose and to gain full acceptance by the workers of the new system. No serious opposition to the new standards developed until the panel-wiring department began to work under it. Management had never found the fifty wiremen an easy group to get along with. The head of the time-study office said: "The men stick together here in this panel-wiring department more than any other of the departments. They feel they're more skilled and more responsible in their jobs. They go as high as labor grade three, which is very high. [A punch press operator is only grade 7.] They all act in concert and together." As soon as the new standards came into effect, production dropped from a third to a half in the department, though standards had gone up only 25 per cent. On the average the wiremen had been turning out between 83 and 90 unit hours ($2.61 per hour to $2.80 per hour). A few had made as high as a 100- or 105unit hour ($3.07 per hour and $3.20 per hour). The wiremen also refused to work any overtime under the new standards. They complained that the company expected them to do work taking as much effort as the old 90-unit hour but would pay them no more than they had got for the old 60- to 75-unit hour. This, of course, is exactly what the company expected. The time-study staff explained that the old standards had grown loose and that the work for which the men had formerly received a 90-unit hour had been grossly padded. The new standards, the staff maintained, were neither loose nor tight. Small adjustments would be made, but no major ones. The wiremen agreed that the old standards had been too loose and were willing to abide by a 15 per cent point rise in the new standards, but they were convinced that a 25 per cent point rise

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was completely unjustified. The wiremen were the only union members who were convinced of the justice of the case. No member of the shop grievance committee believed that the wiremen were entitled to more than a 5 per cent adjustment. "How do you think I feel," exclaimed the president of the local, "having to fight those bastards' battles? Every one of them is making more than I am, and they've been on that gravy train ever since the war. Why, some of those guys are making eight to eleven thousand a year." 10 The wiremen maintained the overtime ban for five months. Then they gave it up because it was costing each man thirty to forty dollars a week. The slowdown continued for another four months, though, and wiring production fell far behind schedule. So pressed was the company, it continued to offer overtime, paying premium rates for half-effort. The company did not admit that the MTM standards were faulty, but management finally did make an adjustment of 5 per cent and added a "relaxation" element that further reduced the original new standard by about 7 per cent. The head of the industrial relations staff explained that the company had finally settled because it needed the production: "No matter how good we thought the standard and the system, we had to consider the life blood of the company—sales. The needs of our customers come first. It became a bargaining deal and we were in the tight spot." The company needed the production of the wiremen too badly to suspend or fire the men for the slowdown. The control panels on which the men worked were essential to the rest of the machinery produced. Furthermore, this was special order work, designed specifically for individual customers. To train competent replacements would have taken at least a year. The company first tried to combat the wiremen by contracting out some of the wiring work. The subcontractor was too small to be able to handle enough of the work to relieve the company, and the quality-control department refused to approve much of

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the subcontracted work. Meanwhile the engineering department developed a simplified method of wiring. It designed a simple, standard circuit that a semi-skilled worker could learn to wire with two weeks of training. From the standard circuit the engineers believed that they could build up complex panels merely by combining them in various ways. The director of industrial relations believed that he had won the fight when the engineers brought their proposal to him. He sent seven semi-skilled women into the wiring department to work on the simplified circuits with no warning to the wiremen or to the union officers. Had the simplified circuits worked out as the engineers assured the director they would, the wiremen might have been forced to accept the higher work standards. However, the women gained proficiency very slowly; the standard circuits had but limited use for most production orders; and the local union officers, incensed because they had not been taken into the director's confidence when the company brought the women into the wiring department, refused to give any further aid to management. The wiring department workers were able to defeat the new standards proposed by management because their bargaining position on the issue was stronger than that of the local union. Through their disruptive tactics they made management settle on their terms. The chief steward in the panel-wiring department put the settlement in a different light: "The company had to realize that our people are human beings. W e are not automats that jump when somebody pushes a button. They've been trying to force maximum production by putting pressure on us, and we had to pressure back." For the strong work group, to refrain from pressing its demands to the limit of its bargaining power is to deny its members the opportunity to determine immediately and most meaningfully their work affairs. Self-determination is powerfully attractive to the workers because it helps them to achieve a major goal: recognition of their values and their human dignity. If workers in an organized plant use disruptive tactics for bar-

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gaining purposes—as the panel wiremen did month after month —and repeatedly use them year after year, what role does the union organization play? Can bargaining tactics be "unauthorized" in any real sense when union representatives plan, lead, and enforce the tactics as openly as they do? If one means by "unauthorized" a tactic used spontaneously by a group of workers without forewarning to union leaders and in defiance of union representatives or local officers, the answer is no. But this does not mean that the local union leaders approve such tactics or encourage the workers to use them. The officers of the local to which the panel wiremen belong were not in sympathy with the wiremen or their slowdown. In the "hot tread" case, too, Howard, the union's representative, did not think much of the claim of the tuber men for downtime allowance and did not organize the slowdown. Almost without exception leaders in all of the local unions interviewed for this study denounced work stoppages and genuinely co-operated with the international unions and with management to discourage them. Whenever a group of workers becomes excited over a grievance dispute, officers of the locals make appeals such as the following: "I would like to say to all the membership, just don't get mad and shut the plant down— give us a chance to settle your trouble. Always keep in mind that there are two sides to every case." Candidates for local union offices campaign on their loyalty to union aims—i.e., to the union pledge in the collective agreement to settle grievance disputes peacefully. Candidates for local office boast of their ability to get settlements through the grievance machinery without slowdowns and walkouts. My observation is that local officers generally try to avoid walkouts or try sincerely to get the men back to full production. In plants where nonpeaceful grievance settlement has many supporters, as in some of the rubber tire plants, union officers warn the workers in the same manner as the president of a large rubber local:

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Work stoppages, deliberate slowdowns, and other interruptions of work constitute a violation of our collective agreement with the company. Employees who instigate, encourage, promote, or participate in such stoppages or other interruptions of work are exposing themselves to disciplinary action. If the company administers discipline to members who are guilty of such activity, the local union will find it extremely difficult, and in some cases impossible, to provide any relief.

In private most of the officers deplore the slowdown and other disruptive tactics, but give their opinion that these are too integral a part of plant life to be stopped completely. Managers often accuse local leaders of bad faith, lack of responsibility, and hypocrisy because these leaders do not stop their union members once and for all from using disruptive tactics. Managers are in a poor position to so characterize local leaders unless they have really understood the difficulties of the union leaders and unless they have fully assumed their responsibility to help the local officers. True, the public advice of the local officers to their members to avoid disrupting production may remain mere words and seem never to become live policy. And in delicate political situations, elected leaders may in fact have no desire to transform their words into policy. More often, however, the fault lies not so much with the leaders' will as with their ability. Even before the union customarily promised not to interfere with production, when many union officers favored walkouts and slowdowns as a final step in grievance settlement, local officers were more contributors to, than decisive leaders in, the use of disruptive tactics by work groups. When members of a work group become dissatisfied, they can produce their own shop leader; they do not have to borrow one from the union hall. The president of a local union may counsel his members and mediate grievance disputes, but he does not necessarily have the authority to forbid the use of this or that tactic useful in fractional bargaining. A determined work group, such as the panel wiremen, can actually force local leaders to follow its direction and to support its tactics. As long as management negotiates with bargaining work groups, by-

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passing union officers and making concessions to the work groups that it will not make to the local as a whole, the local union is in a poor position to crack down on fractional bargainers. If one wants to single out men to blame for disruptive tactics and fractional bargaining, one should look to the work group leaders, the active shop stewards and representatives. An experienced industrial relations director of a large rubber firm said that a major problem he had in dealing with a wildcat strike or a big slowdown in his largest plant was that he really had eight different unions to contend with. Leaders of the work group bear the most responsibility for the use of fractional bargaining tactics. Not all leaders of work groups by any means approve the continual use of disruptive tactics, but unless they have strong, active support within the group, they are not apt to advocate vigorously mere adjudication. A long-time division chairman who leads a powerful work group noted for its walkouts and slowdowns explained: "You can't be honest all the time and be a politician too. You've got to tell the company off, and how do you tell them off better than with a walkout? You've got to put on a show for the members if you're going to succeed and be elected." This man led walkouts, organized slowdowns, and "cracked down" on foremen not because he thought this was always the best way to negotiate with management or even to satisfy the demand of most of the members of the group, but rather because he felt he had to guard himself from the attacks of "hotheads." The hotheads in a work group are usually younger men. They display antagonism toward management and the company; they are ambitious for a shop position or an office in the local union; and they are exceedingly active in all group and union affairs. They are the first to speak and always ready to act. If they are not group leaders themselves, they influence, out of all proportion to their numbers, the men who do occupy shop positions. Unless the rest of the members of the work group feel strongly enough to oppose them actively, the views of the hotheads prevail. Union and management people at every level described the

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role of the hotheads in getting a group of workers to interrupt production as a division chairman did in the following statement: "Most of the men are fairly passive, but there are a few hotheads who will put the pressure on the rest of them. They follow simply to maintain their unity because they are part of a group, b u t not because they were in favor of it." T h e workers who style themselves as "radicals" or proudly bear the name of "hotheads" make it plain that they rely on group unity to get all the men off the job. If the group unity does not come freely, it may be forced. All the workers know or have heard of men who "went it alone on [earnings] limits" and have been penalized by the group or have been "entertained" at such affairs as "parking lot parties." 1 1 To engage in a disruptive tactic in defiance of company rules and union promises is a truer and more serious test of group loyalty than abiding by the limit. The hotheads need not necessarily enforce group compliance. Maintenance of group unity has a strong appeal to the group members themselves. Their preference for unity often outweighs their desire to continue normal work. If the group acts, all act, whatever action the workers may subscribe to individually. The members' attitude is more understandable when considered in the light of the emotional build-up during fractional bargaining negotiations by the group and its leaders. Bargaining tactics seldom develop spontaneously, but neither do they often result from farsighted planning. A leader may be able to use a critical situation to talk up an overtime ban or some kind of sabotage or a slowdown, but he is unlikely to be able to persuade the group to act simply to increase bargaining pressure at an advantageous point in his negotiations with management. A typical case is described in the words of a steward in a machine shop: For months we had been discussing this new rate. They'd cut us 30 per cent, and we were holding meetings with everybody from [the chief of industrial relations] . . . to the time-study men and the foremen. The case was slated for arbitration, but nobody was pushing it. We'd built up a slowdown and we'd been losing twenty to twentyfive dollars a week. [The building steward] kept telling us we'd win

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at arbitration and get retroactive pay. Well, you can't live on retroactive pay if you have a family and you've got to pay the bills now. The men were taking wage cuts to quite a degree and were very touchy. It was during this touchy period that the company put a supervisor on to buff the rings for the pin support. That's our work and the foreman knew it. I was peeved anyway, and I jerked the grinder away from him and told him he wasn't going to work those damned rings. The supervisor just laughed, and it was too much. They'd been riding us because of the slowdown. The men's feelings were building up and just waiting for something like this. We all felt what's the use of working if we're going to make only a little bit anyway. We'd been driven as far as we would be driven. At the smoking break I passed the word to the loyal ones to stop at 3:00 [p.m], I couldn't appeal to the men directly, and of course I had to keep working since I was the steward. The men stopped working at three and talked over the situation without really deciding what to do. The foreman tried to get them back to work and asked me to speak. I got up and argued against the walkout and told them they ought to go back to work. I made it plain that I was talking as a representative of the union and they understood the situation, of course. [The building steward] couldn't be found in the plant or even at union headquarters. He knew I'd given the word. By the time we were down for an hour stock began to back up and the ring-forming line had to shut down. By that time everyone began to leave the plant. This kind of slowdown and wildcat strike is not spontaneous and it is not unplanned. It is an impulsive action and, once started, not wholly directed, yet predictable. T h e group leader organizes a disposition already existing and makes the most of it. In the above case the steward was more eager for a walkout than most of the group, but they all responded to his call for a stopwork meeting as they had done to his probable call for a slowdown. From that step to a walkout was not far. Once he had started the move toward a walkout, the steward could expect the group to support him because at issue was a matter of major concern to each member: the rate of earnings. Workers who are not anxious to walk out will not be disposed to do so in support of an issue that promises them no possible benefit. Individual complaints are not the issues that provoke slowdowns or wildcat strikes.

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The leader can assume that his group will walk out only if most of the members expect to benefit from the action. On most occasions a slowdown, a wildcat strike, or another tactic must promise enough benefits from management at low enough cost to the group members to keep unenthusiastic workers from actively resisting the action. Typically, the group which initiates the bargaining tactic does not bear its full cost. In the walkout described above, soon after the buffers stopped work, the ring-forming line had to close down. If the walkout continued into the next shift and on into the next day, the foundry workers would be out of work too. The other workers outside of the buffing department would lose work and earnings, although they would gain nothing from their necessary participation in the strike. The buffermen caused other workers to lose earnings because their job was a bottleneck operation through which all the work of the shop had to flow. The slowdown thus affected a large proportion of all workers in the plant and a large share of production. The leverage of the buffermen magnified the cost of management's disagreement with the disgruntled workers, but it also allowed the buffermen to evade the full costs of their bargaining tactics. The gains made by work groups in the kind of fractional bargaining that involves tactics such as slowdowns and walkouts cannot bring honors to local union officers. Such groups win by breaking both the spirit and the letter of the union's promise in the collective agreement not to disrupt production, and their actions bring demands from other groups for the same benefits. Workers in other departments who willy-nilly had to bear part of the cost of these bargaining tactics may feel that equity demands that they now gain a like reward. If the local officers cannot help the other work groups through regular negotiation or adjudication of grievances, as is most often the case, the other groups may either take it upon themselves to recoup their losses through their own fractional bargaining or to retaliate against the first group.12 In short, within the local union fractional bar-

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gaining tactics may divide the workers, setting one group against another and alienating local officers from shop representatives who lead the work groups. Fractional bargaining and the use by work groups of coercive, disruptive tactics clearly create problems for the union as well as for management. They also give a new and immediate reality to the claim that the grievance process is a democratic way of adjusting disputes. Fractional bargaining may emphasize "democratic" more than "adjusting" and in so doing make the reality more than what earlier advocates of industrial democracy were looking for. Management and perhaps even the public outside of the factory may be less able to achieve their goals if the workers participate in the direction of shop affairs through work groups. Fractional bargaining may endanger productive efficiency as strong work groups push piece rates to an uneconomical level or make impossible a flexible adjustment of the working force to production orders, thus raising costs and cutting output. If peaceful settlement of disputes is a goal worth striving for, one must recognize that the tactics of fractional bargaining may be an obstacle to its attainment. Moreover, if democratic participation by workers in shop affairs depends upon fractional bargaining, there is no reason to believe that shop democracy will lead to an era of greater harmony. It may bring more conflict.

VI. Independence and Democracy in the Shop

the orthodox view of collective bargaining recognize that bargaining does not come to an end with the signing of the collective agreement. However, one should not confuse continuing collective bargaining with fractional bargaining as described in the present study. Continuous bargaining is assumed to be carried on by union and company men who responsibly administer and negotiate within the framework of the general collective bargaining agreement. Even though daily settlements may apply to single departments or job classifications within a plant, the negotiators are assumed to be representatives of the particular workers and supervisors through the local union and the plant management. In their daily bargaining, the negotiators are supposedly supported and guided by the same relative bargaining power that they, or the party whom they represent, either suffer or enjoy in the negotiation of the collective agreement. Having determined the limits of each other's general rights in line with their relative bargaining power, company and union officials promise in the interests of stability and economy to refrain from testing their relative bargaining strengths during the life of the collective agreement. Union officials usually promise not to interrupt production, and company officials agree to recognize the union as the exclusive representative of the workers and promise to comply with all the terms of the collective agreement. For a supervisor or staff officer to engage in fractional bargaining is to slight his first responsibility to company (or plant) management as a whole; for a steward or union officer, it is to THOSE WHO HOLD

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slight his first responsibility to the whole union. The collective agreement, according to the orthodox view, is the best possible compromise of mutual rights and duties that the two parties can define under existing circumstances for the members of both organizations. For any group within management or the union to bargain for more favorable treatment for itself alone than that allowed by the collective agreement is to deny the full authority of the larger organizations. Collective bargaining recognizes no intermediate bodies between company and supervisors or between union and workers; thus, bargaining at an intermediate level tends to repudiate the collectivity—the essence of collective bargaining.

Causes of Fractional

Bargaining

Since the orthodox view of collective bargaining assumes a simple relationship between the workers and the union and among the different personnel of management, it tags the power tactics of fractional bargaining as well as the bargaining itself as exogenous hindrances to "good and true" collective bargaining. Advocates of the orthodox view explain fractional bargaining, with its primary aim of satisfying parochial interests and its use of tactics formally renounced in the collective agreement, as a result of the essentially personal shortcomings of those who participate in grievance work in both the union and in management. The leadership on one or both sides is deemed to be immature: Management officers have not adopted reasonable or honest employee policies and practices; union leaders are insecure, militant, or unco-operative. In short, this view holds that there is an absence of personal good will which continuous collective bargaining and successful (i.e., peaceful) grievance settlements require. 1 Good will, honesty, co-operativeness, and reasonableness are, no doubt, necessary, but hardly sufficient, to effect the settlement of grievances and to maintain peaceful, continuous collective bar-

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gaining. The problem that fractional bargaining and its tactics pose for the orthodox view is more intractable of solution than are the conflicts of personal encounter. For such problems as slowdowns, the remedy of more maturity that even sophisticated observers of the local union propose 2 is admittedly inadequate. But as long as one analyses collective bargaining and the grievance process in terms of the orthodox assumptions concerning union-worker and company-supervisor relationships and ignores the logic of the forces within American collective bargaining, no other remedy is apparent. Maturity of the grievance representatives can help to solve personal and individual grievances or essentially superficial group-grievance problems growing out of misunderstanding and lack of knowledge. It can help but little to solve the conflict of expectancies that arise from the appreciation by workers and by union and management representatives of their position in and power over the work process. If the collective agreement ignores or fails to reconcile the conflicting, power-based expectancies of all the various groupings within the negotiating organizations, it is incomplete and lacks validity and legitimacy in the eyes of those whose expectancies and power are ignored or unreconciled. Should work groups use wildcat strikes, slowdowns, overtime bans, or other disruptive tactics, their actions may indicate not so much the failure of these groups to abide by judicial grievance procedures as the unwillingness of management, and probably also the union, to satisfy the expectancies of the members of the work group. Committed to the assumptions of orthodox views of the grievance process and collective bargaining, union officials and top management may, indeed, be blind to the possibility of any worker (or foremen) expectancies other than those expressed through the regular union organization (or management hierarchy). Unable to comprehend the true source of disruptive—or at least annoying—fractional bargaining, top officials search for culprits and find personal irresponsibility and ignorance the

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source of their troubles. Thus is explained the reluctance of top officials to give their shop representatives and agents loose rein, and thus can be understood union-management training programs that explore, or more usually expose, any number of subjects except those relevant to the needs of shop grievance bargainers. In fact, however, grievance representatives are responsible in their fractional bargaining, though not in the way desired by top officials. Shop and chief stewards may have a high degree of responsibility to work groups, whatever their responsiveness to top union officials. Foremen and lower supervisors are apt to be more responsive to the immediate shop production and cost schedules by which they are judged than to the industrial relations department or to provisions of the collective agreement. Grievance representatives intimately involved in the grievance process may be ignorant of the fine points of managerial rights or details of time study, but they have a keen knowledge of the complex of coercive shop pressures to which they must respond. Grievance representatives recognize in practice what the abstractly conceived grievance procedure did not admit: that the technology of the production process itself forms individual workers and supervisory management, to greater or lesser degree, into groups whose collective ego is not easily persuaded to serve a wider interest. Grievance representatives must face the fact that the work group is a focus of power lying between workers and union and also that within management, men with different duties have differing interests. The actual facts of experience have required that fractional bargaining become integral to the grievance process. Willingness to Bargain If all members of management pursued the same labor policy and held to the same goals, fractional bargaining and disruptive tactics could hardly be successful and thus would not be much used. The differing positions of the various members of manage-

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ment impose responsibilities which lead them to be susceptible in differing degrees to the force or lure of fractional bargaining. Such differences in susceptibility militate in practice against a uniform company or plant labor policy, whatever the formal appearances may be. As noted earlier, the industrial relations staff can take a broader, longer view of labor problems. It specifically has the responsibility to maintain good relations with the union and by its position cannot help but be a judge of lower line managers and a critical advisor and agent of higher management. Their responsibilities for over-all labor policy and their judicialadvisory roles do not keep industrial relations staffs from bargaining fractionally, as we have already seen in the illustrative cases of the last chapter. A director of industrial relations may deem it wise to help build up through grievance concessions a friendly, understanding union representative who backs the company's time-study methods. He may finally pay some part of a doubtful claim for back pay if in return the steward will drop a grievance which, if explored in arbitration, would reveal a shop practice of dangerous precedence when applied to other departments. Since its primary concern is broad company policy, however, the industrial relations staff is less tempted by fractional bargaining and parochial settlements than any other part of management, and it is also less affected by bargaining tactics than any other part of management. Foremen and line managers, not the industrial relations staff, have had to stand up to the greatest thrust of fractional demands from work groups. Industrial relations men rose to their influential position with the rise of unions. Foremen have had to share control of the shop with both union representatives and the industrial relations staff. Members of industrial relations staffs may often feel uncomfortable as they fill their judicial, advisory role, but foremen feel caught in a position that denies them the necessary independence and flexibility to carry out their duties. Fractional bargaining, whether detrimental to the company or not, gives them a way to escape. Within the solid stone of man-

