White Collar Workers Look to Unions for their Future

By Tom Herriman

Boeing engineer Carl Slater holds a model of a space station module he and his colleagues designed. Boeing workers have done much of the design work for the proposed permanent space station.

Last week, as the remarkable Boeing engineers strike was drawing to a close, the University of Washington was notified that 80 percent of their teaching assistants, graders and readers had signed up with the United Auto Workers, a militant and progressive union whose roots go back to the sit-down strikes in Flint, Michigan in the 1930s.

Wallingford resident Carl Slater, a Boeing aeronautical engineer who has worked on the space program and on designing the 777 airliner, is a member of SPEEA, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, which last year affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

Slater said the SPEEA membership had been dormant for decades, but new management focus on profits and away from quality and customer satisfaction had soured the engineers' attitudes toward the company.

The Boeing engineering staff is "the most brilliant community of people in the world," Slater said. "I've never see anything like it; we run circles around everyone else. But the company has been training managers to believe that there is no value any more in that body of knowledge nurtured and developed over the last 100 years."

Dr. Mary Jo Kintner.

"The University couldn't run without us," said Roberta Gold, a graduate student in American history at the University of Washington and a teaching assistant in the history department. Teaching assistants handle a majority of undergraduate classroom teaching, Gold added. "But despite our critical role at the center of the educational process, we have no voice in how much we are paid, how many students we have to teach, or the quality of the educational process."

Dr. Mary Jo Kintner, a family practice physician at Medalia Health Care's Magnolia clinic said that when changes in Washington's health care reform laws reduced the amount of money available for health services, Medalia found itself with too many patients and not enough revenue. Some doctors were fired or forced out and management dictated increased patient loads for those remaining. "But you can't give the same quality of care when you can't spend enough time with each patient," Kintner explained. The Medalia doctors complained to their managers, but to no avail. "We had no voice, no control over the basic conditions of our work. In order to have a voice," Kintner said, "we formed a union."

Slater was astonished at the militance and solidarity of his colleagues. "Most of them are politically conservative, live on the east side and have voted Republican most of their lives," Slater said. But the anger and resentment at recent actions by the company was so widespread that it erupted into a 40-day strike in which well over 90 percent of the workers took part.

Temporary Microsoft worker Barbara Kempf.

On the day the strike started, Slater said he went into the office early to clear out some stuff. "When I saw one of my co-workers walking out with armloads of his house plants, which he had kept in his office," he said, "I knew it was going to be a long strike.

"It was a little bit miraculous," Slater said. "There was a tremendous feeling of solidarity and unity and a recognition that we had our backs up against the wall, and we weren't going to give in. It was the kind of spirit that must have been at the Alamo."

A similar spontaneous unity also emerged on the University of Washington campus in the last few months.

"When I went around asking people to join," noted Gold, "I often couldn't get two sentences out before they said 'Great, Where do I sign?'" She is a member of the organizing committee of the Graduate Student Employee Action Coalition.

One of the issues that was not on the table but was a major irritant for Boeing engineers, Slater said, was the Boeing system of allocating bonuses. Once a year, managers for various departments are asked to rank each worker on the quality of their work. The ranking deteriorates into negotiating and horse trading among managers and the result is that half the workers feel cheated every year. Rankings often seem based on personal grudges and subjective judgments.

UW teaching assistant Roberta Gold faces down an end-of-term stack of final exams.

"In several years when I did my best work for the company, I received no bonus because my bosses didn't go to the totem meetings," Slater said. "Almost everyone has experienced some form of humiliation because of this system," he said bitterly.

"The search for excellence, quality and customer service, which most of us strongly believe in, was treated with derision by the managers," Slater said. "There was a new focus on price and marketing strategy and a consistent message frommuch like a family; that many of us are not going to be here in a few years."

For Roberta Gold and other teaching assistants, money is an important issue. Gold, who is working on her Ph.D. in American history, is at the top of the pay scale for teaching assistants. She gets $1000 a month, or about $12 an hour, for 20 hours of work each week conducting classes, holding office hours and grading papers. She is expected to spend at least an equal amount of time pursuing her own studies.

But more important for Gold and many others is that her work load doesn't permit her to give enough to students who need help.

It also irks Gold and her colleagues that the University unilaterally cut health insurance benefits recently, including the co-payment for drugs. "If we had a union contract they couldn't do that," says Gold, who worked previously as a paramedic in New York.

Barbara Kempf lives in Northgate and commutes to her temporary job at Microsoft in Redmond. She creates index entries for "E-WED," the Encarta World English Dictionary.

While Kempf thinks she is well paid for her work, she doesn't enjoy the full range of benefits Microsoft is famous for, which have pushed earnings up above $200,000 a year for many Seattle area software workers.

Kempf is actually employed by a labor contractor who pays her, and then charges Microsoft for her wages and benefits.

She thinks she and her colleagues need a union because they have no voice and no control in their wages and working conditions.

"People can get mistreated by agencies," Kempf said. "We don't know what their mark-up is, and we don't know what other workers are getting. We should have this information."

Some of the employment agencies treat their workers like adversaries. At least one agency requires random drug testing, and is known to fight their workers' unemployment compensation claims when workers are laid off.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year (in Vazcayno Vs. Microsoft) that as many as 10,000 people routinely hired by Microsoft through labor contracting agencies, must be treated the same as regular payroll employees when benefits are dished out. The ruling applies to the company stock purchase plan and other benfits such as 401-K pensions, but not to stock options.

Microsoft has not yet complied with the decision, but when they do, some of the most resented inequities between permanent and temporary employees will be eliminated.

While Kempf thinks the system could work better, she is reasonably satisfied with temporary contract work at Microsoft. And, added Kempf, as a temporary worker, "At least they never ask me to be on the bowling team."

Carl Slater voted for the settlement between SPEEA and Boeing, which ended the nation's largest and longest white collar workers strike on March 19. He's "highly doubtful" that many of the underlying problems that caused the strike were resolved in the contract. But, he said, "I'll be better off when I go back because I'll be more aggressive in pursuing solutions to those problems."

In describing the long term solutions he thinks Boeing and other big employers will have to adopt, Slater referred to an article by economist and business consultant Peter Drucker published in The Atlantic magazine in October, 1999.

Drucker wrote: "Increasingly, performance in these new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the institution so as to attract, hold, and motivate knowledge workers. When this can no longer be done by satisfying knowledge workers' greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to be done by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition and social power. It will have to be done by turning them from subordinates into fellow executives, and from employees, however well paid, into partners."

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