Office Quandries
Peter Rachleff
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PUNCHING OUT page 2 of 3 | |||||
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Weekly Answers to Office Quandries |
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Professor Peter Rachleff |
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Your story reminds me of a little-known labor struggle here in Minnesota,
where I live. Back in the late 1970s, a group of women who worked for a bank
in Willmar, a small town about 100 miles west of the Twin Cities, became
frustrated that they were training in men who were then being promoted above
them. These women asked questions similar to yours--"Is this legal?" "Isn't
this an 'unfair labor practice'?" When they learned that the answers to
these questions were negative, they got another idea. Inspired in part by
the women's movement, they decided to organize into an independent union
local and approach the bank management with a list of demands, including
better pay and benefits.
Bank management laughed them out of the office so, in the middle of a Minnesota winter, the women decided to go on strike. They held firm for months, picketing in sub-zero temperatures, and they enjoyed support from their families, from other union families in town, and from women's rights advocates the country over. Ultimately, their effort failed, and their union was never recognized. But their effort was hardly a total failure. They awakened the women's movement to workplace issues and they demonstrated that white collar workers have great potential to organize, and lots of reasons to do so. Today, the labor movement is much more focussed on organizing white collar workplaces and workers like the "Willmar 8." Their efforts, from two decades ago, give you--and other women and men like you--more of an opportunity to consider organizing as an alternative to accepting whatever garbage and inequities employers and human resource departments choose to hand out.
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