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agement, thus, there exist lines of cleavage. As in a stone, pressure along the line of cleavage can most easily divide the seemingly solid unity. FOREMEN ON THE LINE

The complaint of foremen is that the industrial relations staff does not recognize their difficulties in reconciling demands for production with demands made by union representatives. Typical of the feeling of many foremen is the following comment by a division foreman: "They [industrial relations] don't really understand the problems here. They are too far away. That's the difficulty with an over-all contract in a big company. The contract may be good generally but it doesn't fit the technical requirements of my department." Even when foremen appreciate the work of the industrial relations department, they find that it interferes with their primary purposes. With rare exceptions foremen and line supervisors judge their grievance activities by the effect those activities have on shop production schedules. They are convinced that the requirements of the grievance procedure usually interfere with their local, immediate production goals. An experienced senior foreman in a foundry said: "We have to work around the union or prove everything 100 per cent, even though you know you're right to begin with. Without the union you could bring in the best workers and not follow seniority. It hurts production to follow the rules." A younger foreman in another plant said: "The union and petty grievances just hamstring the foreman. . . . They rob a man of his time and keep him off his important work." A second level foreman complained of judicial grievance work because "the same questions come up year after year and we have to hash them over and over. No matter whether it is a damn fool complaint or not it takes precedence over everything else." All foremen preferred to avoid the compliance-judicial procedures if possible. They take the foreman away from his pressing production duties and, even worse, take

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the complaining workers and union representatives away from their jobs. The judicial procedure requires the foreman to meet with the workers and union representatives to discuss complaints. If they do not reach a settlement, the foreman must detail a written answer to the charges in the grievance. He often has to check with industrial relations and the next higher supervisors to make sure that his answer is in line with company policy. There may be further conferences at the second level and with the industrial relations office. If the matter goes that far, the foreman may have to defend his action and his answer before an arbitrator. The small charm of having to defend their actions before superiors has led foremen to give up a part of their authority and independence of action despite the often expressed desire of the industrial relations staff that they maintain it. Staff men say that they would like foremen to feel free to handle disciplinary cases themselves, but all too frequently the responsibility for enforcing discipline comes to rest with industrial relations. Under the collective agreement discipline must be in accord with the rules and based on clear proof of transgression. Unions press almost every serious disciplinary case through full grievance hearings, and foremen then have to defend their actions before the union and higher management. As a result, the ordering of any but minor disciplinary action on their own becomes particularly unattractive. "When the union takes the problem to the higher level [i.e., industrial relations], the foreman will find that the control is out of his hand," explained one foreman. A number of foremen expressed sentiments similar to those of a foreman who maintained that industrial relations could not help believing: "Where there's smoke there's fire. In any department with a lot of grievances, management will think there's some difficulties and be around." Industrial relations staff members tend to confirm the foremen's fears. They cannot be sure what a flood of grievances from a department means. Perhaps a shop steward is only overzealous or

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bucking for higher office, but it may also be that the foreman is not following the agreement. In any case, the attention of the industrial relations department is drawn to the situation. A director of industrial relations said: "Even if a complaint doesn't amount to anything, it is worth getting out and investigating the causes. You don't want a real problem to fester and develop into a hot spot." Thus, even where the foremen receive no "black marks" for a grievance sent to higher levels, as some foremen believe they do, grievances invite the unwelcome attention of the industrial relations staff. Foremen want to avoid losing production time, but, just as important, they desire to maintain as large a measure of independence and flexibility as they can. Only by escaping from some of the restrictive provisions of the collective agreement, shop rules, or customary practices can they gain what they consider to be necessary shop flexibility. The more freely foremen can work out local, immediate arrangements in their departments, the better can they fulfill their production goals. The less that higher management, the industrial relations department, and the restrictions of the collective agreement are involved in his shop affairs, the freer the foreman is; the fewer the grievances that go to the top, the less notice the shop receives. Foremen try to carry out two intertwined purposes within the grievance process: to minimize grievance interference with their production schedules and to maintain the flexibility they feel they need to insure a safe margin in working time and efficiency. Since the guarantees of the grievance procedures and the collective agreement restrict foremen's pursuit of both aims, they find informal problem-solving with the aid of the union representatives or, if necessary, fractional bargaining the most satisfactory method of treating shop and worker problems. Those foremen who had few complaints about grievance handling were men who treated few, if any, formal grievances but who were adept at inducing or forcing their stewards to settle problems fractionally and with but passing regard for the col-

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lective agreement. Their willingness to bargain fractionally arises because they must operate and succeed within a coercive system that frequently makes production demands upon them great enough to persuade them to ignore the demands of company labor policy. UNION

REPRESENTATIVES

Similarly, willingness of union representatives to bargain fractionally results from their being subject to a complex coercive system that makes demands upon them to serve not only the plant-, company-, or industry-wide interests of the unions, but also the narrow parochial interests of their electorate. Many representatives feel themselves caught between the demands of the workers whom they represent and the demands of the union whose responsible officials they are supposed to be. Pressures to engage in fractional bargaining do not bear upon all representatives equally any more than they do so upon all foremen. Representatives who work full time at handling grievances and enjoy their career are more likely to find fractional bargaining attractive than representatives who work regularly at their job and accept their office not so much because they like grievance work as because their fellow workers refused the office themselves. Representatives who hold, but do not fill, their office, have little incentive to bargain in the shop. Union officers and chief representatives in most of the locals estimate that not more than half and frequently as few as 25 per cent of all shop stewards or committeemen can without help competently advise workers, write up grievances, and process complaints. Passive, rather than inactive, is the description to be given to these representatives, who make up so large a portion of the unions' shop delegations. If they were completely inactive the grievance system would quickly fail; it does not fail because passive representatives serve to collect and pass on complaints of the workers to active union representatives and to call attention to minor problems developing. They make little effort to

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judge the merits of complaints or to resolve difficulties. Their aim is to transmit demands from their constituents with as little personal involvement as possible and to claim such special rights and benefits as shop representatives may enjoy. Most local unions elect first-level shop representatives yearly. Open nomination, secret ballot, and general indifference mark most if not all of the contests. Since election of local officers and chief representatives usually occurs before or after election of junior stewards, general political issues almost never arise. Any man who seeks a steward's position can usually find one to fill, and many men who do not seek the office find themselves chosen by their fellow workers. Not infrequently higher officers must appoint men to fill posts for which no one ran or from which incumbents resigned. To find weakness or failure in shop unionism because of worker apathy or indifference toward selection of their immediate shop representatives and because of the low level of performance of a large portion of those representatives, is to judge unions by an impossibly high standard of operation. 3 To find in every group of twenty to forty ordinary workers a man who will bear the costs of active grievance work and who will be satisfied with the rewards is unlikely. The costs of active office and the demands made upon shop representatives are high, while the rewards may be at best intangible. If each steward were an active, able, and acute representative, the shop organization would be seriously, if not disastrously, overstaffed. Passive representatives perform an unspectacular but necessary function. Perhaps they could perform better, but they may be adequate to the needs of workers and the union. Their presence in the shop is a reminder and a guarantee of the availability of the full aid of the local union. Plotting over-all grievance strategy and conducting general grievance negotiations is usually a full-time position except in the smallest shop. Senior representatives may have job assignments at which they work occasionally, but in fact they are more likely

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to spend the largest share of their time both in and out of the plant in handling grievances. In a large local union several representatives may become full-time strategists and negotiators; in a smaller local a single representative may be able to handle the general grievance work. Whether their union title is chief steward, division chairman, president, or vice-president, the full-time grievance representatives are the key men in the grievance process. The senior representatives meet with managers at all levels. They are the men who informally help to administer the provisions of the agreement and to solve daily shop problems. On the shop floor they are the professionals among the shop stewards and the foremen; at the industrial relations office they are experts co-equal with the staff men in interpreting the agreement and applying labor policy. The senior representative notes trouble brewing in a department and brings it to the attention of higher management. Perhaps a foreman has not been letting the stewards see seniority lists as the collective agreement requires, or a ventilation fan in the paint department has been inoperative for two weeks, with hot weather approaching. He may work out an understanding with a department foreman that men be temporarily transferred by seniority anywhere within the department, though the agreement restricts temporary transfers to specific production lines. In return the foreman agrees not to put in third-class operators but to use only first and secondclass. The foreman gains flexibility, and the workers need not worry about lower-paid employees taking work from them. He meets with the plant superintendent to discuss problems of equalizing overtime hours during the vacation months when trained help is most scarce. The industrial relations director asks him to stop by to try to screen out a couple of grievances slated for arbitration next week. A worker in the freight dispatching office may catch him in the union hall and complain that the company is making him time-

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study himself. It turns out that the foreman only requested the employee to note the entering and leaving time of company trucks, a kind of work clearly within the classification. The representative explains the matter to the troubled worker. A "hot-shot" steward may bring him a tortured interpretation of the provision for jury-duty pay, to justify a grievance he wants to submit for a fellow worker. The senior representative disallows the grievance and points out the clear intent of the provision. Another steward may tell him that foreman X has turned down a request for off-standard rates and the boys want some pressure put on him to be reasonable. He promises to talk to X, and if he doesn't come around, he will meet the group to see about "heating things up." In another department a steward raises a question of helpers doing work within an operator's classification. The particular job is new, and the senior representative phones industrial relations to clarify the matter at once. As he passes through another section of the plant on his way to a grievance conference he stops to talk with a crew taking a smoking break. He may explain a recent arbitration decision that affects some complaints of theirs, discuss the new work limits that the group has decided upon after the last wage increase, and get a line on the "tall poppies" or "red apples" who won't go along. At the grievance conference a steward may charge that a new rate is too tight, for the men are 20 per cent below their usual earnings. The senior representative goes over the job specifications and time data with the time-study engineer and steward. While they may occasionally find a few errors or omissions in job elements, the senior representative may more frequently conclude that the rate is about right and try to persuade the workers to give it another try. Any active union representative who hopes to win a higher position—or to insure his present one—must perform, in his own sphere, duties very much like those performed by the senior representative. He must represent workers who often know little about their specific rights under the agreement, but who believe

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that any representative who wants to hold his job should safeguard their interests and fight for their welfare under all circumstances. The Politics of Handling Grievances. All active union representatives face a common problem: maintaining the confidence and favor of enough union members to secure re-election. If general indifference marks shop elections and almost any willing worker can secure a position, one may wonder how re-election can be much of a problem. First, the small number of votes cast for any candidate allows volatile changes in voting results. Should a steward provoke a few members by his handling of a grievance without gaining some offsetting loyal supporters elsewhere, the poll at the next election may swing heavily against him with the shift of but a few votes. Frequently candidates for favored positions win over their several rivals with a plurality that may be only a third or less of the total votes. Faced with a fickle electorate and rivals for the best positions, a representative must alienate as few, and win the support of as many, constituents as he can. Second, not all shop positions have equal prestige. They vary in desirability according to the kind of work performed in the departments, the skills and plant status of the workers represented, the kinds of problems that customarily arise, and the attitude toward grievance settlement of the departmental foremen. The office of shop representative may go begging among the clean-up crew, the yard gang, or the time checkers, but plenty of candidates desire to represent the skilled men and departments that have major production facilities. Even in some of the good departments, an office may occasionally be unattractive if a tough foreman fights every grievance to the last step. With strong support from his work group or a reputation made through energetic grievance work, a steward or committeeman can aspire to higher union office. He may appeal for broad support by pointing to his departmental record as evidence of his capabilities.4 The result is competition among active representa-

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tives in junior offices for a reputation on which to base a challenge for senior positions and a weeding out at the top of those who cannot satisfy the demands of voting members. Competition among the junior representatives and rivalry between the junior and senior representatives generates a constant, unsettling tension within the grievance process. Departmental actions and loyalties of the junior representatives tend to conflict with the wider responsibilities of senior representatives and local union officers. Yet each is dependent upon the other and must compromise his own responsibilities. Senior representatives and union officers need the recommendation and support of junior representatives in order to get the votes of the workers, and junior representatives need the support and cooperation of senior representatives in order to process grievances effectively. The volatile election system, combined with competition and rivalry among the active representatives, makes political maneuver and calculation an ever present force in the grievance process. There is obvious value in pushing grievances just before elections, or in arranging at that time to have pending before industrial relations or arbitration a complicated grievance involving a lot of back pay. Representatives feel political pressures upon them at all times, though, not just prior to election. The chairman of a skilled maintenance division in a plant of thirteen thousand workers said: "We and the committeemen are under constant pressure to take up grievances which have little merit. W e take them up against our better judgment because, after all, we're elected. The workers want to know what they're paying $3.75 a month for." A foreman in another plant of two thousand workers said: "I've seen the men really jump on the stewards. Sometimes they get him in the locker room and give him a going over. They want to know why they haven't got an answer; they tell him he'll get no vote at the next election, and what're they paying dues for." If representatives at the lower levels send up politically difficult, but meritless cases, senior representatives at the top are in

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a difficult spot. The president of a local defended a big backlog of arbitration cases: "Look, if the stewards don't do their job, I can't face them all down and say those grievances have no merit —not three months before elections I can't." A number of tactics are available to lessen the onus of refusing to defend poor grievances. A union representative may try to direct the ire of the workers to the "obviously inadequate, but nevertheless clear" wording of the agreement. Or he may advise the grievance committee to refuse further processing of a grievance, while the official minutes show that he voted to carry on the fight. Then he can tell the complainants that he was overruled by the unsympathetic committee. Alternatively, the committee may recommend that the case be taken to arbitration, but for various reasons it may not come up until it has become meaningless or been forgotten. The most widely recognized and deplored tactic is that of taking meritless grievances to the arbitrator/' To deplore these tactics of sidestepping unpleasant decisions without considering the political realities in the union is to be unfair to union representatives. Industrial relations officers usually have a lively appreciation of the political pressures upon their counterparts and try to take an understanding view of exasperating grievance maneuvers. In democratic locals the members can overrule the disposition of grievances by their representatives. Workers enjoy the practice of offering their grievances to one representative after another until they get an advocate. Union officials frown upon such a practice, but rivalry among junior representatives and competition with senior representatives maintains it. 6 A more important check upon union representatives is the right of members to ask the executive board, the general grievance committee, or some other such union body to investigate a complaint and its handling by the representative. Complainants may also appeal to the membership at a regular meeting to overrule even decisions of the grievance committees. Successful appeals are not unknown and cause grievance handlers

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to consider carefully the cases they turn down. Small attendance at meetings allows a relatively small group of complainants and sympathizers to be more effective than appears likely. If a member can muster enough support from his ethnic, race, religious, family, or work group, he may force the union to take a doubtful grievance to arbitration. If the membership forces an appeal and the arbitrator finds in favor of the complainant, the union representative who recommended against arbitration will hardly have enhanced his reputation. On the other hand he gains little if his opinion of the merits of the complaint is confirmed by the arbitrator. Hence, because of their political position, union representatives have a bias in favor of grievances of doubtful merit. First, they may feel as one steward did: "I'm paid to handle these [worthless] grievances. That's my job. If I don't give them the benefit of the doubt, nobody is, because management sure won't." Second, dissatisfied members are more apt to vote against union representatives than satisfied members are apt to vote for them. Union representatives also have a bias in favor of grievances of a group of workers over grievances of individual workers. A group of workers can overrule grievance decisions of the representative more easily than a single worker, and if a group has any lasting unity it commands more votes with which to punish him. Successful active representatives are not so much representatives of individual workers as they are representatives, leaders, and spokesmen of important vocal and aroused work groups. The political implications of grievance activity and the conflicts among union grievance representatives can only be understood as one recognizes the group interests of workers in grievance activity. As long as political support is to be gained and political loss avoided by fractional bargaining, both junior and senior representatives in the shop who are active in handling grievances feel compelled to engage in it. Although executive officers of the local union may feel more restrained than representatives in the shop if the bargaining requires disruptive tactics, they certainly

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have a sympathetic understanding of the position of the representatives. Willingness of shop representatives to engage in fractional bargaining arises, then, not from the designs and machinations of union leaders but rather from the desire of the shop representatives' constituents to enjoy the fruits of fractional bargaining and their readiness to bear the costs of whatever tactics bring successful bargains. As supporters of fractional bargaining, workers implicitly deny the integrity of the union to which they belong. Even more openly do they deny the union when they participate in disruptive tactics disavowed by their union leaders. Fractional bargaining and its illegitimate, disruptive tactics are tainted with rebellion against the stable, legal industrial order jointly established by the union and management. They challenge the authority of management and the prestige of the union. An international president, Leland S. Buckmaster of the United Rubber Workers, has blamed too much local autonomy and too loose control from the top for the widespread fractional bargaining and heavy evidence of disruptive tactics used throughout the plants organized by the rubber workers union.7 He accused those who engage in walkouts and slowdowns and, by implication, fractional bargaining of showing "no . . . respect for the laws of their Union or the written contract between the Union and the employer." 8 Fractional bargaining and its tactics thus challenge the union, for the union claims a proprietary right to the use of forceful tactics and a proprietary interest in the discontent that such tactics manifest.9 The union seeks to organize the workers' discontent and to direct it through the union's own channels of activity. If workers act on their own in the shop, ignoring the promise given management by union leaders to settle shop grievances peacefully and choosing shop leaders to direct their negotiations and tactics, union leaders are put in a difficult position. The covert or open support that local union leaders give to fractional bargaining and its nonpeaceful tactics may appear to

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management or to an outside observer as simple duplicity. To union leaders it may be a desperate necessity. WORKERS

Apparently workers do not recognize the claim by unions to an exclusive interest in their shop discontent. Workers do not understand themselves to be simply members paying dues to the union and receiving in return wages and working benefits and protection of their individual rights under the agreement. The relationship of workers to the union is more complex than that. They no more approach the union as individuals than citizens of our nation approach the government as individuals. For some purposes they may do so, but for many more they make known their interests and demands through specialized agencies and pressure groups. Certaintly the above cases illustrate such relationships, and I believe them to be typical in the plants studied. Represented only by the union, workers may not be able legitimately to achieve all of the aims they seek. Active union members in the shop, shop representatives, and local officers were unanimous in their declaration of what worker aims are in the grievance process. A member of the general grievance committee of a large local eloquently described the meaning of the grievance process to the workers: As Americans we know what independence is and we value freedom. When we have both in everything else we do, why shouldn't we have them where we work? We've fought for and we defend the grievance procedure because we believe that every man ought to be treated equally and decently. W e don't want to take over the plant or take management's place. AH we want is to start on some kind of equal terms with management and be free men—Americans—in the plant.

A shop steward in another local expressed himself this way: The grievance procedure makes them [management] recognize you're a human being. You let big concerns know that you're not a machine— you let them know you get tired and have to stop. You aren't automatic. They've got to recognize you have skill and ability, and they've got to eliminate the sweatshop and discrimination and give equal rights to the workers. The company's got to recognize the human and moral sense of the workers. That's what's important.

