Steward’s Corner: Fighting Mid-Contract Changes Can Build the Union

Often our best opportunity to strengthen the union—to build activism, solidarity, and leadership—comes during contract negotiations. Under most U.S. union contracts, this is the only time we are legally free to use our greatest power, the strike.

But during the years between negotiations, it’s easy to revert to a sleepy “business union” model. We may reinforce passivity or dependence among the members we “serve” by handling their day-to-day problems “for” them instead of mobilizing their power and true ownership of the local.

How can we mobilize members during the long periods between contracts?

In my old local, United Auto Workers Local 2300, which represents service and maintenance workers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, we found a way. We came to understand that including members in as many fights as possible isn’t just an approach to adopt during bargaining time.

Between contracts, we could, for instance, engage workers in grievance battles. While most grievances involve individuals—someone got a written warning for poor attendance, for example—there are always some grievances and situations that lend themselves to broader and more creative involvement.

For example, our largest department, Care of Buildings, made what they thought was a small policy “adjustment,” impacting the 300 custodians who cleaned academic buildings.

The union was on good terms with the head of the department. But as she got older, she handed a lot of the day-to-day management over to a young Turk, Rob. To me, he was a classic know-it-all doofus manager (like Michael Scott in the TV series The Office).

Rob was super-eager to “modernize” everything and used lots of corporate jargon. One of Rob’s “innovations” was an edict forbidding custodians from carrying a cup of coffee or a can of soda on their custodial carts.

The carts held most of the custodians’ supplies, including cleaning fluids and basics like gloves. The custodian and the cart were together all day, like a small rolling office. Most custodians had a magazine tucked in the cart, and pretty much everybody had a beverage to sip during shifts.

‘UNSAFE & UNPROFESSIONAL’

One day, a shop steward called the union office and told me that Rob had just announced that custodians could no longer carry drinks on their carts. “What the hell does that busybody care about our drinks?” said the steward. I said I’d call and find out.

Lo and behold, this was not some misunderstanding. Rob claimed this “loose practice” was a major health and safety violation. “Al, we can’t have toxic cleaning fluids and drinks all mixed together. It’s dangerous, and how do you think it looks to our customers? Very unprofessional.”

By customers, Rob meant students, faculty, and clerical workers—folks who in many cases had worked for decades with our members and were on a first-name basis with them. It was not likely that the long-term building “family” was offended by a coffee cup.

The safety argument seemed equally far-fetched. “I don’t think our members are going to mistakenly put their toilet cleaner into their coffee,” I told him.

“Just can’t have this, Al—unsafe and unprofessional. Staff get breaks, and that’s when they should be drinking.” Rob was making a stand.

TO GRIEVE OR NOT TO GRIEVE?

Strange issue. Did our members care? What were our options?

The custodians did care, mostly because it had been a practice forever and because it was Rob stripping away a small piece of their routine, a little bit of comfort, for no apparent reason. They disliked Rob and saw him as a meddler.

We called a meeting of all the stewards, around a dozen folks, to brainstorm and discuss options.

SUPPORT LABOR NOTES

BECOME A MONTHLY DONOR

Give $10 a month or more and get our "Fight the Boss, Build the Union" T-shirt.

There was no language in our contract that spoke to this issue directly. There was, as in most contracts, a management rights clause that gave Cornell latitude in making day-to-day decisions on issues not covered in the contract.

We could file a grievance based on the fact that carrying beverages on carts was a “past practice.” The employer typically must negotiate with the union before ending or changing a customary and long-standing way of doing things in a workplace.

But Cornell would likely fight us, we thought, and there was a good chance they would take it to the final stage of the grievance process, a neutral and binding arbitration. The right to binding arbitration of grievances was a key victory in our first strike a few years earlier.

But there were downsides to this approach. It could take many months, and during that time there would be no cups on carts. Also, we might not win.

We knew Rob’s reasons were nonsense, cooked up by someone with a little too much time and desire to show authority. But maybe the arbitrator would latch onto his safety argument or see this as too minimal a benefit to qualify as a “past practice.”

A STICKER FOR EVERY CUP

One of our best stewards said, “Well, a bunch of the members at my clock are just saying they are going to ignore Rob or hide their drink inside the cart.”

It got me thinking. If a few people did that and got caught, they might get disciplined for not following the order. What if everybody refused to obey?

Folks got creative fast. One custodian made a great point: The animals in Cornell’s barns and labs had ready access to water. Why should we be treated worse? We got custodian Leo LaMontain, our resident activist artist, to do a flyer with a smiling horse drinking from a trough. The tagline: “Every horse in its stable, every rat in its cage can take a drink, but not COB custodians?”

At time-clock meetings, we learned that custodians were thoroughly irritated by Rob’s ban of cups on carts. It wasn’t the biggest issue, but it was a completely unnecessary indignity. Some members who hardly ever engaged with the union seemed to wake up around the issue.

One evening, a bunch of custodians came down to the office and prepared 300 white Styrofoam cups, placing a UAW sticker on every one. We got enough cups for every steward to hand one out to every custodian the next morning at six.

MASS DEFIANCE

It was mass defiance. Workers who had voted against having a union, workers who had scabbed during our first strike, took the UAW cup and proudly gave Rob the middle finger that morning.

We held our breath, waiting for management’s move. It came not with a bang but with a whimper. No one was disciplined, and no one ever heard another peep about having a beverage on their cart.

The next week, I was with Jean Rogers, the head of the department, dealing with a grievance. I asked her, “What was Rob thinking with that ‘no drinks on carts’ BS?”

Jean looked at me and said, “He’s an asshole, isn’t he?”

Al Davidoff is the former president of UAW Local 2300 and the co-founder of the National Labor Leadership Initiative. This article is excerpted from his book Unionizing the Ivory Tower: Cornell Workers’ Fifteen-Year Fight for Justice and a Living Wage (Cornell University Press, 2023). For more on past-practice grievances, see How to Win Past-Practice Grievances by Robert M. Schwartz, available for $13 from the Labor Notes bookstore).

Have a story of a mid-contract fight you’d like to share with Labor Notes? Write to editors[at]labornotes[dot]org.