Office Workers on Strike:
San Francisco 1981
by Lucius Cabins
The Company
The Union
The Boycott and Labor Movement Solidarity
Naive Union Strategies: Manipulation or Misunderstanding
Blue Shield Workers Take Direct Action
When in the U.S. Do as the Polish Do
Since December 8, 1980, 1,100 office workers at Blue Shield Insurance Company
have been on strike. They are represented by the Office and Professional
Employees International--Local #3 (OPEIU), AFL-CIO. The union is pressing
its demands to retain its Cost-of-Living-Adjustment formula for determining
pay increases (which has been in effect for six years and would allow for
a 14.7% wage increase this year): to reduce current heavy production quotas
(initial claims processors are expected to handle 383 claims in each
7.5 hour shift!); to base the ""average production measurement''
on a four-day week to allow for a bad day; special rights for Video Display
Terminal operators; and to improve pension plan provisions.
Blue Shield is demanding no mention be made in the contract of production
quotas or standards, claiming such a change would open these matters up
to grievances and arbitration, thereby limiting Blue Shield's competitiveness.
Production standards, the company insists, should remain a management prerogative.
Blue Shield was offering a 9.5% wage increase this year with a reopener
clause for wage negotiations in the next two years. Since OPEIU Local #29
in the East Bay settled for 9.5% this year, 8% next year, and 7.5% in the
last year with Blue Cross, Blue Shield has offered the same package. Also,
some management ""take-away'' demands (e.g. a shorter lunch break)
were reintroduced, after having been dropped to avert the strike.
The Company
Blue Shield is facing an increasingly competitive market. Several years
ago. it lost its contract to process Medi-Cal claims when they were underbid
by a non-union data processing firm. Blue Shield is the only unionized insurance
carrier in San Francisco though they do have four other non-union offices
in California in Los Angeles, San Diego, Woodland Hills and Sacramento.
At the time of the strike, San Francisco Blue Shield was processing 52,000
claims per day, 37,000 of them under a federal contract for Medicare processing.
Medicare constitutes a $12-million-a-year business for Blue Shield, about
1.3 million claims annually. Though they have been processing claims at
below-average cost in the past four years, they are expecting stiff competition
from the numerous non-union data processing companies entering the market
to threaten their Medicare contract.
As the only major unionized private corporate office in San Francisco, Blue
Shield is on the front lines of the rising battle between management and
the increasingly important clerical sector of the workforce. This fact is
not lost on Blue Shield, OPEIU, or the workers themselves. Blue Shield is
clearly attempting to break the union outright or render it completely impotent.
The Union
OPEIU Local #3 won the right to represent the workers at Blue Shield in
1972 without serious resistance from the company. The 1,100 striking Blue
Shield workers constitute 1/3 of the membership of OPEIU Local #3. A small
union with a tiny foothold in the enormous office labor market of San Francisco,
OPEIU Local #3 is fighting for its life in this strike.
OPEIU is affiliated with the AFL-CIO, and it pledges allegiance to U.S. labor
laws. These laws impose severe limits on what workers and unions can do to achieve
their demands (for instance, it is illegal to occupy a workplace). Their primary
tactic in this confrontation with Blue Shield is the strike, a traditional walkout
protected by National Labor Relations Act legislation. Out on the picket lines,
however, workers no longer control the machines and data banks that are in their
control daily when they are on the job. This divests them of the tremendous leverage
they would have if they stayed in the offices and prevented their replacement
by scabs.
The Boycott and Labor Movement Solidarity
The second major tactic of OPEIU, in an attempt to gain support for the strike,
has been to appeal to other unions for a boycott of Blue Shield insurance contracts.
In fact, John Henning, secretary-treasure of the state AFL-CIO, has issued an
appeal for all unions and union members to cancel their insurance contracts with
Blue Shield if they don't give in to union demands. This threat is less than ""toothless''
since it is only possible to break these contracts upon their expiration. In any
case the medical insurance contracts of unions and their sympathizers represent
a relatively small part of Blue Shield's total business, the bulk of which is
processing federal Medicare claims. The vast majority of workers, who are not
in unions, have no say over their companies' choice of insurance policies, and
their bosses are hardly likely to support a boycott. With the boycott tactic,
the union remains peaceful and within the law, but much of the strike's energy
and resistance is diverted into hopeless boycott work.
As usual the union has not attempted to mobilize the millions of AFL-CIO
members to support the strikers at Blue Shield (or anywhere else for that
matter). Local #29 (OPEIU) in the East Bay, a ""sister'' union,
undercut the bargaining position of Local #3 when they recently accepted
from Blue Cross a contract which says nothing about production quotas or
work rules, and accepts paltry wage increases for the next three years.
Meanwhile, office workers represented by the same Local #29 were on strike
for six weeks against the Alameda County Council of Building Trades Unions
demanding cost-of-living increases (which they finally got). The Council
of Building Trades Unions used their power to prevent the Central Labor
Council (AFL-CIO) of Alameda County from sanctioning the strike. One picket
line- crossing union bureaucrat even went so far as to admit that he and
his fellow bureaucrats were just of bunch of ""hot-air hypocrites
who don't practice what we preach.
"The separation and isolation of workers from each other is clearly
being furthered by the actions of these Bay Area locals... so much for the
""labor solidarity'' of trade unions.
Naive Union Strategies: Manipulation or Misunderstanding
The union accepts the ""necessities'' of the marketplace, i.e.
that costs must be cut for Blue Shield to remain competitive. The union's
strategy is to blame a ""malfunctioning data processing system''
installed in '78 by another company called Electronic Data Services for
the too-high costs and production quotas, and they are appealing to Blue
Shield to cut the 50- cents-per-claim fee that EDS gets instead of
lowering wages, and to get an improved data processing system.