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Less articulate workers and union representatives reveal the aims they seek through the whole of the grievance process as carried on in the shop when they discuss the value of shop representatives and grievance settlement: "You get more protection now. They used to treat you like dirt." "The union stops behindthe-door deals and discrimination. We're not at the mercy and whim of the foremen." "It gets rid of favoritism—foremen used to run things to suit themselves!" "We've set up boundaries between right and wrong." "The foremen used to push us around, now they have to respect the workers." "When the foreman used to act like he was the master—the ruler—it was like hitting a big sore." "The way we settle grievances keeps them from working us for only efficiency, they got to treat us like men." 10 In general terms the workers' shop aim, at least as expressed by active union members and representatives, is the establishment, enforcement, and extension of work and shop rules based on the values held by workers. No longer can foremen hire, fire, promote, or transfer arbitrarily at whim; no longer can management push the worker about or cast him aside with no regard for his needs or expectations; no longer can management ignore the workers' demand for job rights that give him security and protection. In pursuit of their aims workers may defensively protect what they have through the compliance-judicial function of the grievance process. They may also aggressively seek to enlarge the area of their rights through daily fractional bargaining. Union representatives and workers do not differentiate among the functions of the grievance process. They consider fractional bargaining an integral part of the grievance process, though they seldom explicitly recognize it for what it is and customarily speak of it as simply the working of the grievance procedure. The individual worker does guard himself against management's arbitrary discrimination and inconsiderate decisions by appealing directly through the formal grievance procedure. Grievance records show thick files of complaints against management's infringement of the rights of this or that individual. Each worker can seek the compliance of management with the existing agree-

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ments, for the workers collectively stand ready in the local union to defend those rights which they have collectively established. To make sure that his voice is heard and his interests considered when union and management establish his rights in the collective agreement, the worker must relate himself to the union in an appropriate, influential way. He may accomplish this as a supporter of certain candidates or officers who back his interests. If workers of like interests are scattered throughout the plant and on all shifts, they cannot manifest themselves as a unified group at the place of work. The most opportune time and place for the interest group to make itself known and to act is at local union meetings and through elections of local union officers. Only by joining with other scattered members of the local who have the same interests and by raising those interests to the level of a local-wide matter can any worker hope to influence the local officers in unionmanagement negotiations and thus to affect the collective agreement. Through such means workers can secure recognition from union leaders and participate in deciding such issues as acrossthe-board versus percentage wage increase, SUB versus pensions, and seniority layoffs versus a short work week. But the influence exerted through interest groups by the workers in formulating union demands and in affecting decisions that establish their rights is indirect. Furthermore, the inevitable compromises that modify the proposals of interest groups by the time they have become part of a collective agreement may well make the workers feel but slightly responsible for any new provision in an agreement. The final provision is concerned with his interest in only a general way, and in turn he gives only general, attenuated allegiance to it. The impersonal they in the union office and on the negotiating committee, not he, really looked after the matter, and they looked after their interests and the interests of many others too. When an individual worker attempts to insure his human dignity and to inject his moral values into a peculiar, developing, or new work situation, the union is an aid, true, for the values

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and aims of the membership more closely resemble his own than do those of management. Still, the union is large and not easy to reach. Its aims may not always be his when it is so large as to include diverse groups—skilled and unskilled, high-seniority and low-seniority, old and young, male and female, piece-rated and day-rated, Negro and white, married and unmarried, fast- and slow-working, and single- and dual-job-holding. WORK GROUPS

Much grievance activity arises from the decisions and demands of work groups, as we have seen. In volume of grievance work and in political significance to the union, the fractional bargaining of work groups within the grievance process probably overshadows both judicial and administration grievance work. By himself the worker has too little strength in relation to management or the union to claim successfully a right not already established or a concession not yet granted. He must join with others, and together they can press a desired claim. He need not seek out other workers who share his daily work interest since the technology of his work usually places him in a group whose job interests follow a common pattern. 11 A work group is so constituted that its members can easily participate in and conduct fractional bargaining. Its members exchange ideas and information immediately and directly every working day. It is a unit identifiable to the union and to management as well as to its own members, for the members of the group jointly perform or share a certain task in the production process. It is a regular and stable unit within factory society, delimited by a given technology. The work group is a primary organization which predates by far the union, as the investigation of Stanley B. Mathewson has already demonstrated. 12 The union and its grievance procedures, which protect workers from arbitrary managerial discipline and require specially empowered shop representatives, have given work groups greater opportunity to develop them-

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selves and to carry on their activities. The union has strengthened work groups, not weakened them, and has enabled them to expand their sphere of action, not deprived them of their area of work. Yet they play a curiously casual and informal role in union affairs. At worst they play an autonomous role, showing slight respect for the union or its policies. At best they meet worker needs that the union disdains to consider, needs too petty and troublesome to be dealt with as union matters. Through work groups the workers can seek recognition of their individual work values more immediately and meaningfully than they can through interest groups or the local union. The closer a worker can identify himself with a group, the more recognition he gains for his moral values and human dignity as the group pursues its purposes. Since work groups are smaller than the local union, he can help to determine work group purposes in a more significant way than he can union purposes. The responsiveness of such a group to his needs also makes the gains of the group his gains, and its decisions his decisions, in a way that the local union cannot. A chief purpose of members of work groups is to set and maintain a level of output or earnings which corresponds to the value the members place upon their efforts within existing conditions of work and pay. Some work groups may not so much set work limits (or as many workers prefer to call them, work goals) as accept them. They are traditional and habitual limits, continued and accepted as his own by each new worker when he becomes a member of the group. Groups may quite consciously change their limits from time to time in a most democratic way, after free discussions and real debate, as is illustrated by the following case. After a new piece rate had gone into effect in a stock-handling department and the men had tested it out, the younger workers began to talk up an increase in the limit of ten cents an hour. The older men, who by and large were not eager to expend the extra effort that such an increase would necessitate, argued for no change at all. After

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a week of discussion during smoking breaks and lunch periods, the departmental committeeman called a meeting at the gate at the end of the shift. After some arguing on the merits of a tencent increase or no increase at all, one worker proposed an increase of six cents. A general chorus of assent indicated that this compromise was popular. After a show of hands, the committeeman announced a new limit of six cents, which went into effect the next day. (A week later the international union proudly announced it had negotiated a new agreement with a six-cent-anhour wage increase. The men in the stock-handling department were not impressed.) If workers individually determined the amount of work they performed, a few would probably "make out" at whatever standard or norm management set. Some workers will exert the effort needed to meet and surpass the standard, and management can then point to those workers as proof of both the standard and the lack of effort by those workers who have not yet "made out." Lack of unity among workers enables management to force acceptance of work standards against the desires of most of the workers. Management need have little regard for the workers' consensus as to what the proper effort is under the circumstances. Only if workers formulate a common policy toward management's demands—to which all are held—can they gain enough strength to force management to recognize their values. The grievance process helps the group to set and maintain their limits. The shop steward can easily move about, meet all the group's members, and organize group meetings because he has special rights to "investigate grievances." He can police group limits since he can check production records. If he finds a "ratebuster" he can pass the word along or casually drop by the offending worker and warn him to get in line. The grievance process can help a group maintain their limits in another way if the workers are under a piece-rate system. To make sure that each makes his daily limit, the men like to have an unreported "bank" of finished materials that can be thrown into

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the day's production in case of power failure or machine breakdown. The steward can make sure that the foremen will allow these usually illegal banks by threatening to harass him with grievances, much as Howard and the tuber men made life miserable for Buchanan in the "hot tread" case. A second chief purpose of members of a work group is to maintain their integrity and prestige as they compare themselves with workers in other groups. Grievance files and fractional negotiations abound with evidence of rivalries and jurisdictional disputes between work groups. A superintendent of an assembly department in a plant of twenty-three hundred workers once said that he did not see why there should be any dispute among union representatives over which of two classifications, the assemblers or the testers, should be assigned to a new job task. "After all they're in the same union and the same plant. Nobody is going to lose work." He did not understand that control of new jobs affects the relative prestige and strength of contending work groups. The matter had nothing to do with the shop stewards as union representatives; it did concern them as shop (or group) representatives. The local union officers wanted no part in settling the bitter dispute. Work groups strive through the grievance process for settlements that benefit themselves even if they may injure other work groups. Each may seek to enlarge the area of work in its own job classification, to raise its members' earnings or lessen its members' work effort, to restrict bumping in from other groups, and to gain any special job privilege it can. Members of different work groups in a plant vary greatly in the degree to which they participate in group decisions and activities. Thus, the political pressure that members exert upon their representatives to pursue their joint interests varies greatly among work groups. The type of worker, the placement of workers on the job, and the incidence of new and changing conditions, all affect the interests and ability of members to control their work group.

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Worker participation in group activities must be physically possible, of course, before it can occur. Members of a work group spatially close to each other are better able to interact at the place of work and better able to participate directly and continuously in group activities than are workers widely scattered throughout a plant. But even if physically close to each other, workers may still not be able to develop a strong, united group because of such interference as noise or special work equipment (face masks, for example) which never allow the members to communicate effectively on the job. Members of a scattered or noncommunicative group typically depend upon their shop representatives to maintain their ties and to formulate group policy. Members of well-knit groups usually restrict the authority of their representative and insist that he be responsive to their demands. In some plants where representatives tried to follow a policy pushed by the local union that ran counter to a group's interest, the members of the work group simply ignored the elected leader and followed an informal spokesman. A group in one plant was so independent that it became in reality an autonomous unit over which the union had almost no authority. Throughout a plant work groups display a wide range of democratic control and participation. In some, the leadership is inseparable from the group, expressing its unmediated demands and acting only in response to it. In others, leaders have almost complete independence to speak and act as they like with but passing regard for desires of group members. The kind of grievance activity that results from these two types of groups are quite different. In the first, the full strength and feeling of the group is engaged. If its demands are denied or its activities frustrated, its leaders can react more strongly and with more emphasis than can the leader of an apathetic or loosely organized group. If its demands are met and it is allowed to secure its purposes, it can also render through its unity of action greater productive services and benefits.

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Frequent or major changes in conditions of work or pay stimulate members to a high degree of participation in group affairs, increasing political pressures upon shop representatives to give first priority to any and all group interests. Where work materials change frequently or vary widely in quality and where workers must turn out new products under new piecework rates, every member must keep alert and contribute if the group is to influence or control the work changes. Irritation over work changes and uncertainty about earnings thus promote a willingness to support fractional bargaining. Members of a work group who have submitted easily to the leadership of the local union and have not previously insisted upon a policy markedly independent of, or contradictory to, local union policy, can quickly change if prodded by alteration of their work methods or technology. The change to fractional bargaining and use of disruptive tactics can be dramatic, as in the case of 150 workers in the wheel-and-brake department of a firm making aircraft parts. These workers have long considered themselves skilled, though much of their work was a routine kind usually handled by semiskilled men. They machine aluminum castings on lathes, drill machines, and boring mills to turn out wheel-and-brake parts. Each worker operates his own machine, using his skill primarily in the set-ups of the jigs and dies for each different model and design. The care required in set-ups precludes any piecework payment. In the past the firm tried to fill all orders, however small, as fast as they came in. As a result, the wheel-and-brake machinists made frequent set-ups, sometimes as often as once a day and almost always at least once a week. After cost and engineering studies, top management concluded that it could profitably change the method of filling orders if it installed more automatic equipment and drastically reduced the number of set-ups. Up to this time the wheel-and-brake department had originated few grievances and had almost never sent a problem to industrial relations. The local union had never been

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embarrassed by the shop activities of members in wheel and brake nor bothered by unreasonable demands of any kind. In fact, the skilled, conservative wheel-and-brake machinists contributed more than their share of men to leadership posts in the local. Installation of the automatic equipment brought a change. The president of the local union, a former wheel-and-brake worker himself, explained what happened: I guess they [wheel and brake] give us more trouble now than any of the others. New machines are being put in and the men have been asked to work out of classification. [They were requested to work in a lower grade except when actually performing set-up work which has now become relatively scarce.] W e took it up with the company immediately. They were pretty upset, meeting up here in the union hall. They are acting as a unit even though only a few are being affected. They don't like this automation. W e have a new drill machine that one man can operate, and it takes the place of six other men. You can see that they wouldn't like it. They've always considered themselves skilled men, but now they're not top and they know it.

The group imposed a ban on all overtime work, and industrial relations hardly had time to consider grievances from the rest of the plant, so many welled up from wheel and brake. T h e union president appreciated the resentment of the men, but he felt that they greatly overstated their skill-status. To support the wheel-and-brake men in their claim for maintenance of their classification would raise trouble with half the semiskilled workers in the plant who were doing the same kind of work as that done by the wheel-and-brake men. Since the local union did not support their claim with enthusiasm, the shop representative carried on the major share of negotiations. He argued that since the output per worker had increased, the worker ought to get a commensurate wage increase. After all each worker now bore considerably more responsibility; he oversaw a larger production and cared for a vastly more expensive piece of equipment. Company officials refused to budge in negotiations, and as the union president laconically remarked: "The boys got pretty restless." Two months after they had imposed the overtime ban,

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seventeen men of the wheel-and-brake department appeared one morning before the company gates with signs announcing a strike. Management fired the men on the spot and was upheld later by the arbitrator. Unrest continues in the wheel-and-brake department, however, and the introduction of automatic machines has not yet brought the increased production and efficiency predicted by the company's engineers. Irritating or stimulating conditions of work and an ease of communication with each other do not by themselves produce work groups willing to support fractional bargaining or its disruptive tactics. Unless the workers can identify themselves more clearly with their own group than with the union, or unless they can identify the group with characteristics peculiar to their jobs, a work group is apt to be so amorphous and lacking in self-consciousness that its members seldom reach a consensus, or if they do, support it too apathetically to be effective. Compare the assembly wiremen in an electrical equipment plant with the tire-builders in a tire plant. There is no single concentration of wiremen in one department. They work in several production departments: some in transmitters, some in receivers, some in regular control panels, and some in the model shop. Nor is there a sharp delineation of the wiring job in a single classification. Men with higher classifications, such as testers and repairmen, can perform wiring jobs, and the lower-skilled assemblymen do minor routine wiring work. Management transfers wiremen from department to department as work loads vary. The lack of a particular identity of wiremen with each other tends to weaken the unity of their work group. The work concerns of assembly wiremen in any one department blur and merge with those of wiremen in other departments, yet a wireman cannot identify himself strongly with an "assembly wiremen's group," for the particular workers in his line or on his bench claim his work attention and loyalty too. Assembly wiremen resemble an interest group. They can express their will better through local union officers than through their own shop representatives. The

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wiremen do not speak with one political voice and so allow the shop representatives to respond more to their union obligations than to fractional demands. In contrast to wiremen, tire-builders work in a single department distinguished by its location, the tools and machines used, and the uniqueness of the work. No other workers in a tire plant assemble plies, beads, and treads into a green tire. The tirebuilder can see himself as the key worker in the shop. Each builder takes semifinished materials and builds from them the product for which his company is known. He recognizes that he and his group are different from all other groups in the plant and that he and the group serve a special, important purpose in the shop. The tire-builders form a strong, united work group in the plant and within the union. They maintain tight self-discipline in enforcing work and earning limits and act as one man in slowdowns, a tactic that requires close and careful group control. They choose their elected officials upon the basis of service to the tire-builders, not the union. In one local union where an election was coming up, a tire-builder remarked that he guessed he wouldn't be voting for the presidential incumbent. "He's not bad, but then he hasn't done anything for the tire-builders that I know of." The incumbent received very few votes from the tire-builders' group in the election that followed. However, a clear self-identity by itself does not necessarily produce fractional bargaining. Unskilled janitors and general laborers are members of groups clearly identifiable to themselves and to others. Yet they submit to the leadership of union officers and shop representatives. They seldom show much interest in group activities in or out of the plant. First, they find little need for any action since their work conditions are usually well established and stable. Secondly, these men are generally poorly educated or of limited experience so that they lack leadership ability or the confidence to assert themselves. The workers who enjoy the most prestige within the union and

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who have excellent opportunity to press their demands, the highly skilled workers, often appear to engage in little fractional bargaining, almost never use disruptive tactics, and generally solve their shop labor problems conservatively. Though the grievance activity of skilled work groups resembles that of very unskilled groups, it originates in strikingly different circumstances. The groups to which the skilled workers belong are not weak associations. Members are well informed about union affairs and company policy. They take pride in their work and enjoy a pronounced esprit de corps that enables them to act as a group off the job as well as on. Some groups maintain special funds to help with funeral expenses of deceased members or to aid injured or sick members. Skilled groups in some plants have funds large enough to be banked with the credit union. They frequently hold banquets or arrange other social gatherings to honor members worthy of special merit. If members take part in group athletics or excursions, they organize this activity within their own skilled group. Though skilled workers form themselves into strong, united groups, they probably have less occasion to find fractional bargaining attractive than many other groups. First, they contribute to the leadership of the local union out of all proportion to their number. Better education and more freedom on the job to campaign are the likely causes. As a group their unity in supporting or opposing candidates for union office can give them undue influence, though the sheer number of semiskilled workers may more than outweigh that unity of action. Whether a local union president is a skilled worker or not, he will be most responsive to the groups with the largest number of votes. A second and more important reason why skilled workers have less need of fractional bargaining is that more than any other group of production workers they have effective control of their work lives. A foreman in one plant pointed out the skilled maintenance men who repair broken machines and damaged tools: "[They] always take all their time to do the work no matter how

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much there is. Some days there's not an hour's job for all of them, but they busy around the whole shift. Another day they'll have everything to do and still get it done." For the most part they work at individual tasks under a minimum of supervision. They can set their own pace of work to match the effort they think they ought to exert for the hourly pay they receive. Unlike its attitude toward most other workers, management does not usually try to determine the effort that skilled workers should expend at any given time on every job. The work cycle of a machine or the speed of an assembly line does not tie them to a pace not their own. Sometimes the skilled worker may perform his work quickly and at another time slowly, in the same way that any person varies his output according to his moods, motivations, and understanding of the needs of the job. By virtue of the nature of their work, skilled workers enjoy most of the benefits that other workers seek to attain through fractional bargaining. The less control workers have over conditions under which they work or the more specifically management tries to control their work, the more determinedly will workers look to the work group to help them force a consideration of their interests and values. Refusing to cooperate, feigning ignorance or misunderstanding of directions, "rawhiding," 13 establishing work limits, banking finished pieces, hiding improved techniques of production, and misleading the time-study men are all ways in which workers and their work group can exert some control over the job, even if they are in a weak position to bargain fractionally. The stronger the work group and the more favorable its bargaining position, the greater will be the temptation for dissatisfied workers to demand fractional bargaining and the greater will be the willingness of group members to use available bargaining tactics. Workers' motives in supporting nonpeaceful settlement of shop disputes is not difficult to understand unless one places no value upon the workers' view of themselves as men. In summary, both the conflicting and the reinforcing pressures of the coercive systems within which managers and union (or

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shop) representatives act engenders a willingness among these representatives to engage in fractional bargaining as well as an unwillingness to accept just adjudication or administration of rights and duties under the collective agreement. Managers and representatives must respond to conflicting parochial as well as broad demands; they must resolve a complex of responsibilities to those above and to those below. Problems and tensions can be resolved only with mutual help. Each is limited by the other and can achieve a particular purpose only by modifying or compromising some or all of his own purposes. Compromises are possible and necessary because the participants often must maintain a precarious balance of responsibilities. From time to time each of the representatives may be in a position either to upset another's balance or to offer him assistance to secure a safer balance. Willingness to bargain fractionally is an adaptive or exploitative response of managers and union representatives to demands made upon them. Foremen will sacrifice rights of management under the agreement, disregard shop rules, or grant special concessions to workers if they feel they must do so to attain their primary goal of continuous, high-level production. Higher managers, who likewise emphasize production as their primary goal, may be responding to the coercive pressures of market competition and technological circumstances. Union representatives are willing to use fractional bargaining if they have more to gain than to lose from it politically. If their constituents, to induce them to serve narrow interests, can apply more political pressure than can the union in its effort to make them uphold its responsibilities, union representatives will support fractional bargaining. Fractional bargaining does not arise spontaneously and randomly among workers in a plant. Technological conditions under which workers perform their jobs greatly influence their attitude toward bargaining and their use of it. The technology of the work may not only transform individual into common interests and re-

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inforce them but may also enable workers to pursue their group interests successfully. How technology allows work groups to place their demands ahead of the union's is the problem to which we now turn.

