INTERVIEW WITH A UNION ORGANIZER:

Finding a Place in the Labor Movement

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by Linda Jane

Kathy Laskowitz came to Cleveland ten months ago to help organize the electrical workers in this area. She is a paid organizer for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (U.E.).

The U.E. prides itself on maintaining the militant rank and file unionism that grew out of the depression years. Established in 1936, it was one of the founding unions and early leaders of the C.1.O. It split off from the C.I.O. during the McCarthy era, alleging that union officials were cooperating with management to undermine the workers' cause. The U.E. was subsequently charged with "communist domination". The Justice Department dropped the charges in 1959 for lack of evidence. Today, there are. hundreds of U.E. shops across the country that represent close to 200,000 workers.

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Linda: How did you get involved in the labor movement?

Kathy: I guess it goes back to when I went away to Penn State as an undergraduate. I thought the world was mine. I was going to get out and get a job-fit right into the mold. When I got out, there weren't any jobs-particularly for someone with a B.A. in anthropology. That was in 1972, when the economy was starting to get a little tighter.

Although I had never considered myself a worker, I had worked through college and high school. I found that I had to rely on those experiences to live. I waitressed for awhile and did ironing for people. Then I got what was my best paying job till then as a secretary for the University of Pittsburgh. Because I

BREAD AND ROSES TO CHANGE HOOSE

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had a college degree, I think I was a bit arrogant. As a worker now and not a student, I began to see the hierarchy-the whole pseudo-professional intellectualism. I was treated like a secretary and I resented it. I was smart enough, probably because of my political activities in the women's movement and the anti-war movement and also the trade unionism in my family, to turn to my co-workers to try to improve things. After about six months I got fired.

Linda: You said you were active in the women's movement in college. How does this relate to your interest in the labor movement?

Kathy: Actually, I was in the women's movement

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even in Pittsburgh when I was working. I was in consciousness raising at the time and having a miserable time at my job, but I never talked about trying to change my working conditions. There wasn't any sense of trade unionism among the women in my group.

Linda: Was that because the women in your group weren't in the same position financially, or was that just not considered an appropriate subject?

Kathy: Until it became politically fashionable to talk about trade unionism and working class women, I don't think there were very many avenues for women to talk about their work, except in unions. I know that was true for me, particularly in college. I was working a third shift and some of my friends were working, too, but we never talked about it. We talked about the oppression of women and never about our goddamn bosses.

Linda: Some of that may stem from the fact that many of us in that position saw our situations as transitional.

Kathy: Yes, we always thought of ourselves as temporary workers. But it makes me angry-angry at myself for not seeing the contradictions. It is a very emotional and intellectual issue for me--the women's movement versus the labor movement. I could never completely integrate my working conditions and my feminism. Sometimes women make it difficult by defining the women's movement as their own activity. You go to a large city and try to find out where the movement is, and it's usually a very small, closely-knit group of women. They're all very caught up in their own progression forward.

I ran into a similar conflict in '73. I was working as a printer in a non-union shop in Buffalo. A group of us in different workplaces organized a collective to talk about improving our working conditions. We set up a Buffalo working women's union, similar to other groups springing up across the country at that time. For some of the women, the most important concern, was eliminating sexism in their workplaces and confronting their bosses on that issue. And, although I agreed that was important, I knew it was only a part of the basic bread and butter issues that were important to us unorganized workers.

Linda: What you're talking about reminds me of the issue of assertiveness training versus more collective organizing. There's been a heavy emphasis in the women's movement for some time now on asserting yourself going to your boss and telling them what you want. Which is certainly a step in the right direction, but it doesn't necessarily get at the root of the problem. So, in some ways, I think the conflicts you were feeling about the women's movement in '72 are still very much with us. How did you deal with this conflict?

Kathy: What I found happening was that, although we would sit around talking about the racist, sexist, and anti-lesbian attitudes we experienced at work, a lot of times those issues weren't boss-worker related. They were worker-worker related. I knew that I could rally people around the worker-boss issue. But our group did not want to deal with that. They were all politically conscious, but they thought I was selling out by moving more toward getting people in my shop to join a union.

Linda: Are you talking specifically about working with men as part of your struggle?

Kathy: No, it wasn't so much that as it was the content of the struggle. If I could have reported back to

the group that I had raised some man's consciousness about sexism or lesbianism, that would have been fantastic. If I had said that we had gone to the boss and demanded that we don't work any more overtime, it wouldn't have seemed as important. And I began to see that for the people I was working with and for myself, it was the economic issues first that were important. And so in 1973 I split from that group and began to organize at my shop. That's when I really made a commitment to the labor move-

ment.

Linda: When did you get involved with the electrical

workers?

Photo by Janet Century

Kathy: Well, in the meantime, I had been doing a lot of research on the history of working women and was offered a two-year teaching assistanceship at Divingston. It meant a free masters degree, and they had a union at the university. I taught labor studies for 2 years and got a chance to work with some fine trade unionists who were into labor education. I also got involved in the teaching assistants' union. It was a good experience, but it took me away from what I really wanted to do, which was to organize. And then I ran into a U.E. organizer in New Jersey. I had heard about the U.I. before. I did some research to find out which electrical shops in New Jersey were unorganized. I was going to get a job in one of these shops, but then one of the organizers suggested I apply to the union as an organizer.

Linda: Then you never actually worked in a U.F. shop? Have you found that to be a disadvantage?

Kathy: Yes, I think the organizers on the staff now who came from U.E. shops make better organizers because of their experience. I've worked in shops but never in the electrical industry.

Linda: How do you go about getting people within a shop to feel a commitment to the union? I mean, you're going into a place where the workers are told by their bosses what to do each day, how to do it, and how long they have to do it in.

Kathy: That's a good questions which, in itself, takes up about 60% of my time. Some people are really attracted to the union and would fight and die for it. Others you really have to work with to try to develop. As a union organizer, you need to figure out where a person is and take them three steps further. What it means is showing them that rank and file unionism isn't just a theory. You don't need a Teamsters' macho image to be strong. In a true rank and file union, where you rely on the might of numbers, and the strength of the workers, you can take on the boss