It seems highly unlikely that Blue Shield would take such suggestions seriously.
Demanding more efficient management or proposing viable economic solutions
for the company obscures the basic conflict between profit motives and workers'
interests. The union bases its strategy on the erroneous idea that the workers
and the company have basically the same interest in the company's success.
In reality, the company's success by increasing profit margins. The main
way of doing this is to cut labor costs by replacing workers with machinery,
lowering real wages, or trying to get more work out of each working hour
on the job. These are the very measures that the workers are striking against.
The union remains utterly naive in its political/economic perspective. In
the concluding statement on their appeal for solidarity the union says:
"Since Blue Shield does have a federal Medicare contract,
union labor should be upheld, not undercut.''
Can the government be relied upon to support workers against management?
The answer lies in the history of the role of the U.S. government as strikebreakers
(1934 Longshoremen's strike in San Francisco, 1970 National Postal wildcat
strike, invocation of Taft-Hartley Act in 1978 coal miner's strike to cite
only three examples out of hundreds). The National Labor Relations Act has
been hailed as a progressive landmark of workers' rights. But a closer look
at the action of workers in the industrial mid-East of the 1930's suggests
that the National Labor Relations Board was created primarily to contain
widespread militancy (factory occupations and sit-down strikes). At the
same time as they gained the ""right'' to bargain collectively,
workers were deprived by the courts of their most effective means of fighting
when workplace occupations were made illegal.
Since its beginning in 1935, the NLRA has been amended by the Taft-Hartley
Act of 1948 which further limited worker's rights to take effective action
against their employers. The courts have repeatedly defined workers' rights
to take action for themselves in the narrowest possible context. Now, in
1981, Blue Shield justifies its measly wage offer by referring to the President's
wage guidelines as well as the pressure to remain competitive for the federal
Medicare contract.
No one should hold any illusions that the federal government (or the state
or the city) is in any way on our side (though there may be some
effort to bolster the sagging AFL-CIO in order to control the upsurge of
angry strikes which is bound to occur in the next few years). With Reagan's
inauguration, the federal government will move to front and center in the
attempt to impose austerity and sacrifice on us ""for the good
of the country.''
Blue Shield Workers Take Direct Action
Blue Shield workers have tried to break out of the confines of the union's
tactics. During the two weeks preceding the strike the workers engaged in
a widespread slowdown on the job. Since the strike began, workers have spray-painted
all over the Blue Shield buildings ""On Strike.'' Superglue in
the locks of automobiles of scab temporary workers and Blue Shield doors
have also caused some difficulty for the company. On the 17th of December,
a bicycle messenger who crossed the picket line to deliver a message returned
to find his bicycle dumped in the street. He attacked one of the strikers
and was beaten up, suffering lacerations and bruises. In mid-January, a
pile of claims waiting for processing was hurled out of the windows at the
Grant St. office of Blue Shield.
Some ideas that came up during a discussion of the situation on the picket
line included: cutting off the water necessary to cool the computer, thereby
causing the computers to overheat and malfunction; also, the idea to cut
off the phone connections with the building was raised. Some reluctance
was expressed about taking such illegal actions, since the union would be
blamed and would end up being tied up with legal and financial hassles--
another example of how unions and labor laws constrain workers. Some strikers
also wanted the union to bring in ""some goons'' to defend the
picket line and prevent scabs from crossing them so nonchalantly.
While force by striking workers (not hired goons) is invariably
necessary to make some headway, even a military force of strikers would
be inadequate if the struggle remains isolated in one office, company, or
factory. Significant permanent gains can only be the result of networks
of supporting actions throughout the workforce.
Insofar as they purport to represent specific groups of workers, trade unions
are based on the separation of different types of workers and industries.
It is becoming clearer that this is precisely what needs to be overcome.
The isolation and separation of working people by sex, race, skill, job
category, etc. is the single most useful tool that our ""leaders''
have in keeping us down. Trade unions, while occasionally paying lip- service
to this idea, actually play an important role in maintaining and prolonging
this isolation. Until office workers begin to make common cause with each
other and all production workers, strikes will remain defensive and weak,
with little chance of success, regardless of the militance of the particular
workers involved. Still, the more direct control workers in any particular
enterprise take over their workplace, the more likely they are to win their
demands.
When in the U.S. Do as the Polish Do
According to Business Week (Jan. 19, 1981) workers' real income has
been falling since 1978--the longest continuous decline since WWII--and
is likely to continue dropping in the next few years. But fewer workers
went on strike in 1980 than in any year since 1965, despite the worsening
living standards. For years unions have been bargaining away control over
the work process (i.e. agreeing to speed-ups and ""job redesigning''
layoffs) for increased wages and benefits. Now that the system is in crisis,
owners and managers are no longer offering the carrot of wage increases
in exchange for increased control. Today, they are turning to the stick
of unemployment and falling living standards to keep us working for them
on their terms.
Waiting for government or management solutions to our worries will get us
nothing but less of everything (except maybe war). On the verge of a very
serious recession/depression, we will have to begin asserting our abilities
to decide what we want and how we are going to get it. For those of us who
work in offices the first step toward a better life is communication with
each other.
At the workplace our strength lies in our control over the massive quantities
of machinery and data which are necessary to the continuation of existing
institutions of political and economic power. We must not be fooled by anyone--politicians, union bureaucrats, or anyone else--who say we can get what we want through petitions, negotiations, or bargains with the existing order. For a world
free from 9 to 5 drudgery and free from material scarcity and austerity,
we will have to take over and transform the existing production/distribution/communication system. Polish workers have demonstrated this collective power-- we must make preparations to use ours.
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