VII. The Influence of Technology

the willingness of workers to engage in fractional bargaining arises not only from the sensitivity and unity of work groups but also from the power-based expectations of the workers. Workers may favor fractional bargaining as a means of getting benefits for themselves, but realize that the ability of their group to act is too limited to encourage much fractional bargaining. The ability of work groups to conduct fractional bargaining depends upon the power relationship between the work group, the union, and management, a relationship significantly influenced by the technological conditions under which a plant or industry operates. The theory of collective bargaining has rightly assumed that the collective strength of the union is superior to the power of the individual worker. To secure optimum benefits for workers, unions must speak and bargain for all workers in a bargaining unit. Individuals within the union should have freedom to pursue their work interest through the union, but these interests must give way before the interests of the majority if a conflict exists between them. As the agent of the majority, the union is the superior; the workers are subordinates. However, the fact that unions have a strength superior to that of the individual worker does not necessarily assure them of a strength superior to that of a work-group minority. A minority often has a unity and source of leadership that encourages it to look to its own resources and strength as well as to the union. Even if it acts as a political force within the union, it is not necessarily completely of the union. Given the opportunity (or belief in the opportunity) to challenge the directives AS HAS BEEN POINTED OUT,

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of management, it is able to challenge the union, too, and to display an independence which union officers may reluctantly try to camouflage by a belated support for the group. Ability of the Group to Flout the Local Local unions vary greatly in the ability of their officers to control and discipline work groups in their use of fractional bargaining and disruptive bargaining tactics. Technical conditions and work requirements determine the propensity of workers to act individually in the shop and also determine the propensity of work groups to act independently of the union. Local union officers whose constituents belong to groups inclined toward independent action will give considerably weaker support to the collective agreement and prove less willing to discipline erring members than officers whose constituents belong only to dependent work groups. In plants where most of the work groups resemble the assembly wiremen's group described in the last chapter, local union control is strong, and local officers can contain fractional bargaining and keep the most disruptive tactics in check. In plants where a number of groups resemble the tire builders, local unions tend to be weak, unable to defy or discipline work groups. The technology of production in some industries tends to foster amorphous work groups easily dominated by local union officers, while in other industries technological requirements create distinctive, united, and self-conscious groups whose members' primary loyalty is to the group, not the union. Union and management officials in industries with "strong," responsible local unions find it easy to praise their own wisdom and practices as the source of their peaceful industrial relations. Union leaders and managers in industries with "weak," irresponsible local unions blame their troubles on each other. In neither case are the officials apt to realize that the industrial technology under which they must operate determines to a large extent their

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success or failure in industrial relations. A comparison of the activities of work groups and the resulting state of industrial relations in two industries with contrasting technologies is instructive. Among workers in the electrical equipment industry, work groups may bargain fractionally and engage in disruptive tactics from time to time, but there is seldom any question of work groups' having too much autonomy or local leaders' exercising too loose control over the groups. Typical of the attitude of union officers was a comment by the president of a local when asked why his members never engaged in unauthorized walkouts: "Wildcat strikes develop from weak leadership at the local and international level. Only once did we come close to a wildcat here, and I settled that." Another president of an electrical workers local explained: "Our people are pretty well disciplined. They would really be in trouble with us if they went on a walkout without our permission." He went on to illustrate: A group of internal transportation workers who had been trying to loosen up a piece rate finally walked off the job without notifying the top officers. The union officers had some sympathy with the issue in dispute but were alarmed and angry at the action of the group. They ordered the men to return to work immediately and promised to fight for a favorable settlement as soon as the men were working again. The director of industrial relations had assured the officers that he would meet the demands of the group more than halfway, after they returned to work. When the group rebelled against the local leaders and decided to continue the walkout, management fired all its members. The union leaders refused to help the discharged men, and the case never went to arbitration. Such behavior by union officers in a rubber local would be startling indeed. It is unlikely that any president of a tire local could afford to discipline a work group by refusing to grieve the discharge of wildcat strikers. His political position is more unstable than that of his counterpart in the electrical workers union. He must hold together a majority coalition of at least four

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or five quasi-autonomous, distinctive work groups led by senior grievance representatives. In the continuing political maneuvers he does well to avoid giving unnecessary offense to any leader or group, for his strength comes not from the direct support of members of the local union but rather from the group leaders solidly backing him and delivering their groups' votes to him. The unity of the work group in a tire plant usually allows a politically astute group representative to throw the votes of virtually all the members of his group to one candidate or another. Such unity limits the group representative as well. He must closely identify himself with the group at all times and move in the direction that the group wants to go. He backs the group and it supports him. Should he repudiate a group decision, he would seriously endanger his support. He does not have a wide enough electoral base to be able to defend the interests of the local when these conflict with the parochial interests of the group. 1 On the other hand, the quite different type of work group in an electrical equipment plant enables the president of an electrical workers local to develop widespread support among union members in every department since workers are only loosely tied to their indistinct groups. The president can undermine rebellious group leaders by appealing directly to his supporters in the groups throughout the plant. The political consequences of a break with a group leader need not be severe since voting is seldom done in solid blocks and he will not necessarily lose the votes of the whole group. Ability of the Group to Flout

Management

To conduct fractional bargaining successfully, work groups must—in addition to acting independently of the local union—be able to force or persuade management to settle shop disputes on their terms. The technology of production determines the occasions when a work group can secure its demands by the force of disruptive tactics or by the persuasion of attractive concession.

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One kind of technology may produce only opportunistic fractional bargaining; another kind may place work groups in a position to bargain fractionally more or less continuously. The more vulnerable the total production is to disruption by work groups, the greater the power of groups to demand their terms of settlement whatever the provisions of the agreement or the understandings of top union and management officials. The technology most conducive to fractional bargaining has four characteristics: First, it subjects a large portion of the workers to continued changes in work methods, standards, or materials as they work at individually paced jobs. Second, it allows workers a considerable degree of interaction with others in their task group as they work at their distinctive and specialized semiskilled or skilled jobs. Third, it groups most of the work force into several nearly equal-sized task departments. And fourth, it requires continuous, rigidly sequential processing of materials into one major type of product. The first and second of the above characteristics stimulate willingness of members of the work group to engage in fractional bargaining. The third tends to weaken the political authority of the local union over the work groups, and the fourth enables the work group to disrupt the plant's total production at a cost to itself which is small in relation to the cost it inflicts upon management. The less pronounced these characteristics are in a production technology, the less important should fractional bargaining be in the grievance process. Some or all of these characteristics may be absent most of the time in a given technology, but they may appear occasionally and give rise to the opportunistic fractional bargaining mentioned above. Comparative analysis of differing technologies and their effect upon the grievance process and use by workers of disruptive tactics indicates a causal relationship between technology and the incidence of fractional bargaining. The two technologies com-

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pared here are those of the rubber tire and electrical equipment industries. The characteristics of rubber tire technology match almost perfectly the characteristics most conducive to fractional bargaining. Rubber stock and fabric, the primary materials used by the workers, vary in consistency and quality with every change of temperature and humidity, and even under the same atmospheric conditions rubber stock varies from batch to batch in its workability or tackiness. A local union president explained: You've got to have a lot of adjustment in handling rates since the stock and floor conditions are extremely variable and change from day to day. One day the humidity may be low, the stock dries out. Or the stock may have been piled too long in storage and is dried out. Another day it may be humid and hot, and the stuff*s too sticky. This means that the time the builders have to spend on a tire may vary considerably from day to day. A big, heavy truck tire may take a man one day, and another day three days simply due to changes of material and floor conditions. Continual variation in material makes workers especially sensitive to the work standards management wishes to set for them. The question of how tacky stock is comes up daily and is the subject of much dispute, since tackiness can be affected by the workers' handling as well as by atmospheric conditions. Foremen tend to blame the workers, and workers prefer to blame "abnormal" conditions. Rubber workers must also contend with changes in models, designs, and sizes of tires and with changes in the type of rubber stock from natural rubber to any of several synthetic rubbers. These changes are probably not more drastic or more frequent, however, than like changes in the products of other industries. The method of turning raw rubber and tire-fabric (and steel wire in the bead) into a finished tire involves a number of separate, distinct processes. Workers must first prepare the raw rubber. Warming-mill operators warm it batch by batch on their individual machines until it is plastic, then transfer it to Banbury

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mixers whose crews add certain chemicals, depending upon the use to which the rubber will be put. From the Banbury mixers some stock moves to calender mills where the fabric is coated with a thin layer of rubber to form the ply material. Other stock goes to the bead and tubing departments. The tubing department processes the stock it receives into treads and inner tubes. The mill men, Banbury operators, and calender operators form the preparatory group in the tire plants. An elderly union activist of long experience in grievance work described the group in this way: T h e mill men don't h a v e to stay in their job at a single p l a c e a n d t h e y g e t to talk a lot to e a c h other. . . . All the p r e p a r a t o r y division work is in one big room, you might call it. T h e y all stick together. T h e s t e w a r d s a n d chairman c a n m o v e around freely. It's easy for p r e p a r a t o r y to shut the plant down too. I used to be one of t h e m a i n agitators. If w e pull out, the main switches for the w h o l e plant are pulled out.

The stock, beads, plies, and treads flow from the preparatory department into the tire-building department where men at separate semiautomatic machines skillfully build them into green tires. Conveyor lines carry the green tires past inspectors to the curing departments or pits. Here crews of from four to twenty workers load the green tires either into giant pot-heaters that hold as many as ten tires or into the newer bag-o-matic, watchcase heaters for curing. The cured tires are trimmed, inspected, wrapped, and shipped. The work at each stage of tire production little resembles work at the other stages, and the materials handled at each stage pose quite different problems for the workers. A widespread observation among management and workers was well expressed by a local union officer who had worked as a skilled machinist: I t is in the tire-building room that I think w e h a v e most of our difficulties. T h e men's solidarity is most p r o n o u n c e d there. T h e tire builders are a b r e e d apart. T h e y ' r e like miners and they're definitely w o r s e in g o i n g their own w a y . T h e pitmen a r e just as independent. T h e y ' r e f a m o u s for their walkouts too. There's been a long history in tire-

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building and in the pits of the men running the department to suit themselves; they take action on their own.

Besides creating three large work groups of approximately the same size—preparatory, tire-building, and the pit (curing)—the technology of tire production has developed two other large, distinctive, and unified work groups: maintainance and internal transportation. The great amount of heavy machinery used in each processing phase requires a large crew of skilled machinists, electricians, plumbers, and carpenters. The members of the maintenance and internal transportation work groups move about the plant freely, easily able to keep in close communication with each other. The internal transportation group is especially important in the older, multistoried plants where materials cannot be moved automatically. An organizer at the international office who had represented the transportation workers at the local level explained the strength of the group: Now how effective you are in bargaining grievances depends how you affect the goods. If the mill men close down they won't affect the rest of the plant for awhile. W e could live on stock for a few days anyway. But [internal] transportation can be effective immediately. In two days we can close down the whole plant. Besides, the truckers are extremely close. Whenever one trucker has a grievance, they all have a grievance and they act together.

Like members of the other major groups, maintenance and transportation men are exceedingly loyal to their group. A good deal of the work performed by members of each of the main work groups in the tire plants is done by hand, and therefore the output of any department is sensitive to the pace at which the workers desire to work. Further, production cannot continue unless the workers are on the job. The plants are not at all comparable to an oil refining or a sulfuric acid plant where machinery or the process itself determines pace and speed of output. The tire plants operate the clock around for five or six days a week. The physical properties of rubber and the methods of

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preparing it require nearly continuous-flow processing in a definite sequence of operations. Rubber stock is bulky, taking up much space if simply held in storage. Ordinarily space is too expensive and limited to allow management to produce for storage. The preparatory department sends mixed rubber directly to the fabric-calender, bead, and tread departments. Those departments, in turn, send the plies, beads, and treads directly to the tirebuilding department. Conveyor lines haul the green tires immediately to the curing rooms. The finished tires are exceedingly bulky items, and the firms attempt to keep those stocks at low level too. Further reason to avoid any sizable inventories between processes is that mixed rubber deteriorates if not cured. The deterioration does not take place in a matter of hours, but compared with the stability of semifinished metal products it is rapid enough to warrant keeping stocks merely big enough to take up the variations in daily and shift output. The great temptation to bargain fractionally and the great opportunity presented to the tire workers who engage in it are suggested by the impact that a small work group may have in the continuous sequential flow of tire production. Table III gives one an idea of how effective a tactic that disrupts tire production can be. Probably an extreme case was the walkout of three elevator men in an Akron plant. Though the elevator men are not usually an aggressive group, they were apprehensive of the firm's attempt to consolidate jobs and save labor costs. The attempted consolidation coincided with layoffs throughout the plant when men in all work groups were fearing for their jobs. The plant is a multistoried building in which elevators are essential to transport of rubber stock and plies from one processing department to another. Within three days after the three elevator men walked off, over ten thousand workers were idle. No other workers would run the elevators; other elevator operators in the building refused to carry the materials usually moved by the struck elevators. No

Table III Leverage of Rubber Workers in Unauthorized Walkouts, 1944-54, Showing the Large Number of Workers Idled by a Small Number of Strikers Date of Report 4 Oct 1944 25 Nov 29 Nov 30 Nov 22 Mar 1945 10 Apr 13 Apr 15 Apr 20 Apr 24 Apr 1946 27 Apr 27 Apr 1 May 3 June 17 June 12 May 1947 5 Aug 14 Feb 1948 21 Sept 10 Nov 30 Nov 25 Mar 1949 30 Julv 1950 30 Julv 13 Apr 1951 12 June 23 Aug 30 Aug 6 Sept 12 Sept 14 Sept 4 Dec 25 Jan 1952 21 Feb 10 Apr 1953 15 June 31 Julv 15 Sept 7 Oct 5 Nov 12 Jan 1954

No. of Strikers

Workers Idled

4 5 36 25 5 300 525 6 200 400 25 200 25 500 125 20 250 80 3 60 50 265 4 90 530 4 135 27 30 61 12 100 14 4 180 150 4 92 30 6 72

5,000 1,500 2,000 1,000 600 5,000 3,100 2,000 600 15,000 115 600 300 6,000 6,500 300 1,500 800 450 4,000 3,500 12,000 2,500 200 2,850 1,250 10,000 700 1,500 3,000 250 4,000 2,000 1,250 3,500 5,400 3,000 500 1,700 100 2,600

Struck Dept. Banbury Chafer strip band building tread cutting tubes Banbury n.a.' curing prep. tubes millroom reclaim tubes n.a.* preparatory compound steel prod. curing tire building Banbury shipping stock cutting calender n.a.* n.a.' tire building curing prep. transport. fuel tanks stock supply preparatory reclaim compound room n.a.' curing prep. curing transport. calender rim tread calender curing

Company Goodyear M

M

Goodrich ti Goodyear Firestone Goodyear Goodrich Goodyear Goodrich Goodyear Firestone

Goodyear Goodrich Firestone Goodrich Seiberling Goodyear Goodrich ««

Firestone Goodrich Firestone «

Goodyear Firestone Goodyear Goodrich Goodyear Goodrich Goodyear Firestone

' Not available. Source: Clippings from the Akron Beacon Journal in the files of the Akron Public Library, Akron, Ohio. The paper reported many more walkouts, but the available clippings gave information only for the walkouts listed above.

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member of supervision tried to run the elevators because no worker would have used them under the conditions. The three men were effective because they found widespread sympathy among the other workers, who also feared consolidations and layoffs; if the elevator men could resist management successfully, the other work groups, too, might bargain for concessions for their members. Under the agreement, of course, management had every right to consolidate jobs, but under the circumstances it felt it had to agree to the substance of the demands of the elevator men. The technology of production in an electrical equipment plant is obviously less vulnerable to disruptive tactics and much less conducive to fractional bargaining than the technology of tire plants. The electrical equipment industry produces a varied assortment of items. The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists the following broad categories of products within the industrial groupings from which the plants studied were chosen: electrical generation, transmission, distribution equipment, electrical industrial apparatus, communication equipment, and household appliances. Each of the plants studied produces a wide variety of products as well as many different models and designs of each product. The typical electrical equipment plant is a large jobbing shop with different departments turning out different items and with workers in many of the departments using similar skills and job techniques. A plant might turn out, for example, several models of transmitting and receiving equipment, radar screens for the Department of Defense, a contract order of relays, five sizes of electrical motors ranging from fractional to several horsepower, and custom-designed electrical control panels. Each department requires its own variety of parts for semifinished materials, of which only a few might be used in another department. The fabricating departments, such as (radio) tubes, metal-working, coil-winding, and casting, produce a wide variety of models and parts, largely for stock. Each of the assembly departments concentrates on one or another of the various sizes or models as sales

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orders come in, drawing most of its components from stock inventories. Inventories are maintained at a level of one- to six-week's production to meet the usual fluctuation in assembly and sales. Large inventories of parts enable the firm to fill large orders of standard items and at the same time to meet the more fluctuating demands for special orders or custom-designed products that include a number of standardized components. The production runs of some items often extend through only days and weeks in contrast to the typical runs in tire plants of months. For many items assembly does not have to follow a fixed sequence. If a shortage of components develops, workers can usually "work around" the missing parts. Some loss of efficiency results, of course, but this flexibility often frees management from what could be embarrassing and costly delays. A supervisor of radio assembly in one plant described the common situation in electrical equipment plants as follows: H e r e in assembly we can juggle around the sequence w e put the components in nine times out of ten. T h e costs go u p of course, but if w e can save time it is oftentimes worth it. Right now I've been waiting since last Fridav for relays, and we're working around that relay. When it comes in we'll stick it in and the job will b e finished.

The technology of production in plants turning out electrical equipment does not subject the workers to undue changes in work methods, standards, or materials. Although metal does vary in its ease of working and machining, on the whole it is probably less variable than a substance like rubber. The electrical equipment workers do have to adjust to new products, different components, and changing methods of fabrication and assembly from time to time, and these changes give them ample reason to desire fractional bargaining from time to time, but the changes are not as continual and as subject to debate as those in the tire plants. Most of the work groups in the electrical equipment plants resemble the assembly wiremen's group described in the last chapter. They tend to be loose, amorphous associations whose

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members can identify their work interests with the local union about as easily as with their task group. T h e statement by an assistant director of personnel concerning work groups in his plants is likewise true of most other electrical equipment plants: We don't have factions in the plant departments that manifest themselves in serious union fights. We have a liberal policy of promotion and transfers from department to department. There is a lot of interchanging back and forth so that the workers feel a part of the plant and not a part of a particular department. Work groups with strong internal ties and a distinctive identity, such as the skilled foundrymen or the model-builders or testers, are usually too small to carry enough political weight to challenge the local union officers directly. None of the work groups is in a position to disrupt much of the total flow of production. In a job shop an interruption or disruption of work in a single department does not stop production in the whole plant. Each department has a considerable stock of components to draw upon, and assembly of the component parts and the finished item have no rigid sequence. Even if one product-line were vulnerable, management could rely upon production of the other departments to strengthen its hand in any fractional bargaining. Most managers in electrical equipment plants find themselves in the position of this plant superintendent: I don't think any one group in this plant could make it difficult for us in the whole plant. If the stampers walked out 01 got uppity, a lot of the other departments who use stamped parts could do the work themselves and get the work out pretty soon. The machine area could close down some sections of assembly, but not the whole. If radio slowed down or put a ban on, telephones could continue of course. If fabrication walked out, the rest of the plant would close down if there was no backlog, but as it is we could go for a month on stock. But from time to time, as the opportunity presents itself, members of work groups in an electrical equipment plant may be able to bargain fractionally. If stock is low, outside purchases are limited, or management needs to fill a special rush order, members of a work group may take the opportunity to slow down or

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refuse to co-operate with the foreman and so force a concession in rates, rules, or conditions of work. As one chief steward candidly explained: If you want to bargain over a tight rate, a sitdown isn't always effective. W e have to watch the schedule dates on production and catch the foremen up against their weekly deadline or something like that. Every department has a schedule, but they don't always hold firm. That's the trouble. They always give some "lead time" to allow for errors and changes.

As the chief steward suggests, the electrical workers conduct fractional bargaining, but under some handicap. Given the opportunity they bargain fractionally, though such occasions present themselves to them less often than they do to the tire workers. In one electrical equipment plant technology did not favor fractional bargaining except in one unlikely department. The assembly work and the routine punch-press and finishing work in most of the departments for the 1,300 workers was essentially the same. Work groups were most indistinct and apathetic. The local union president firmly controlled all negotiations with management under a near "sweetheart" arrangement. In the "unlikely department," thirty women worked at assembly of fractional horsepower motors. Production runs seldom lasted more than a week, and the design of the motors changed almost as frequently. If the time-study engineers did not set a standard on each new run that was satisfactory to the women, they went on a slowdown. Since the runs were so short, even a brief slowdown could upset the production schedules. Regularly the group's steward and the time-study engineers bargained over the standard and usually settled close to the women's demands though elsewhere in the plant fractional bargaining occurred rarely or not at all. No objective means of measuring the incidence of fractional bargaining exists in any of the plants. Most of the bargaining is informal and camouflaged by the judicial grievance procedures. None of the firms keep any record of the less disruptive tactics, and only a few keep statistics on walkouts. Even the few statistics

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turn out to be unreliable since different members of management define a work stoppage variously according to the bargaining situation in which they may find themselves.2 The definition of a work stoppage varies considerably between management and the union too. In one case where I was able to compare a union's and a company's records of work stoppages, the differences were large, though the trends were similar. (See Table IV.) Table IV Number of Work Stoppages in One Tire Company, 1950—56, as Recorded by the Company and the Local Union 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956

Company Record

Union Record

40 60 62 16 8 5 3

21 39 44 6

0 0 1

Source: Confidential company and union files.

Since 1947 the average length of work stoppages in the electrical equipment industry has ranged from about one and one-third times to nearly seven times as long as the average length of stoppages in the tire industry. (See Table V.) On the average, less than a tenth as many production workers have participated in work stoppages in the electrical industry as in the tire industry. Since the participation rate of tire workers in many years has been over 100 per cent, the same workers clearly must be involved in more than one stoppage during a year. The higher frequency of work stoppages among rubber workers indicates that they have more opportunity to engage in shorter work stoppages. For the same number of production workers there are two to seven times more work stoppages in tires than in electrical equipment. From extensive personal interviews with management, international and local union officials, shop representatives, and

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Table V Characteristics of Work Stoppages in the Rubber Tire and Tube and Electrical Equipment Industries, 1947-59 DURATION

PARTICIPATION RATE

Man-Days Idle per Per cent of Production Worker Involved Workers Involved Electrical Electrical Tires Equipment • Tires Equipment ' 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 Median

6.30 4.89 7.95 2.49 4.21 5.46 3.06 14.71 3.25 6.80 8.52 3.95 27.75 5.46

15.77 11.63 13.56 9.69 9.95 7.87 23.07 18.14 17.41 46.85 19.15 11.91 17.05 15.77

32 65 92 129 121 151 119 118 113 88 47 22 72 92

4 4 5 20 14 13 8 8 23 8 5 8 5 8

FREQUENCY

No. of Work Stoppages per 10,000 Production Workers Electrical Tires Equipment 2.0 3.2 4.1 10.9 12.2 10.0 7.8 7.0 8.2 4.8 2.8 2.3 3.0 4.8

0.9 0.8 1.0 2.3 1.6 1.4 1.3 1.5 1.7 1.1 1.1 0.9 0.8 1.1

' Electrical generating, transmission, distribution, and industrial apparatus, and communication equipment and related products. Sources: Work-stoppage data taken from Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletins on Analyses of Work Stoppages, 1947—59. Data on production workers taken from Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Payrolls, 1947—48; Employment and Earnings, Supplement Issues, May, 1955, May, 1958, and May, 1959.

workers in the major tire plants, as well as from written information from industrial relations staffmen in most of the other tire plants, I concluded that the tire workers' use of other disruptive tactics and fractional bargaining is at least as common in the tire industry as the work stoppages. Probably fractional bargaining is much more common. In the electrical equipment industry, plant managers, local union officers, and workers were familiar with fractional bargaining and its problems but only as an opportunistic or sporadic activity. All confirm what one might infer from the BLS data,

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that the use of seriously disruptive fractional bargaining tactics is far from continual or even frequent. To test further the conclusion that there exists a causal relationship between the technology of production and the amount of fractional bargaining and disruptive tactics used by the workers, the technology and grievance experience of two specially selected test plants were examined. The technology of one plant resembles that of the electrical equipment plants but otherwise is subject to the same influences as the tire plants are. It adjoins a tire plant, employs many former tire workers, and draws on the same labor supply as several tire plants do. In fact the plant is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a tire firm. Most of its managers came from the tire plant. An industrial relations official avowed that "we have the same background, the same philosophy, and the same ideas as the men in the tire plants." The officials in the local union could make a similar statement concerning themselves and the officials of the rubber locals, though they belong to a different international union. The local in this plant has been no more and no less active than the rubber locals in providing training for shop representatives and in improving the grievance process. The international officers of the rubber locals have been quite as determined in their efforts to stop unauthorized walkouts and other disruptive tactics as the international to which this local belongs. The plant is a large job shop. It has six major departments turning out a total of forty different products ranging from radar screens to glass-fiber boats and from corn planters to aircraft parts and special transportation equipment for the Navy. The management takes orders for any product which it believes it can profitably produce in its vast floorspace with its wide range of tools and equipment and its experienced workers. At any one time most of the workers appear to be members of distinctive work groups, and one would expect them to have strong group ties and a well-formed group identity. However, the firm has taken up the production of new items and dropped

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old ones (e.g. caskets, airplane bodies, and navigational devices) so often that the current work groups are usually too new and probably too impermanent to have developed into strong, independent organizations. Management has always insisted upon the right to transfer workers from department to department with few restrictions, and it has exercised that right often. The technology of the firm makes it virtually impossible for a single group to exert much pressure upon management. Much of the production is for inventory and in-process stock because of the wide variety of models and types of parts that must be on hand to meet the many different customers' needs and specifications. Even if stocks should be low, a single work group could not disrupt a very large proportion of total output. The diversified product-lines provide many props for the company to rest upon. About a third of the workers work at highly specialized jobs on precision or specialty items such as the radar screens and the transportation equipment for the Navy. These workers do form tightly knit, distinctive work groups, but like skilled maintenance men in many plants they are allowed to work at their own pace, determining largely by themselves their own work standards and many of their work conditions. Since they do not need to bargain with management to get their work values recognized and accepted, they find small use for fractional bargaining. The president of the local did not believe that the men in the different departments did much bargaining on their own: "If a dispute breaks out, they'll come up here [to the union hall] and discuss it with us, but there won't be any dogging-it [slowdown]. There isn't too much use in dogging-it here." Shop foremen and committeemen indicated that slowdowns were more common than the president had suggested, but the use of them that they described was clearly opportunistic: the workers take advantage of the foremen's need to get a special order out or to fill his weekly or bimonthly production quota, and on very short runs they often try "dogging-it" to get an adjustment in standards. Since 1945 the men have walked out only three times. One

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walkout took place in 1945, but no one could remember any of the details of it. Another one in 1951 lasted a few hours, and management took no severe disciplinary measures. The last one occurred in 1955 and lasted one morning. The men who walked out lost their jobs. Not two miles away is the parent company's tire plant, which during the same period has had literally hundreds of walkouts and in 1959 had two serious unauthorized stoppages despite a radical program to combat them. The other test plant has the technology of rubber tire production and is located in the labor market area of three of the electrical equipment plants investigated for this study. The workers in this plant and in the three electrical equipment plants are made up of the same ethnic, religious, and racial groups. The plant was organized just before World War II, at the same time as the electrical equipment plants. Its output consists of conveyor belts, hose, gaskets, bottle tops and stoppers, and other mechanical rubber and plastic goods. Though the plant produces a large number of items, the raw materials move along the same continuous sequence of preparation until the rubber (or plastic) and fabric (or steel) are formed into one of the many items. Then all the items go to a curing department. The several forming departments (analogous to the tire-building department in a tire plant) have less distinct, less united work groups than in the tire plants, but in general the work groups here resemble those in the tire plants. Fractional bargaining is so common that if the committeemen and foremen will take him into their confidence, an observer may study a negotiation at any time. Fractional bargaining is the work of the shop representatives. Further, walkouts and slowdowns, particularly the latter, constantly plague management. For a while management and the local union officers did lessen the incidence of walkouts through a vigorously pursued disciplinary program, only to be more troubled by other, subtler tactics. The director of industrial relations said that he had concluded: "I'd rather have walkouts. They're a clean open break. You know something is wrong and

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what it is. These slowdowns creep up on you and you never know what the trouble is." Other

Causes?

In comparing the grievance experience of workers under the two different technologies of rubber tire and electrical equipment production, as many other variables as possible were held constant. The size of the tire plants ranged from 2,000 to 13,000 employees, and the electrical equipment plants ranged from 1,500 to 15,000 employees. Since these are all large firms, the possibility exists that fractional bargaining and disruptive tactics are a function only of large work forces. Interviews with local union officers who worked in an automobile-parts plant of 300 workers and with the industrial relations director of a cable plant of 500 workers did not, however, confirm such a possibility. In both plants, according to the officials, work groups and foremen engage in opportunistic fractional bargaining, though under the permissive or at least watchful eye of higher union and management officials.3 Informal bargains and quiet deals do not remain hidden in a small plant where everyone knows all the people involved. In the auto-parts shop the workers had walked out several times over disciplinary penalties, and in both plants slowdowns broke out occasionally. From among the relatively small work force in these two plants able leaders are probably too scarce to supply both the work groups and the local union. The workers can reasonably be expected to elect the ablest leaders to local union offices and so to deprive the work groups of men capable of regularly leading them into independent action. Further, the ability of officers in the small local to handle almost every important grievance problem and their involvement in every shop dispute makes it easier for a work group to relate itself to the whole local and for the members to feel that they are fully represented. As well as size of grievance unit, the kind of service offered by

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the union to the workers can certainly affect grievance handling. If a union makes little or no attempt to handle grievances or train its shop stewards in grievance work, the workers may turn to fractional bargaining and disruptive tactics in desperation. However, neither the rubber nor the electrical equipment workers had such a reason to subvert collective bargaining or to resort to nonpeaceful methods. The United Rubber Workers union in the tire plants and the International Union of Electrical Workers in the electrical equipment plants are both industrial unions with a CIO background. Both show real, continued interest in shop work, in improving grievance activities, and in maintaining active local union organization. The leaders of both unions decry overt disruptive tactics and encourage the workers and locals to abide by the collective agreement. Both unions have stood by management's efforts to crack down on habitual and chronic disruptive tactics in the shop. The managements in these two industries were not found to differ from each other in any manner that could have relevance to the grievance process. In both industries managers fully accept their unions and strive to settle shop disputes peacefully. All of the firms have training programs for supervisors and have been willing both to adapt grievance procedures to new conditions and to adjust the grievance system when it performed badly. During the course of this study a number of management and union people suggested special circumstances, peculiar to the tire industry, as the cause of its higher incidence of fractional bargaining and disruptive tactics. Dual job-holding, which is common among some tire workers, 4 may lower resistance among the workers to those disruptive tactics that cause a loss of earning. If a worker is not completely dependent upon his tire job, he is hurt less by these costly tactics, and he may be more willing to take part in, or support, them. However, even if all rubber workers held only one job, the workers would not be prevented from using disruptive tactics; they would only be a bit more reluctant to engage in them. Also, walkouts and slowdowns are

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common in tire plants that operate on eight-hour shifts where there are few duel job-holders. Another special circumstance suggested was the tradition of on-the-job action inducing rubber workers to rally to the support of work-group stoppages, slowdowns, overtime bans, and other tactics that interfere with production. The rubber tire workers do have such a tradition, stemming from the violence of the 'thirties when the union first organized and secured company recognition. Plant sitdown, quickie, and stopwork strikes were frequent in Akron in 1936 and 1937.5 Agitated and dissatisfied, members of work groups discovered their strength and their ability to stop production. Hotheaded leaders often do appeal to the tradition of early wildcat strikes to whip up enthusiasm for a walkout or slowdown, but this tradition is neither the cause nor the necessary condition of the work stoppages. Even in the newer tire plants built far away from Akron and in those firms where management accepted the union peacefully, as U.S. Rubber did under Cyrus Ching, members of work groups developed the full range of fractional bargaining tactics quite as much as did their Akron brethren. Popular journalists have suggested that Communists in the Akron rubber locals were the chief instigators of the walkouts and shop trouble. 6 Such a suggestion makes either the problem of disruptive tactics too simple or the influence of the Communists unbelievably great. Walkouts and slowdowns continued during World War II when the Stalinists were most anxious to end them. Present leaders and old hands in the local union and among management personnel doubt that the Communists before, during, or after the war were a significant cause of walkouts or other troublesome tactics. Casting further doubt upon the role of the Communists as instigators either of walkouts or of fractional bargaining are the activities of Communists in some of the IUE locals. During the postwar years the Communists controlled one of the IUE locals

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investigated in this study, but they ordered only one walkout, which was a complete failure: the ringleaders were all fired and the strikers disciplined. No more walkouts occurred under either the Communists or the non-Communist unionists who ousted them. The high incidence of walkouts, slowdowns, and other disruptive tactics in the tire industry results primarily from the widespread use of fractional bargaining and not from other circumstances of the tire workers. Special circumstances may affect the particular incidence at any one plant, but they are not the cause of the workers' use of nonpeaceful tactics. An analogy might be the freezing of salt water. Adding more or less salt changes the temperature at which the water freezes, but it does not cause the freezing. In summary, the incidence of fractional bargaining is greatly influenced by the technology of production. Technology determines the ability of workers to press their demands and greatly affects their willingness to formulate demands. Practitioners of collective bargaining and industrial relations must recognize the necessities and requirements imposed by different technologies. Different technologies have an important and predictable influence upon the stability of the union in the shop and upon management's control of its work force. Not every technology places management, union officials, and workers in the relationship to each other assumed in the theory of collective bargaining. Whenever and wherever the assumptions concerning peaceful settlement of shop disputes are invalidated by the technological structure of an industry, management and the union face a serious challenge. That challenge is to the shop practices and customary attitudes toward shop activities of officials in both management and the union.

VIII. The Challenge of Fractional Bargaining

IT

is

CLEAR

that workers use walkouts, slowdowns, and other such

tactics not simply as devices by which they may short-circuit blocked grievance procedures, but also, and probably more significantly, as bargaining tactics within the grievance process. It is also clear that until management officers and top union officials recognize these two quite different uses, they cannot understand or deal constructively with the problems that fractional bargaining poses.

The Challenge

to Collective

Bargaining

Fractional bargaining is not a peculiarity of just those industries where walkouts flourish, but is an integral, though unrecognized, part of collective bargaining as it is practiced in the United States. It is no exotic growth on collective bargaining; it is a natural development nurtured by forces inherent in collective bargaining. Grievance procedures and the presence of shop stewards at the place of work have favored the development of a power center within, though not necessarily of, the local union. The grievance system is not alone responsible for this power center, but it has given new direction and added strength to the work group. A technology of production may bind workers through their common fears and hopes into unified groups and make management vulnerable and dependent upon the continuous co-operative effort of those groups. When members of work groups learn that they can with profit help determine their conditions of work

168

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by using forceful tactics, their temptation to make regular use of such tactics is great. Despite the disapproval of higher union officials, accusations of bad faith, or lack of authorization, work groups will use whatever power over production they possess to gain favorable terms. Peaceful, judicial settlement of grievances may not then prove attainable however desirable it may be. The stronger the workers' desire to satisfy their interests, the greater the likelihood that they will seek to find within the latitude of the general rules or the provisions of the collective agreement a specific application favoring those interests. Or if latitude is wanting, they will try to get around, or simply ignore, the rules and provisions restricting pursuit of their interests. The greater the ability of the workers to satisfy their interests—given their desire to do so—the more they will bend the general rule in their favor, or the less likely they will be to submit to the rules and provisions established by union and management. Irregular negotiations and tactics disturb the legitimate process of accommodation through collective bargaining. They are a clear, overt defiance of the industrial rules by which both unions and management agree to live. In recent years both parties have largely institutionalized industrial conflict, recognizing the benefits of conducting negotiations and even strikes in an orderly way. Collective bargaining usually follows a regular, predictable course, and if an authorized work stoppage occurs, the parties continue to follow the rules. Workers help management prepare for the shutdown, the factory gates remain closed, and picketing is perfunctory. However, fractional bargaining and wildcat strikes, slowdowns, or other illegitimate tactics follow none of the rules and may seriously disturb union-management relations. Through such bargaining and tactics workers and work groups challenge the authority and prestige of both union and management. How the major firms of one industry, the rubber tire, and locals of the rubber workers union have responded to this challenge during

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the past fifteen years reveals new and significant possibilities for collective bargaining and industrial relations. The Experience of the Tire Industry The popularity and widespread use of fractional bargaining among tire workers and the special vulnerability of tire production to any disruptive tactic created a serious problem for managers of tire firms and officers of the rubber union. Management of the tire firms had to take remedial action to re-establish order in plants that had as many as one hundred walkouts a year. The various work groups and foremen bargained as if their departments were independent baronies to be exploited for their own benefit. At first the union charged, and management believed, that the trouble lay in poor grievance handling and in inadequate attention by the representatives to grievance handling. As management and the union improved the grievance procedure and adapted it to the needs and conditions of the tire industry, it became clear that workers used the frequent walkouts primarily as a tactic in fractional bargaining and not as a protest against poor grievance handling. Management refused to recognize fractional bargaining as legitimate and called upon the union to discipline the workers. While the international officers look with suspicion upon shop bargaining, the political strength of work groups restrained the local union from any effective action. The international union in turn encouraged management to act: until the companies stood firm and had a program of action, the international officers advised, the union could not do much about walkouts. CURE B Y

PENALTIES

The obvious way to deal with unruly workers was to penalize them instead of granting their demands. But faced with the bar-

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gaining strength of their work groups, tire managers could not act as boldly as managers had in other industries. The industrial relations director of an automobile company told one of the tire managers that his company had put an end to walkoffs when he had fired 385 men who left their jobs in an unauthorized stoppage. 1 No tire company was free to take such drastic action. Loss of so many men would hurt production of the whole plant. Yet, if these interferences to production were to be removed, managers had to make bargaining tactics less attractive to the workers. The timing of the crack-down varied from company to company. One took its first step when it was under Navy administration during a wartime government seizure. The Navy refused to discuss any issue while the workers were off the job, and the men had to return to work without settlements. The company did not follow up this beginning, though, until after the postwar years of the profitable seller's market. Another company took serious steps against strikers when in the early 'fifties a company-wide strike followed a severe outbreak of walkouts and slowdowns. The period seemed one of crisis for management, and it decided upon forceful action. One company cracked down on strikers as it prepared to make extensive manufacturing and equipment changes. If unchecked, the work groups might have seriously interfered with the changes. Management decided to take a stand and bear the cost of combating the workers' tactics in order to insure its ability to carry out the changes unhampered. Personality, no doubt, had some effect on the timing of counteraction. One of the companies that took the earliest action against work groups had as director of industrial relations a man highly respected by top company officials. He was a vice-president, and when he pressed for action he was listened to. In other companies the industrial relations officers were less able to bring their concern to the attention of top officials. There is no doubt that the matter of imposing penalties upon

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wildcatters was a top-level concern. A company could not afford to decide casually whether to impose sanctions. One industrial relations officer said regarding his company: "The top men had to consider the practical effects on production if we applied sanctions. There would be an initial storm to ride out. How will it affect production and the market, was the tough question." Industrial relations men favored stiffer penalties than did production men, and the latter prevailed. They decided to make the penalties progressively stiffer as they experimented to find the penalties that were least expensive to the company but that were sufficient to discourage workers from walking out. Also, a progressive tightening up of discipline had the advantage of not jarring the union or antagonizing the workers into the violent reaction that a large scale discharge might have produced. Some of the first penalties had ludicrous results. One company first announced that it would impose a one-week suspension upon any worker who left his job and did not return within twenty-four hours. The workers quickly adjusted their walkouts to the twenty-four-hour period. Generally tire managements imposed one and two-week suspensions upon work crews initiating the walkout and discharged the ring leaders. Other workers, and members of sympathizing work groups who later joined in the walkout, received no penalties. Even though a few workers received suspension, the group as a whole did not. The workers were able to stop production at what was still a relatively small cost compared to the concessions they could force from management. Until the penalty fell upon all the workers who refused to work at the direction of shop supervisors, the sanctions proved to be no real hindrance to the workers initiating the walkout. Even harsher penalties did not suddenly stop the walkouts, but they began to have noticeable effect. Each company had its own variations, but in general the penalties were a week's suspension for all those who participated in the first walkout, and possible discharge for the second. Until almost every worker had

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experienced one suspension and realized that possible discharge awaited his next walkout, walkouts continued with customary frequency. To help protect their members, local officers kept a record of the walkouts in which each worker participated. If the work group knew that a man had one strike against him, he would be exempt from the demand to walk out the second time. As the companies continued to impose the suspension, they had to accept larger losses. One company had to suspend 150 pit men (in the curing department) for a week, an action which badly crippled all operations and reduced tire production in the whole plant to almost nothing. Thousands of workers had no work and no pay for that week. While penalties brought a decline in the number of walkouts, the number of man-hours lost per worker actually increased at some plants because the suspensions were of a longer duration than most walkouts. Workers were uniformly impressed by the suspensions, however, and fearful of the threat of discharge. A shop representative who favored walkouts related an incident in a grievance meeting that he had attended with the head of industrial relations: We got to talking about the suspension of a bunch of the tire builders. Somebody asked . . . [the industrial relations head], would you fire those 135 men if they had all walked off the second time. . . . [The industrial relations head] jumped to his feet and pounded the table and shouted, "You're god damn right we would!" Well, I figure he meant it. Whether management in any of the tire companies would have discharged 135 or even 35 skilled tire builders is doubtful. Management probably would have preferred to fire the ring leaders and merely to suspend the rest. The workers were not anxious to test management, though, and the men who became subject to discharge did so more through inadvertence than as a challenge to management. 2 A division chairman in one tire local described his reaction to the discharge of a worker who had walked out twice:

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That man had twenty-seven years of service. I'm telling you he was ready to throw over the union and everything to get his job back. It means a lot after you have worked that long and are that old. It's hard to go out and get another job. That's uppermost in the men's thinking.

The penalties of suspension and possible discharge directly effected a decline in walkouts. The penalties also indirectly effected a change in leadership among the work groups and in the local union. The company moves against the strikes probably would have been much more difficult and more costly if union officers and shop representatives had not begun to support these moves. The long disciplinary suspensions for all workers either initiating or supporting a walkout sharply raised the cost of the walkouts to those who initiated them. Increased resistance of management to discuss a dispute until the workers were back on the job made any gains from strike action problematical. Hotheads who argued for walkouts began to lose the passive support of the group majority. Men began to speak out against walkouts and to argue that other means of settlement were less costly and more apt to get a reasonable adjustment. The number of workers participating in walkouts declined appreciably, and the area of impact became smaller as moderates in the work groups were emboldened to resist the appeals to group unity made by the hotheads. Moderate leaders even called upon workers to stay on the job in the name of unity and of loyalty to the union and accused the hotheads of being disrupters. And so the program of penalties directed against all workers and work groups brought the local union more to the center of attention. For the first time walkouts became a union-wide matter in a way that had not been true before. A shop committeeman in the preparatory department of one tire plant where the penalities had been in force for several years said: Now the union could probably get volunteers to take over the jobs of a Banbury crew if one of them walked off. The men were afraid of being suspended and tired of losing work for a little group of men

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who get dissatisfied and fail to take their matters through the grievance procedure. SATISFYING T H E WORK

GROUPS

The penalties imposed by the tire management are drastic but not radical. However, the more significant part of the program has not been publicly announced by either union or management. It is still tentative and exploratory but, if continued and expanded, may mark quite a new development under collective bargaining. Those firms that earliest began their program to reduce the incidence of disruptive bargaining tactics have agreed with the union to give work groups some implicit recognition and a legitimate role to play within the framework of collective bargaining. Between the agreements of the electrical equipment firms and those of the tire companies that have been most successful in ameliorating the disruptive effects of fractional bargaining, there is one notable difference: provisions in the agreement that allow shop and departmental "mutual agreements." A "mutual agreement" allows foremen to make special departmental or shop arrangements with shop stewards when both parties decide that special conditions require new or more flexible arrangements than those allowed by the collective agreement. In form, and to some extent in practice, an industrial relations officer and the president of the local usually must approve the "mutually agreed" arrangements. The main effect is to allow those who insist upon bargaining fractionally anyway a restricted area in which they may bargain legitimately. Thus foremen and stewards may properly be able to satisfy enough of the demands made upon them for local decisions and control to keep them from bargaining fractionally in more sensitive, illegitimate areas. Shop foremen and shop stewards enjoy closer, more intimate knowledge of their parochial problems than do industrial relations and local union officers. By opening areas of legitimate fractional bargaining, the "mutual agreement" provisions give an

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increased range of licit freedom and flexibility to grievance settling. Under some of the collective agreements in the tire industry the following kinds of actions are explicitly allowed to be dealt with by "mutual agreement" on a departmental or shop basis: Grievances or grievance answers may be delayed beyond the deadlines fixed by the collective agreement. The classification groupings for equalizing overtime may be enlarged or narrowed. Reduced work may be met, within limits, by shorter hours or by layoffs. Vacation pay may be received even if the vacation is not taken, and the starting day of a vacation may be other than Monday. Employees on the same job may change shifts for certain limited time. The procedure and frequency of assigning jobs by seniority in a department may vary according to department preference. The trial period for piecework rates may be extended longer than the regular time. Rate and work-standard changes may be changed more or less than the degree of changes in the job. The posting time for rates may be shortened. The union time-study man may participate in the first steps of a rate study.

Management may incur a cost when it allows decentralized decisions on matters such as piece rates, layoffs, and vacations, but it can also reap benefits. The union probably benefits, too, by delegating an area of shop decision-making to the work groups. The "mutual agreement" provisions give an ambitious steward an opportunity to prove his worth legitimately, within the bounds of collective bargaining, and they also give the "hotheaded" steward a chance to secure special benefits for his group by methods approved by the union. These shop leaders are infected with a desire to work outside the area covered by the collective agreement when there is no room to work legitimately under it. Given some opportunity to pursue their goals within the union and under the agreement, they may inoculate themselves with enough legitimate success so that they develop a considerable immunity to the desire to use disruptive tactics.

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Workers as well as representatives build up a resistance to disruptive tactics. The right under an agreement to negotiate with the supervisors for a "mutual agreement" reduces the willingness of members of work groups to bear the costs of forcing managers to listen to their opinion and to negotiate with them on work matters. It seems probable that the desire of the workers to have some immediate, direct voice in determining their working conditions and to obtain a consideration of their interests is met, at least in part, through these arrangements. They do not have to feel that they are but servants stealing tidbits from the master's table. They are recognized as men with a legitimate, continuing right to participate in determining some of the conditions under which they work. In short, they are not merely workers, but men, treated with some of the dignity which is due to men. RESULTS

In the past few years, since 1955 for some companies and more recently for others, the incidence of walkouts in the tire industry has declined markedly. The decline has been in the use of a tactic, not in fractional bargaining. What has disappeared is an unwelcome and disturbing tactic, not the cause it served. Tire companies are still in a relatively disadvantageous fractionalbargaining position compared to that of the electrical equipment companies. They must be willing and ready to pay a high cost to resist the forceful demands of work groups. Even though the companies' position will improve as they automate their plants and as they diversify their products, thereby becoming less dependent upon the strategic tire workers, neither of these developments now appear to be able to produce a radical shift in fractional-bargaining power in the next few years. In the meantime, fractional bargaining continues, some openly through the "mutual agreements" made in the shops and some covertly and informally as before. The latter kind of fractional bargaining focuses on the pre-eminent shop issue of wage rates.

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To support their wage-rate demands, work groups now rely primarily upon slowdowns. The slowdown is the most potent tactic next to the walkout, but it is much more difficult to organize and is very likely more costly to the workers. On the other hand, management has found slowdowns more difficult to combat. Some industrial relations men and high production-officials of the tire plants are worried that workers are simply shifting from walkouts to slowdowns. Walkouts may be more dramatic and may appear to be more costly, but slowdowns in various forms probably account for more lost production. The effectiveness of slowdowns combined with their relative safety from disciplinary penalties persuade workers in many circumstances to use them where they would not dare organize a walkout. Some of the closely-knit work groups in tire plants have carried out protracted slowdowns that management has been reluctant or unable to label as such. In a slowdown, workers may produce at about their base rate. They may argue that this is permissible since the agreement or company rules do not require them to earn piece-rate bonuses. Management, however, bases its production schedules upon an expected bonus output. For the plant to fail to complete an order or to deliver goods that a competitor is ready to ship because the workers are not producing their expected bonuses, puts management under severe pressure to negotiate on the workers' terms. Until union and management agree to allow disciplining of workers for engaging in "base rate" slowdowns or their variations, management is subject to considerable harassment. Local and international unions may be reluctant to deny the use of slowdowns to workers since they are a common and traditional defense against management. Moreover, they do not carry the opprobrium of walkouts in the eyes of the public. In time, slowdowns may persuade managers and union officials to recognize still wider bargaining areas for work groups and openly to accept fractional bargaining as a legitimate activity within collective bargaining.

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The Challenge to Management A manager cannot simply decide to refuse to countenance fractional bargaining and thenceforth be done with it. He must suppress it, or change the conditions under which it flourishes, or do both. The most direct action he may take is to discharge those workers who stop work and those who engage in slowdowns. He may thus eliminate the most overt and disruptive tactics—at the cost of losing valuable workers—but not necessarily fractional bargaining itself. Suppression of fractional bargaining as well as its tactics requires more comprehensive and perhaps more expensive action. A manager may try to keep workers from engaging in group tactics by supervising them more closely. Or, in order to leave less room for bargaining at the lower levels, he may insist upon a detailed collective agreement that carefully specifies the rights and duties of all parties in all conceivable circumstances. Such an agreement sacrifices speed and flexibility in handling grievances, and it will require a larger industrial relations staff than would otherwise be needed, giving lower management added reason for resentment, frustration, and subtle sabotage of the agreement. If a manager changes plant technology to break up or do away with work groups, he must also pay a price. If he mechanizes a hand job and rids himself of an entire work group, there is a development-and-investment cost of probably no small sum. He may simplify a complex job so that he can replace skilled operators by easily trained, semiskilled ones. Production may then be less dependent upon a few irreplaceable men but at the cost of valuable time of the engineers, designers, and research men who produced the simplification. Or, a manager may reduce the bargaining power of a work group that takes advantage of production deadlines, by developing a flexible production-scheduling program—at the possible cost of higher inventories, excess capacity, contracting-out, or poorer customer-servicing.

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Suppressing walkouts, slowdowns, and other tactics and changing technology constitute a negative approach to fractional bargaining. At considerable cost, management suppresses or even eliminates fractional bargaining without garnering any of the benefits that the bargaining can provide. If in calculating the costs, managers also consider the offsetting gains, they may find that the net gain is too low to justify their efforts at total suppression. Fractional bargaining has two obvious consequences that do not commend it to management. The first is that it is accompanied by interruptions in production. Such interruptions are not limited to walkouts and slowdowns by any means. Even in plants where management does not have to contend with work stoppages, fractional bargaining over grievances often leads to disrupted production through use of other tactics. Foremen cannot get special orders completed quickly, machines break down just before a scheduled deadline, or production just simply and mysteriously drops off when a rate is changed. The second detrimental consequence of fractional bargaining is the confusion and conflict in company policy that can result if different work groups persuade or force lower line-supervisors to settle in a different way grievances involving the same issue. Even if work groups do not consistently possess much bargaining power, from time to time one or another may gain a concession which other groups can use to embarrass management and perhaps to whipsaw it into making the same concessions to them. In time, fractional bargaining may undermine the collective agreement and shop rules, which are designed to provide an optimum settlement of the conflicting demands and needs of all parties in the plant. If responsible plant and union authorities agree to change some provisions of the collective agreement after their original negotiations, no harm is done of course, since they may properly wish to modify their decisions in the light of experience. If lesser group or shop officials change the provisions, however, they may

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not consider the effects of the change on all those concerned. Fractional bargaining may well sacrifice certain vital rights and interests of unrepresented parties. One cannot blink away the undesirable consequences of fractional bargaining. They must enter any calculation of a company's labor policy. Fractional bargaining produces desirable consequences, though, which may offset part or all of the undesirable ones. If fractional bargaining had no advantages for any member of management, it is unlikely that it would persist as it does. Top managers in both staff and line may be able to overlook the advantages because they prefer to do so, not because such advantages do not exist. Fractional bargaining allows foremen an area of initiative and a measure of control that otherwise they might not have. As the industrial relations departments have centralized labor relations and personnel policy, foremen have often been left with little or no discretion to reward or punish their workers. Yet foremen remain the crucial point of contact between management and workers. It is they who must gain the co-operation of the workers in fulfilling production schedules. A foreman may find that if he grants privileges not allowed by the collective agreement or management rules, he may "carve out an unintended area of discretionary judgement that gives him power to reward and punish those who look to him." 3 He raises his status among the workers and is better able to fulfill his responsibility for production. The union and the burgeoning staff agencies of management have restricted the foreman while at the same time they and the new technology have imposed on him more complex demands and activities. Fractional bargaining is a way out for the foreman, a way in which he can escape restrictions which make his task impossible of fulfillment. The gains of fractional bargaining accrue not just to foremen but also to higher management. Large centralized organizations are not well suited to meet unexpected production and labor

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problems flexibly and imaginatively. Central staffs must get most of their information regarding problems secondhand and after delays. They are not in a position to appreciate local nuances or familiar enough with immediate circumstances to work out a pertinent solution. A large organization finds it hard to adapt to unpredictable local irregularities in the production process or to take advantage of local opportunities if shop or department managers are forbidden to devise special arrangements with some freedom and alacrity. Local determination of such matters as worker rotation in jobs, overtime assignment, seniority in job placement, and local variation in other matters, such as starting and quitting time and even rates and job content, can pay handsome dividends. The returns do not eliminate the costs, but they may offset them more than central managers might think. Some of the local adjustments may have general merit. Local variances may uncover new approaches to unresolved or budding problems. When tools, machines, and techniques change rapidly, as they do in many American firms, management needs to explore and consider many possible approaches to co-ordinating the effort of men and the rhythm of machines. So many variables and unknowns are present that it should welcome experimentation. Whatever the arguments concerning the benefits of fractional bargaining, they are not apt to convince the manager even if documented. Fractional bargaining, even more than collective bargaining, challenges a deep-rooted concept of the business community that the managers, not the workers, should control the production process. Managers expect to be free to determine the conditions of work according to their interpretation of the existing standards. If workers then have any complaint, they may peacefully appeal to higher authority and finally to an impartial arbitrator. That fractional bargaining allows workers some meaningful control over decisions affecting work and production and that workers might desire such control because they are men

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as well as workers, are concepts too alien to business thinking to receive much consideration. Much of the conflict associated with fractional bargaining arises from opposing concepts of managing within a shop. The clash of wills that results from authoritarian expectations of managers to direct, and democratic expectations of workers to affect, shop affairs provokes more disruption than differences over the mode of settlement. Bargained as well as judicial grievance settlements more often than not are in line with the wishes of management. If they are not, the changes made by the workers are usually slight. Workers often finally agree to management's proposals once they have been assured that management has seriously considered their interests and listened to their views. To insure such consideration and hearing, members of the work groups must, in most cases, apply pressure. Managers do not willingly listen to workers even when they try to consider what they think worker interests are. Only when forced to, will managers explicitly and regularly consider the workers' demands and allow the workers to help determine their immediate and particular conditions of work. Many management officers interviewed during this study refused to consider the possibility that work groups could—let alone should—be allowed to help determine their work conditions. They conveniently ignore the fact that workers do participate in rate-setting and that they must negotiate with work groups over the amount of effort a given rate will buy. As long as the expectancies of managers and workers are in conflict over the right of work groups to participate, differences over the content of fractional settlements are exacerbated and enlarged. Disorder in the shop community will result until the two parties reach a compromise in their expectancies or until one or the other is powerful enough to deny the other's expectancies completely. There are a few signs which suggest that managers can change their minds if work groups apply enough pressure. Some man-

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agers who have been forced by work groups explicitly to recognize fractional bargaining have found that the recognition itself has helped to solve chronic shop disruption. That is, when work groups have gained a regular, recognized role in determining a number of substantial conditions of work,4 they are not as prone to use major tactics. Though conflicting interests remain, they are more easily resolved. Management's recognition of work groups as legitimate organizations and its consideration of the work interests of the members may lower the flash point of disruptive action. Workers may feel less need to demonstrate their power to management in every grievance dispute when management recognizes the right of workers in the shop to express and protect their work interests. Even with recognition the group and management may still have to test their respective bargaining power over a particularly crucial difference, but the frequent disruptions of work may well decline. Managers have not been particularly imaginative in harnessing the work groups to work for the benefit of the firm. In some circumstances, management might significantly lower unit costs if it recognized the control that work groups already do exert to keep down the rate of production and total work earnings and allowed them to increase both. 6 The dullness of mind exhibited by managers in considering worker control of the shop is caused by the obscuring, though comforting, dogma that the control of production in God's well-ordered world properly rests with managers. To have accepted unions was jarring enough; acceptance of a still more intimate sharing of control does not come easily. However, managers are probably too pragmatic to fight powerful work groups to the bitter end. In the interest of uninterrupted production they will change their expectancies and admit such worker control of shop working conditions as will tolerably satisfy the work group. The job of managing will be somewhat

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more difficult, but the manager's central function of co-ordinating the bargains of all those who contribute to the operation of the business will be unimpaired. The Challenge to Unions Fractional bargaining poses a more fundamental challenge to the union than to management. It can jeopardize the rest of the grievance process, thus endangering a unique contribution of American unions to industrial democracy, but it can also strengthen and extend that democracy. The grievance process provides members of work groups with the opportunity for a meaningful democracy within the plant and local union. In most activities of the local union, union members play a small role, participating in formal procedures but seldom in matters of substance. Only a small portion of the full membership usually attends meetings, and often only a few take part in regular elections of officers and referenda on union policy. True, when an issue of importance is at stake, such as a strike, the members may have a deciding voice, and in general union leaders are responsive to the members.6 Yet day by day the workers participate little in the particulars of union affairs, except through the grievance process. Only in the grievance process do they have an opportunity for substantive participation. Grievance activities take place largely in the shop, where workers are already present and engaged. They concern matters that directly interest and apply to workers. In contrast to the union meeting or board hearing, grievance activities provide the workers with an opportunity to make their views known, discuss their particular problems or those of their work groups, and have a real voice in the decision made. A worker is less apt to be intimidated in the shop among his fellows than by the formal setting of union meetings; at a smoking break he is not confused and silenced by the unfamiliar procedures of the organized meetings. Even more than in the judicial handling

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of grievances or in the administrative problem-solving of the shop, fractional bargaining can allow members of work groups to assert their demands, to secure management recognition of their claims, and to gain a real measure of control over their conditions of work. This kind of democracy is not without its imperfections. The dissenting worker is sometimes forced to conform to the general views of the group or to the minority demands of the active leaders. Still, the dissenter has a better chance to make his views known and to recruit support in the work group than in the local union. Fractional bargaining unfortunately can also lead to a kind of anarchy within the union, allow exploitation of weak work groups by strong, or lead to repression of democratic elements in the rest of the grievance process. The informality of fractional bargaining tempts the bargainers to evade their full responsibilities; its covertness can corrupt the broader loyalties of the participants and lead to serious abuses. Expediency and narrow interests of work groups or of stewards often dictate fractional settlements. The first challenge to the union in fractional bargaining is to keep work groups with strong bargaining power responsive to the needs of all workers while at the same time satisfying the powersupported claims of the groups. The second is to help the members of weak groups to maintain, at least, the rights and standards of the collective agreement and, at most, to participate in some of the decisions affecting their conditions of work. The local (or national) union does not exclusively represent the workers simply because of the law and the collective agreement. In practice it is the exclusive representative only as long as workers and members of work groups submit their job-right claims to the union for final decision. Some workers—as, for example, members of strong work groups—may have the desire and the ability to decide their job claims for themselves, with little or no consideration of local union rules and procedures. Members of strong work groups decide to act on their own

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either because the claim they are making is inadmissible to the union since it conflicts or interferes with superior claims, or because the union has failed to accept the claim at all, not recognizing the group as a legitimate body through which claims may properly be made. Through unregulated, irresponsible fractional bargaining, work groups can undermine the integrity of the local —and national—union and fracture the union into more or less autonomous work groups who may exploit members of weaker groups. For example, in one plant the rim-welders allowed the departmental foremen to assign them out of their job classification to work in steel supply or on the shipping dock when work was slow. The welders were protected during short layoffs at the expense of the supply and dock workers. The latter workers received no satisfaction of their grievances over the illegal transfers because the welders controlled the departmental shop stewards. When a work group is strong enough to secure privileges that the local union cannot get for it, local officers must face that fact. To cope with the problems of fractional bargaining, they may have to give up their claims to represent all the workers directly. They may have to give work groups a role as bargaining agent for the union, allowing them to negotiate openly and with minimum restrictions on group issues. The local union would, of course, be admitting, not creating, the practice of fractional bargaining. If local officers believe some matters cannot be left to work group bargaining, such as the seniority status of technologically displaced workers or the method by which workers are laid off, they may in compensation have to grant the groups rights to bargain over other less critical matters which the local union has traditionally claimed for itself. Recognition of the groups as mediating bodies between the workers and the local union may help to reduce tension between the demands of the group and those of the local union. Work groups might be allowed to send their own official rep-

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resentatives to the negotiating committee, executive board, or general grievance council so that the groups have the opportunity to explain and defend their interests as a matter of course. Through these same representatives, unions could confront the groups with the general interests of the whole union and lay before them broader union responsibilities than they are exposed to now. The second challenge of fractional bargaining arises from the weak bargaining position of some work groups. A work group may be at a disadvantage in fractional bargaining because its members are unable to agree upon a common policy and line of action or because it seldom, if ever, occupies a strategic position in the production process. Fractional bargaining is no more limited to strong work groups than it is to industries with a high incidence of short workstoppages. Strong work groups are more apt than weak groups to call attention to their bargaining activities through their often disruptive tactics and their challenge to both union and management authority. In a situation where the work group is weak, the foremen or other management officials can maintain the initiative in fractional bargaining by pressing the workers through "permissible" tactics. Managers always have an advantage over the work groups in fractional bargaining in that they can claim legitimacy for many of their tactics, arguing "management's right to manage." Workers cannot defend their bargaining with a generally accepted "right of workers to manage," and thus must always appear to be the challengers even if in using their available tactics to gain favorable settlements they are within the limits of the collective agreement. Though management's tactics are more subtle, they are not less effective than the dramatic tactics of strong work groups. As long as foremen and managers have the desire and ability to secure concessions from the workers, they will do so. One can no more assume that a judicial grievance procedure will in all cases suffice

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to protect the shop rights of workers than that every work group will limit its demands to those made by the local union. Members of a weak work group have no protection of their rights except through the judicial grievance function and no way to express their job demands except through the local union. They must depend upon local union officials to give them adequate and accurate representation; they cannot secure it on their own. Yet, if the local union does not recognize an intermediate body between itself and the workers, one may wonder how adequately it will represent the workers in the shop and on the job. Where members of weak work groups are unable to contest the program of the local leadership except through local elections and in local meetings, the peculiar work needs of these weak groups may be overlooked or ignored. Workers may be represented tolerably well as a whole in matters of general wages, hours, and working conditions, but for particular groups and on specific issues, the representation may be intolerable. If weak groups must contend with strong groups for favor in the local union, they may receive scant attention. Where there are few or no strong work groups in a plant, local officers are free to concentrate their attention on general rights and obligations of the local and downgrade the importance of grievance handling. The result in both cases is a weakening of the union's interest in the day-to-day concerns of the workers. Even the expectancies of members of weak work groups, if unfulfilled, may lead to dissatisfaction that can erupt as protest walkouts and unrest on the job. The local union is challenged to truly represent work groups that are both strong and weak in fractional bargaining power. The strength of the strong must be recognized, yet harnessed to serve the whole union. The weakness of the weak must be recognized too but not exploited for the benefit of the local or favored factions within it. Since most union members do not participate with any regularity in union activities outside the shop, one may ask why the

CHALLENGE

OF

FRACTIONAL

BARGAINING

189

unions do not bring more of their activities to the workers. A chief steward in a large local suggested: The union is going to have to go to the workers because they don't come to the union. We're going to have to give thought to that. I don't know if it is the whole answer, but we could stand some development here. Perhaps the union can meet the worker where he works; the shop is the only place where they have real contact.7 Not all union matters can be handled at shop meetings or by votes taken during lunch hour, but perhaps some matters could be so handled. In such a way, members of all work groups could participate in union affairs to a greater degree than is now possible and local leadership would be kept more responsible to the shop needs of the workers. As long as unions are reluctant to recognize the work group as a legitimate agent of the union and as long as they give it only as much recognition as members of the work groups can force through threat and overt action, there exists a source of contention in the union and a threat to the stability of the union. Unions would do well to recognize the reality of work groups as separate, distinct entities within the union and explicitly assign them responsibilities and activities. The result could be a strengthening of the unions and an extension of democracy for the workers. In establishing shop grievance procedures, American management and unions built more than they knew. One may believe that they also built better than they knew. They meant only to protect and apply the limited job rights of the worker that are secured by the union through collective bargaining. They assumed that the only pertinent variables were the institutions and offices of the union and management and that the relationships among them were simple. Now students of the industrial scene have begun to observe the complexity of the relationships at the place of work and the ambiguity with which the various workers, union members, and management personnel fill their roles. A simple, direct approach to the goal of industrial democracy is no longer apparent; designed to protect workers, the griev-

190

CHALLENGE

OF

FRACTIONAL

BARGAINING

an ce system can subject them to new masters: the union leaders and the strong work groups, who, since they speak in the name of the worker, are more pretentious in their claims than the employer ever was. With these greater dangers of the grievance system, however, are also greater opportunities for a more meaningful industrial democracy than was once possible to suppose. Through the grievance process the workers may be able to achieve a meaningful and responsible control of the conditions under which they spend their work lives. To paraphrase a statement made in another context: The grievance process has been formed by the actual events of experience. It has taken on functions which correspond to unforeseen necessities, and it may be directed toward the goal of industrial democracy if only we remain loyal to the original motive rather than to the original pattern.8

Notes

Introduction 1. Joseph Shister, "Collective Bargaining," in N. W. Chamberlain, F. C. Pierson, and T. Wolfson, eds., A Decade of Industrial Relations Research, 1946-1956 (New York, Harper, 1958), p. 34. 2. Fred Whitney, The Collective Bargaining Agreement (Report No. 25, Indiana University School of Business, Bureau of Business Research, 1957, pp. 108-9. 3. Lee Hill and Charles Hook, Jr., "Some Management Problems," in E. Wight Bakke and Clark Kerr, eds., Union, Management, and the Public (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1948), p. 640. 4. Frederick H. Harbison and John R. Coleman, "Procedures and Methods," in Clinton S. Golden and Virginia D. Parker, eds., Causes of Industrial Peace (New York, Harper, 1955), p. 41. 5. Leonard R. Sayles and George Strauss, Trie Local Union (New York, Harper, 1953), pp. 21-23. Chapter I. The Theory and Practice of Grievance

Settlement

1. See the statement of the National War Labor Board issued July 1, 1943, quoted in The Termination Report of the National War Labor Board (3 vols., Washington, Government Printing Office, undated), I, 65-66. 2. New York Times, November 30, 1945, p. 17. 3. See "Grievance Procedures in Union Agreements, 1950-51," Monthly Lahor Review, LXXIII (July, 1951), pp. 36-39. 4. Even at the international level grievances involving welfare programs require special procedures. In the Officers Report to the Ninth Constitutional Convention of the United Packing House Workers (1954), the Grievance Department reported: "In addition to its normal function of trouble shooting . . . [it has] been faced in recent months with problems arising out of the newly negotiated agreements on surgical and hospital insurance, life insurance, and pensions." (P. 17.) 5. Gerald G. Somers, Grievance Settlement in Coal Mining (West Virginia Bulletin, Ser. 56, No. 12-2, June, 1956), p. 9; Arbitration of

192

NOTES : A D J U D I C A T I O N

IS

NOT

ENOUGH

Labor-Management Grievances (Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin No. 1159, 1954), p. 3; T. V. Purcell, The Worker Speaks His Mind on Company and Union (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 222; Melville Dalton, "Unofficial Union-Management Relations," American Sociological Review, XV (October, 1950), 614. 6. The union leaders' complaints are probably heard wherever firms have centralized their labor policy under control of a special department. See statement by a union leader quoted in Neil W. Chamberlain, The Union Challenge to Management Control (New York, Harper, 1948), p. 209. 7. E. E. Witte, Historical Survey of Labor Arbitration (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952), p. 37. 8. See Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (London, Longmans Green, 1950), pp. 3 0 4 - 3 0 6 and p. 489; and H. A. Millis and R. E. Montgomery, Organized Labor (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1945), p. 251. 9. See, for example, the agreement of Goodrich, Goodyear, and Firestone with the American Federation of Labor and the United Rubber Workers, reported in "Findings and Recommendations of the Fact-Finding Board Appointed by the Secretary of Labor," (Mimeographed report, November 15, 1935), p. 8. For a description of the chaotic situation that resulted as workers and union representatives took steps to make management abide by the agreement as they understood it, see Howard and Ralph Wolf, Rubber: A Story of Glory and Greed (New York, Covici, Friede, 1936), pp. 497-526. 10. The Steward's Manual of Local Union 1245, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, pp. 8 - 9 . 11. Research Department, International Association of Machinists, Shop Stewards Manual (September, 1948), pp. 3 0 - 3 1 (my italics). 12. "Steward's Training Course," Machinists Monthly Journal, June, 1953, pp. 193-94. Chapter

II. Adjudication

Is Not

Enough

1. For an excellent discussion of the role of the union as challenger, see William F. Whyte, Money and Motivation (New York, Harper, 1955), pp. 235-^10. 2. The term "grievance" is used loosely and means any and all problems, complaints, or "gripes" brought to management's attention by the workers or their stewards. 3. One might expect higher officers to be less aware of minor, daily shop settlements since informality tends to decline away from the pressure and influence of the shop. Higher grievance-handlers and officers of the local unions consistently rated informal handling a larger portion of their total activity than did their management

NOTES:

IS

S E T T L E M E N T

POSSIBLE?

193

counterparts. The elective position and easy accessibility of union officers probably explains the difference. 4. In Clinton S. Golden and Virginia D. Parker, eds., Causes of Industrial Peace (New York, Harper, 1955), p. 41. 5. How complex these provisions are may be indicated by the fact that in a plant of 5,000 workers, the local's vice-president and the assistant director of industrial relations worked for three days to straighten out the "bumps" when 100 workers were to be laid off. 6. Leonard R. Sayles, "Seniority: An Internal Union Problem," Harvard Business Review, XXX (January-February, 1952), 55-61. Chapter III. Is Peaceful Settlement

Possible?

1. See, for example, William Gouldner, Wildcat Strike (Yellow Springs, Ohio, Antioch Press, 1954), p. 106; and Leonard R. Sayles and George Strauss, The Local Union (New York, Harper, 1953), pp. 85-87. 2. Jerome F. Scott and George C. Homans, "Reflections on Wildcat Strikes," American Sociological Review, XII (June, 1947), 278-86. 3. Paul Pigors and Charles Myers, Personnel Administration (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1951), p. 145. 4. Sayles and Strauss, The Local Union, p. 248. 5. K. G. J. C. Knowles, Strikes—A Study of Industrial Conflict (New York, Philosophical Library, 1955), pp. 33-40; and University of Liverpool Department of Science, The Dock Worker (Liverpool, University Press, 1954), pp. 118—43. Some of the wildcat strikes during World War II may have been provoked by the cumbersome, slow machinery for dealing with the wage and work problems of the workers. See Arthur W. Hepner, "Wildcat Strike," Harper's, CXC (April, 1945), 459. 6. Clark Kerr and Abraham Siegel, "The Inter-Industry Propensity to Strike—an International Comparison," in Arthur Komhauser, Robert Dubin, and Arthur Ross, eds., Industrial Conflict (New York, McGrawHill, 1959), pp. 203-204. For a criticism of this view see G. V. Rimlinger, "International Differences in the Strike Propensity of Coal Miners," Industrial and Labor Relations Review, XII (April, 1959). 7. B. R. Crane and R. M. Hoffman, Successfid Handling of Labor Grievances (New York, Central Book Co., 1956), Part III. 8. The parties have made few changes since the period 1946-48. The major procedures established by or at that time remain in effect. 9. Descriptions of unauthorized walkouts and other disruptive tactics may be found in the following works: Neil W. Chamberlain, The Union Challenge to Management Control (New York, Harper, 1948), pp. 270 and 277; Melville Dalton, "Unofficial Union-Management Relations," American Sociological Review, XV (October, 1950), 611-19;

194

NOTES:

IS

S E T T L E M E N T

POSSIBLE?

William Goode and Irving Fowler, "Incentive Factors in a Low Morale Plant," American Sociological Review, XIV (October, 1949), 622-24; Lois MacDonald and others, The Grievance Process in New York City Transit (New York University, Institute of Labor Relations and Social Security, n.d. [1956]), pp. 325, 360, and 363; Donald Roy, "Quota Restriction and Goldbricking in a Machine Shop," The American Journal of Sociology, LVII (March, 1952), 427-42; Leonard R. Sayles and George Strauss, The Local Union (New York, Harper, 1953), pp. 18-19, 30-31, and 65-68; Joel Seidman and others, The Worker Views His Union (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 36, 84-86, 95, 104, and 107-109; Gerald G. Somers, Grievance Settlement in Coal Mining (West Virginia University Business and Economic Studies, June, 1956), pp. 38-41; George Strauss, Unions in the Building Trades (Buffalo, University of Buffalo, 1958), pp. 105-107 and 110-12; William F. Whyte, Money and Motivation (New York, Harper, 1955), pp. 24-27. 10. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1956. 11. See J. W. Kuhn, "Grievance Machinery and Strikes in Australia," Industrial and Labor Relations Review, VIII (January, 1955), 169-76. 12. The data for short work stoppages can be at best only suggestive of the possible pattern of illegitimate work stoppages. Not all short strikes are necessarily illegitimate, and some may last longer than three days. Short strikes are much more likely to go unreported than long strikes simply because the longer strikes are more apt to catch the attention of news reporters and have a more serious impact on the community. However, the degree of inaccuracy is unknown. Doubts about the accuracy of BLS data gathered before 1951 are raised by notes such as the following: "In the first eleven months of 1944 alone, eight hundred strikes and work stoppages occurred in the automotive industry that were not recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics." Wartime Record of Strikes and Lockouts, 1940-^5 (Senate Document 136, 79th Congress), p. 2. See also Handbook of Labor Statistics, 1951 supplement Bulletin No. 1016, U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, p. 48, footnote 5: "Beginning in mid-1950, a new source of strike 'leads' was added. It is estimated that this increased the number of strikes reported in 1950 by perhaps 5% and in 1951 by approximately 10%. However, since most of the added stoppages were small, they increase the number of workers involved . . . by less than two percent in 1950 and by less than three percent in 1951." It is assumed here that though the absolute numbers may not be accurate, the relative changes from year to year are accurate. 13. Somers, Grievance Settlement, p. 38. Somers secured information from the Northern West Virginia Coal Association for the years 1953—54. The 8,000 employees conducted twenty-eight work stoppages during that period (p. 41).

NOTES

A P P E A R A N C E S

AND

R E A L I T I E S

195

14. Steel Industry Strike Record, 1953-1957 (mimeographed report), and Economic Trends in the Steel Industry (1959). 15. Business Week, November 29, 1952, p. 116. Chapter IV. Appearances

and

Realities

1. Quoted from the division foreman's description that went to the industrial relations office. 2. From the division chairman's brief used in arbitration. 3. Because the operators can vary the speed of the line only slightly as the rubber tread is extruded and cut, variation in output, and thus in piece-rate earnings, depends mainly on the skill of the operators in avoiding substandard treads—i.e., too thin, too thick, or crookedly cut. The men usually work at a 125 per cent efficiency, which gives them an earning of $2.30 an hour. At best they can hardly expect to exceed 130 per cent efficiency, or $2.392 an hour. 4. The committeeman asked for 90 per cent of usual earnings ($2.07) for 4]/3 hours (4:00-8:20 P.M.) which would have given each worker a total of $8.97. Since the men actually began work at 7:45 and planned to work until midnight at 130 per cent efficiency, each could expect to make on piecework $10.166 ( 4 % hours @ $2.392) for a total earnings of $19.13—some $0.736 more than usual shift earnings. The foreman offered 90 per cent of usual earnings for four hours, or $8.28. Each man's total earnings then would have been $18.446, or only $0.046 more than usual shift earnings, an amount hardly worth the extra effort the men would have had to make to maintain 130 per cent efficiency from 7:45 to midnight. 5. For six years—which certainly established a precedent—the company had allowed the men in and near the tuber department to eat their lunches in a storage alcove. Now the company needed the room for stock storage, and the men had to walk about 100 yards to the main cafeteria or eat their lunches on the job. 6. A method of periodically giving senior employees the first choice of jobs in the department. 7. It allowed men of one classification to work under another related classification when work was slow. Layoffs for the men were less frequent, and the foremen benefited from a more flexible work force. 8. Neil W. Chamberlain has used the term in The Union Challenge to Management Control (New York, Harper, 1948), p. 277. 9. See Neil W. Chamberlain, Collective Bargaining (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1951), pp. 220-21, and A General Theory of Economic Process (New York, Harper, 1955), pp. 74-99. 10. See Leonard R. Sayles and George Strauss, The Local Union (New York, Harper, 1953), p. 20. 11. William Gomberg, A Trade Union Analysis of Time Study, 2nd ed. (New York, Prentice-Hall, 1955), p. 247.

196

NOTES:

TACTICS

OF

BARGAINING

12. See Hilde Behrend, "The Effort Bargain," Industrial and Relations Review, X (July, 1957), 503-15. Chapter V. The Tactics of Fractional

Labor

Bargaining

1. In his study of grievances of Local 6, UAW, Bernard Karsh noted few grievances complaining of discrimination by foremen which went to the higher grievance levels. Bernard Karsh, The Grievance Process —A Study of Union-Management Relations (Doctoral dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1947), pp. 101-102. 2. Richard S. Hammett, Joel Seidman, and Jack London, "The Slowdown As a Union Tactic," Journal of Political Economy, LXV (April, 1957), 126-34. 3. Bernard Karsh found the threat to arbitrate a common practice in Local 6, UAW, in its grievance bargaining with the management of Buick Division. Bernard Karsh, The Grievance Process, pp. 112-13. 4. An example would be that of assigning sheet metal workers to a routine punch press job, in which they would be proficient. 5. For a full description of the differences among work groups and an analysis of the causes of the differences, see Leonard R. Sayles, Behavior of Industrial Work Groups (New York, John Wiley, 1958). 6. William F. Whyte examines the threat of the freewheeling timestudy man to the stability of the foreman's work situation, in his Money and Motivation; An Analysis of Incentives in Industry (New York, Harper, 1955), pp. 227-34. 7. Excerpts from a verbatim account of a negotiation between two union committeemen and a time-study man give an idea of the personal approach: "Committeeman A: 'Wilson, you know these people are entitled to more than 6 per cent. You used to be a [finisher].' "Committeeman B: 'We are willing to talk. Why don't you give us a fair offer. We can't sell it to the men at 0.92< increase, and if we can't sell it . . "Committeeman A: "Would appreciate it if you'd give us a fair offer. Can't sell 0.92* to the people.' "Time-study man: 'Can't agree on increase on interference, but will consider something on the elements.'" 8. The real demand is that they be allowed some control over the conditions of work that vitally affect them. 9. The strike had lasted ninety-three days. The main issue had been the union shop. Less than 5 per cent of the eighteen hundred workers did not belong to the union, but the company president refused to agree to the union shop. 10. The top earning in the panel-wiring department was actually $6,400 a year, and only one man made that. In his exasperation the president exaggerated the "gravy" of the wiremen. Other workers

NOTES:

DEMOCRACY

IN

THE

SHOP

197

expressed the same exaggerated notion of earnings in the panel-wiring department. 11. Several workers interviewed during this study testified from personal experience to the effectiveness of physical violence in maintaining group unity. F. L. Simonetti also relates an incident involving a "parking lot party" which convinced a rubber worker to abide by the group limits. See his Collective Bargaining in Relation to Restriction of Work in the Rubber Industry (unpublished dissertation, University of Indiana, 1955), pp. 232-34. See also M. Dalton, "The Industrial 'Rate-Buster': a Characterization," Applied Anthropology, VIII (Winter, 1948), 5-18. 12. Simonetti describes in some detail a bitter intergroup dispute between a crew of tire trimmers and a crew of tire inspectors, that arose from the slowdown of the trimmers in order to get a rate changed. The tire inspectors also had to slow down but could expect no benefit. In retaliation the inspectors slowed down after the trimmers had settled their rate dispute, and thus caused the trimmers to work slower and to lose earnings. The trimmers then cut their work to a still lower level. After a number of months of the trouble the company installed an automatic trimmer machine and eliminated both the trimmers and the slowdown. Restriction of Work, pp. 195-98. Chapter VI. Independence

and Democracy in the Shop

1. B. R. Crane and R. M. Hoffman, Successful Handling of Labor Grievances (New York, Central Book Co., 1956), pp. v-vi. 2. Richard S. Hammett, Joel Seidman, and Jack London, "The Slowdown As a Union Tactic," Journal of Political Economy, LXV (April, 1957), 134. 3. Leonard R. Sayles and George Strauss discuss the decline of the steward, assuming that he once stood higher in union affairs in the shop and was more active in the grievance process. The Local Union (New York, Harper, 1953), pp. 34-42. My evidence points not to a decline, but rather to a continuation of the steward's position. 4. An enterprising and ambitious steward in an electrical equipment firm at his own expense mimeographed and distributed a monthly report of the monetary value of his grievance settlements. When he ran for president of the local after three years, he circulated a persuasive report showing that in 1958 he had won for his 300-man department cash awards and back-pay settlements of $5,047.50, and in his thirty months of stewardship, over $13,000. 5. One IUE local has institutionalized buck-passing and provided for an office from which the buck cannot be passed. The office carries the title of president, but the business agent performs all administrative and negotiating duties and is in fact die executive. The "president" is the chief grievance trouble shooter and spends his full time at the

198

NOTES:

THE

INFLUENCE

OF

TECHNOLOGT

shop, trying to settle the messy problems that the chief stewards and business agent dump on him. Not surprisingly, the turnover of "presidents" is high, and the business agent is reelected again and again. 6. See also Sayles and Strauss, The Local Union, pp. 60-61. 7. Business Week, April 11, 1953, pp. 158-61. 8. Report of the General President, United Rubber Workers, 1951, 1952, 1953, and 1954. 9. Arthur M. Ross, "The Natural History of the Strike," in A. Komhauser, R. Dubin, and A. Ross, eds., Industrial Conflict (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1954), pp. 31-35. 10. See what other labor students have reported of workers' aims: J. R. Coleman, "The Compulsive Pressures of Democracy in Unions," American Journal of Sociology, LXI (May, 1956), 522; William E. Simkin, "Grievance Machinery—From an Arbitrator's Point of View," New York Conference on Labor (1949), pp. 340—41; Joel Seidman and others, The Worker Views His Union (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 80-82, 89-90, 101, 104, and 110. 11. There is overlapping of interest and work groups, of course, and in some situations a particular group will become the prime mover and core support of an interest group to which many other workers scattered throughout the plant belong. One may find, for example, all senior workers concentrated in certain preferable shifts. In the cameron machine department in a tire plant, for example, the first shift had workers of 17-21 years of seniority, the second shift of 14-17 years, the third shift, 9-13 years, and the fourth shift, 3 - 5 years. See F. L. Simonetti, Collective Bargaining in Relation to Restriction of Work in the Rubber Industry (Unpublished dissertation, University of Indiana, 1955), pp. 229-30. 12. Stanley B. Mathewson, Restriction of Output among Unorganized Workers (New York, Viking Press, 1931), pp. 15-127. 13. Working at a fast pace at one time in order to take it easy at another. Chapter VII. The Influence of Technology 1. The militant grass-roots organizing of the rubber workers in the early 'thirties, in the face of AFL hesitation and opposition, demonstrated from the first the vitality of work groups and the direct, immediate control by workers over group affairs. For a discussion of this point in another industry see George Strauss, "Control by the Membership in the Building Trades Union," American Journal of Sociology, LXI (May, 1956), 532. 2. For example, a foreman in a tire plant whose department is much plagued with walkouts and work stoppages did not report a two-hour stoppage by his crew of twenty-four. "It was a nuisance; it created a problem," he said, "but as long as I get enough production, I'll take a nuisance."

NOTES:

CHALLENGE

OF

BARGAINING

199

3. Union officers in the one plant and the industrial relations director in the other denied that they ever bargained fractionally, and there was no available evidence to contradict them. More intensive studies of the grievance system might well have refuted them though. 4. We would estimate that those currendy holding a full-time second job of six or even eight hours total about 10 per cent of Akron rubber workers. But the evidence is sufficient to indicate that fully another 30—40 per cent of those working a six-hour regular shift are also engaged in a wide variety of part-time occupations. See W. L. Ginsburg and Ralph Bergmann, "Worker Attitudes towards Shorter Hours," AFL-CIO Conference on Shorter Hours of Work, September 11, 1956 (mimeographed report). 5. See Howard and Ralph Wolf, Rubber: A Story of Glory and Greed (New York, Covici, Friede, 1936), p. 523; Ruth McKenney, Industrial Valley (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1939), p. 374; Charles R. Walker, "Life Curve of a CIO Union," Survey Graphic, XXVII (November, 1938), 557-58; How the Rubber Workers Won (CIO Publication No. 6, June, 1936), p. 7; Information Report (mimeographed, Akron, Goodyear, January 4, 1937). 6. See Business Week, September 22, 1945, p. 112; and Akron Beacon Journal, October 28, 1947. Chapter VIII. The Challenge of Fractional Bargaining 1. The electrical equipment companies examined in the course of this study have also dealt harshly with workers who walked off their jobs by discharging them. Firms of other industries have been able to pursue a tough policy too. See, for example, Leland Hazard, "Unionism: Past and Future," Harvard Business Review, XXXVI (MarchApril, 1958), 64. 2. The first discharge for a second walkout occurred at one company because the clerk at the union office made a mistake and recorded the worker as having no walkouts instead of one. No one warned him to stay on the job. 3. Neil W. Chamberlain, Labor (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1958), p. 253. See pp. 248—54 for an excellent discussion of this point. 4. That is, not merely matters affecting safety but those affecting hours, seniority, and, in some aspects, wage rates. 5. Seymour Melman, Decision-Making and Productivity (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1958); William F. Whyte, Money and Motivation (New York, Harper, 1955), ch. 10. 6. George Strauss and Don Willner, "Government Regulation of Local Union Democracy," Labor Law Journal, IV (August, 1953). 7. See also the findings of H. Rosen and R. A. Rosen, The Union Member Speaks (New York, Prentice-Hall, 1955), p. 35. 8. Reinhold Niebuhr, The World Crisis and American Responsibility (New York, Association Press, 1958), p. 75.

Index

Absenteeism, 30, 33, 51, 52, 53 Aeronautical parts and engines industry, 3, 136-38 Allowed time, 62, 64, 72, 75, 76, 93, 96, 97, 98 American Federation of Labor, 192n, 198n American Iron and Steel Institute, 55-56 Apprenticeship committees, 8, 33 Arbitration: as final step in grievance settlement, 6-7, 12, 15, 16, 22, 41, 43, 50, 59-60, 70, 71, 107-8, 146, 181; screening out cases for, 19, 126; drawbacks to, 86; bacldogs of grievances, 125 Assembly lines, 149-52, 155, 161, 162 Automation, 136-38, 176, 178 Automobile industry, 50-52, 55, 56, 57, 163, 170; see also Motor vehicle industry Automobile workers, see United Automobile Workers Bakke, E. Wight, 191n Behrend, Hilde, 196n Bergmann, Ralph, 199n Buclcmaster, Leland S., 127 Building trades, 51; see also Construction industry Bureau of Labor Statistics, 53-55, 154, 159, 194n Cable industry, 3, 163 Chamberlain, Neil W., 51-52, 191n, 192n, 193n, 195n, 199n Ching, Cyrus, 165

City transit industry, see New York City transit industry Coal mining industry, 50-51, 55-56 Coleman, John R., 191n, 198n Collective agreement: as instrument of industrial peace, 1-3, 111, 113; and conflicting demands of shop bargaining, 57, 77, 113, 116, 154; violations of, 72, 76, 105; interpretation and application of, 80-81, 121-22, 168; workers' attitude toward, 130; see also Grievance procedures, "Mutual agreements" Collective bargaining, 1, 3, 12, 50, 111; orthodox view of, 111-13, 166; fractional bargaining as challenge to, see Fractional bargaining Communication between management and workers, 36-37, 42 Communists, 40, 165-66 Compensation, 23, 53 Congress of Industrial Organizations, 13-14, 164 Construction industry, 50-51; see also Building trades Control instruments industry, 3 Crane, B. R„ 193n, 197n Dalton, Melville, 52, 192n, 193n, 197n Discharge, see Discipline Discipline, 8; by management, 22, 53, 64-65, 67-68, 79, 88, 105, 117, 146, 162, 163, 166, 169-74, 177, 178, 199n; by the union, 53-54, 83, 145-47, 162 Discrimination, 15

202

INDEX

Earnings, workers' loss of, 2, 53, 86, 91 Electrical equipment industry, 3-4, 88-89, 99-100, 138-39, 146, 147, 154-60, 162-66, 174, 176, 197n, 199n Electrical equipment workers, 146, 147, 164; see also International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers Ethnic groups, 126, 162

Fowler, Irving, 194n Fractional bargaining, 14, 25, 57, 77-83, 158-59; as continuous collective bargaining, 18, 77, 78-79, 91-92, 99-110, 111, 174-76; by work groups, 71-73, 79, 80, 9596, 99-103, 105-6, 131-43, 144, 147-48,152,154,162,169,174-76; by management officials, 73, 78, 80-81, 84-85, 88-89, 92-93, 96, 114-19, 142, 174-76, 187, 199n; by union representatives, 75-76,79, 84-85, 86-88, 93-96, 119-28, 142, 174-76, 199«; attitude of union leaders toward, 83, 98-110, 12627, 163, 169, 173; and industrial democracy, 110, 184-90; orthodox view of, 111-13; causes of, 112-14, 118-19, 127, 136, 138, 139, 14143, 144, 147-48, 155, 163-66; as challenge to union, 127, 184-90; by workers, 128-31; attitude of management officials toward, 163, 169-75, 178-84; as challenge to collective bargaining, 167-69, 17980; treatment of, in rubber tire industry, 169-77; as means of worker participation in union affairs and shop management, 184-90; see also Disruptive tactics, "Mutual agreements," Work groups Fractional bargaining issues, 80-82, 90, 92 Fractional bargaining tactics, 84-110; costs to users, 86-96, 109; timing of, 96-98, 107-8, 124-25

Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., 153, 192n Foremen: authority of, 7-8, 17, 19, 30-31, 52, 72-73, 74-75,92-93,115, 117-18, 180; role in grievance settlement, 10, 16, 18, 26-27, 37-38, 40-41; relations with industrial relations staff, 40-41, 72-73, 114, 115-18, 180; fractional bargaining bv, 92-93, 115-19, 169, 180; see also Production schedules, Union representatives

Garrison, Lloyd K., 5 Ginsburg, W. L., 199n Golden, Clinton S., 191n, 193n Gomberg, William, 195n Goode, William, 194n Goodrich, B. F., Co., 43, 153, 192n Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., 153, 192n Gouldner, William, 193n Grievance bargaining, see Fractional bargaining Grievance committee, 7, 32, 44, 59, 102, 125

Disputes: peaceful settlement of, 13, 39, 42-46, 166; need for preventing, 24, 42; see also Grievance procedures Disruptive tactics: union's attitude toward, 2, 46-50, 57, 98-110, 12627, 145, 160, 164, 173, 177; effects of, 2, 55-57, 109-10; management's attitude toward, 2, 57, 102, 16263, 177, 178-84; workers' use of, 2, 46-47, 50-57, 62-70, 109, 15859; use of, for fractional bargaining, 57, 99-103, 109, 146; causes of, 108, 113,145-46, 148, 160, 164, 166; management's handling of, 169-77; see also Absenteeism, Fractional bargaining, Overtime bans, Slowdowns, Strikes, Walkouts, Work stoppages Down time, 11, 64 Dual job-holding, 164-65, 199n Dubin, Robert, 193n

INDEX Grievance handlers, specified, 6-9, 21, 22, 120-21; demands made upon, 39-41, 120-21; attitude and training of, 44, 77, 114, 164; see also Training programs Grievance procedures: aim, 1-3, 5, 12, 32, 128-29, 189; provisions in collective agreement, 3, 6-7, 8, 9, 11-12, 28, 29, 43-44, 71, 74, 75, 178; steps for handling grievances, 6-7, 9-10, 22, 41, 43, 44, 70-71; in practice, 7, 9-10, 21, 23, 25-26, 39-42, 45-46, 58-77; special procedures, 7, 42; early use of, 12-13; breakdown in functioning of, 4042; effect of new production methods on, 42; recent improvements in, 43-46, 50; workers' expectations, 45-46, 61, 113, 128-29; use of, for bargaining, 61-62, 7172, 75-83, 157-58, 169; as protection of workers' rights, 70-71, 73, 79, 129, 187-88; use of, to reinforce disruptive tactics, 72; and industrial democracy, 110; as means for worker participation in union affairs and shop management, 184-85; see also Fractional bargaining Grievance records, 9, 11, 47, 58, 6061, 78, 129, 157 Grievance settlement: theory and jractice of, 5-21, 166; on shop evel, 10, 41, 175; compliancejudicial function of, 12-21, 23-24, 25, 129; administrative function of, 28-35; as channel of communication between workers and management, 35-37; and company and union training programs, 37-38; effects of delay in, 47, 164; usually in line with management's wishes, 182; see also Informal grievancehandling, Shop agreements, Training programs Grievances: types of, 8-9, 11-12, 14, 15, 25, 40, 121-22; defined, 13-14, 31-32, 73, 192n; example of formal grievance versus actual, 58-73;

f

203 priority of group grievances over individual, 73-74, 126 Guest, Robert H., 52 Hammett, Richard S., 196n, 197n Harbison, Frederick H., 191n Hazard, Leland, 199n Hepner, Arthur W., 193n Hill, Lee, 191n Hoffman, R. M., 193n, 197n Homans, George C., 193n Hook, Charles, Jr., 191n "Hotheads" in the shop, 106-7, 173, 175 Industrial democracy, 110, 184-90; see also Grievance procedures, Fractional bargaining Industrial relations staff: role in grievance settlement, 7, 10, 16-21, 26, 40-41, 61, 65, 69, 70, 72-73, 95, 170-71; relations with foremen, 17-19, 40, 41, 65, 68, 69, 70, 72-73, 74, 115, 117; as liaison between management and union, 18-21, 28, 115; relations with union representatives, 40, 65, 69, 70, 72-73, 94-95, 96 Informal grievance-handling, 26-27, 41, 69-70, 74, 118, 192-93n; see also Shop agreements, Fractional bargaining Interest groups, union, 130, 138-39, 198n International Association of Machinists, 13, 192n International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, 13, 192n International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, 164, 165-66, 197n Job classification, 8, 9, 15, 17, 25, 33, 34-35, 60, 61, 67, 89-90, 121, 122, 134, 137, 181, 186 Job security, 90-91, 129, 152 Job shops, 154, 160 Joint administrative committees, 8, 33, 34-35 Jones and Laughlin Steel Co., 43

204

INDEX

Karsh, Bernard, 51, 196n Kerr, Clark, 43, 191n, 193n Knowles, K. G. J. C „ 193n Komhauser, Arthur, 193n, 198n Kuhn, J. W., 194n Labor-management conference 1945, 6 Layoffs, 97, 152-53, 175, 186 London, Jack, 51, 196n, 197n Longshoring industry, 50-51

of

MacDonald, Lois, 52, 194n Machinery industry, 3, 45, 107-8 Machinists union, see International Association of Machinists McKenney, Ruth, 199n Management officials, role in grievance setdement, 10-11, 20, 22, 28, 42, 45, 49, 72-73, 164, 182 Management's "right to m a n a g e , " 182-84, 187 Mathewson, Stanley B., 131, 198n Melman, Seymour, 199n Metal-working industry, 50-51 Millis, H. A., 192n Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, 14 Montgomery, R. E., 192n Motion-Time-Method incentive p a y system, 100-103 Motor vehicle industry, 3, 55-56; see also Automobile industry " M u t u a l agreements," 174-76, 18384; see also Shop agreements Myers, Charles, 193n National War L a b o r Board, 5-6, 191n N e w York City transit industry, 5051, 52 Newspaper industry, 3 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 199n Northern West Virginia Coal Association, 194n Overtime, 15, 121, 175, 181; bans on, 51, 52, 84, 97, 99, 101, 102, 107, 137, 165 Parker, Virginia, 191n, 193n Piece-rate bonuses, 177

Piece rates, see Rates Pierson, F . C., 191n Pigors, Paul, 193n Production: disruption of, 1, 39, 46, 72, 152; loss of, 2, 3, 51, 52, 55-57, 86, 94, 101, 102, 148, 156, 172, 1 7 7 , 1 7 9 ; grievance procedures and new methods of, 42, 81 Production schedules and goals: relation to fractional bargaining and disruptive tactics, 2, 52, 95, 96-97, 102, 103, 148, 156-57, 161, 177, 178; foremen's concern over, 6465, 72, 76, 81, 92, 96-97, 98, 114, 116, 118, 142-43 Promotions, 11, 89, 97, 156 Purcell, T . V., 192n Rate allowance, see Allowed time Rate inequities, 33, 34 Rates: piecework, 7-8, 17, 36, 51, 76, 81, 88, 92-96, 132-33, 136, 175, 194n; wage, 8, 40, 48, 51, 85, 1078, 122, 175, 181, 182, 199n; offstandard, 58-60, 64, 122 "Rawhiding," 141, 198n Rimlinger, G. V., 193n Rosen, H., 199n Rosen, R. A., 199n Ross, Arthur M., 193n, 198n Roy, Donald, 194n Rubber tire industry, 3-4, 15, 45, 5557, 94-95, 104, 138-39, 149-52, 158-66, 198n; case history, 58-73; treatment of fractional bargaining in, 169-77 Rubber workers, 58-73, 104-5, 127, 146-47, 158-59, 164, 165, 169-77, 198n; see also United Rubber Workers Safety and health, 8, 33, 51, 58-62, 64, 121, 199n Sayles, Leonard R., 52, 191n, 193n, 194n, 195n, 196n, 197n, 198n Scott, Jerome F., 193n Seiberling Rubber Co., 153 Seidman, Joel, 51, 194n, 196n, 197n, 198n Seniority, 11, 15, 30, 33, 34-35, 67,

205

INDEX

89, 91, 116, 120, 175, 181, 188, 193n, 198n, 199n Shister, Joseph, 191n Shop agreements, 24, 26-27, 67, 98, 118, 129, 181; see also "Mutual agreements" Shop management: worker participation in, 24-25, 110, 128-31, 17476, 182-85, 187; management's insistence on control of production, 182-84; union participation in, see Union representatives Shop stewards, see Union representatives Siegel, Abraham, 43, 193n Simkin, William E., 198n Simonetti, F. L., 197n, 198n Skilled workers, 34-35, 90-91, 101, 103, 136-38, 139-41, 161, 172, 178 Slichter, Sumner, 12 Slowdowns, 3, 40, 51, 52, 53, 68, 72, 75, 84, 86, 88, 91, 99-103, 104-5, 106, 107-9, 113, 139, 157, 161, 162-66, 168, 177; see also Disruptive tactics Somers, Ge.ald G., 51, 55,191n, 194n Steel industry, 3, 50-51, 55-56 Steel workers, see United Steel Workers Strauss, George, 51, 52, 191n, 193n, 194n, 195n, 197n, 198n, 199n Strikes, 1, 2, 3, 12, 14, 20, 51, 53-57, 168, 184, 194n; see also Disruptive tactics, Walkouts, Wildcat strikes, Work stoppages Subcontracting, 89, 102-3 Suspensions, see Discipline Tagliacozzo, Daisey, 51 Time study, 8, 36, 81, 92-93, 94, 9596, 101, 121-22, 157, 175, 196n Training programs, 29, 33, 37-38, 114, 160, 164 Transfers, 97, 156, 161, 186 Turner, Arthur N., 52 Union: relationship of workers to, 128, 129-31, 132, 138, 144, 15556, 161, 172-73, 184, 188-89 Union leaders: relation to shop

stewards, 42, 126-27; attitude toward fractional bargaining, see Fractional bargaining Union representatives: role in grievance settlement, 6-7, 9, 10-11, 1216, 22, 28-35, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 49-50, 61, 119-23, 164; political position of, 13, 15-16, 17-18, 35, 41, 65, 66-67, 68-69, 76, 83, 85, 86-88, 96, 97, 104, 105, 106, 119, 123-28, 139, 142, 146-47, 197n; and foremen, 16, 17-18, 26-27, 2931, 44, 52, 62-70, 72-73, 74-75, 76, 84, 85, 91, 96, 97, 98, 116, 118-19, 174-76; in administrative activities, 28-35, 43, 74-75, 84, 121-23; and industrial relations staff, 40, 85; compensation for time spent on grievance work, 44; attitude toward handling of grievances, 4749, 78-79; as leaders of work groups, 74-75, 76, 79, 80,104,1056, 108, 114, 126, 133, 139, 162, 163,173; election of, 120,123, 130, 184; responsiveness to union members, 184, 188-89; bargaining tactics of, see Fractional bargaining Union shop, 196n United Automobile Workers, 196n United Packing House Workers, 191n United Rubber Workers, 43, 104-5, 127, 146-47, 158-59, 160, 164, 192n, 198n United States Rubber Co., 165 United Steel Workers of America, 43, 51 Vacation pay, 175 Wage rates, see Rates Walker, Charles R., 52, 199n Walkouts, 2, 12, 14, 39-40, 48, 5051, 52, 53, 55, 84, 104, 106, 1089, 146, 152-54, 161-66, 170-77, 188; see also Strikes, Disruptive tactics Wash-up time, 89 Webb, Beatrice, 192n Webb, Sidney, 192n Whitney, Fred, 191n

206 Whyte, William F., 192n, 194n, 196n, 199n Wildcat strikes, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55-57, 106, 107-8, 146, 152-54, 168, 193n; see also Strikes, Walkouts Willner, Don, 199n Witte, E. E., 12, 192» Wolf, Howard, 192n, 199n Wolf, Ralph, 192n, 199n Wolfson, T„ 191n Work groups: political strength of, 69, 74, 83, 105,106,131,140,14847, 156, 169, 186; management's concern over reaction of, 73-74, 99; relationship to union, 74, 76, 80, 83, 99-110, 131-32, 135, 136, 137,140,144-47,148,155-56,157, 161, 163-64, 172, 184-90; protection under collective agreement, 79-80; relative bargaining strength, 90, 99-103, 141, 150-51, 152-54, 179, 185-86, 187, 188, 189-90; relationship of workers to, 107-9, 131-43, 147,150,151,155-56,157, 160, 161, 162; as focus of power,

INDEX

114,127-28,134,138,146-47,167, 186-87, 188, 189; influence of technology on, 114, 131, 135, 136, 142-66, 167-68, 176, 178; relations between, 134, 173-74, 179, 185-86, 187; leadership, 135, 139 (see also Union representatives); relations with management, 14763, 182-84, 187; recognition as bargaining agents, 174-77, 18284, 186-90; see also Disruptive tactics, Fractional bargaining Work limits, 132-34, 139 Work standards, 17, 20, 36, 48, 60, 81, 88, 100-103, 132-34, 157, 161, 175 Work stoppages, 47, 53-57, 88, 105, 158-59, 165, 168, 194n; worker participation in, 53-55, 108-10, 158-59, 172-73; definition of, 158; duration and frequency of, 15859, 162, 198n; see also Disruptive tactics World War II, labor-management relations during, 6, 54-55, 165, 193n