But momentum kept building. Jorge addressed groups of people during his lunch breaks. "The management could see us, but they didn't know what we were saying, because we spoke Spanish and they didn't." When the mattress workers finally had a vote, the union won. But ASI offered to increase base wages by only 16 cents an hour. Jorge and the other workers felt they had no choice but to strike.
"Only five workers crossed the picket line," Jorge recalls. "Even some people who'd voted against the union and had been with the company for years were with us. These were old men and women who'd worked hard all their lives and gotten nothing. I was so happy to see them I almost cried."
The workers built outside support with the help of UNITE, organizations like Jobs with Justice, and members of other unions. "We told our customers about the strike," Jorge says, "so they'd call and put pressure for delivery. The company ran out of inventory." After five days, the company settled. Workers received an immediate dollar-an-hour raise and a guarantee of additional raises for each of the next two years, plus sick days, health insurance, and two weeks' paid vacation. The bathrooms were cleaned, and there was talk of a cafeteria. "Now people dare to talk with the boss and tell him what they feel," Jorge explains. "They go by themselves to the office, with the problems they have. They learned to stand up for themselves."
Even in environments that have not yet been unionized, employees working in concert can produce astonishing transformations, although with far fewer protections. At Chicago's Inland Steel, four African American employees became concerned about how minority employees were treated. "The paper policies were fine," says saleswoman Scharlene Hurston, "but they weren't carried out. When you were involved in meetings, you always felt like you weren't part of the group. You felt you were invisible. Although you'd speak up and have a reasonable opinion, your ideas would be ignored or discarded. Then someone who was white would bring up an almost identical proposal, and everyone would jump to embrace it. Forty percent of our plant workers are minorities and they had a common voice through their union. But it stopped when you got to the upper levels. Out of two hundred managers in sales and marketing, we had three African Americans. We felt totally isolated."
Fed up with the lack of progress, Scharlene began meeting informally with three other African American colleagues who had individually approached management to discuss advancement practices, only to find their complaints dismissed. They echoed Scharlene's judgment that "the situation violated principles I hold very dearly, about doing what's right and truthful and honest." Over a period of months, they brainstormed together, finally deciding to approach Steven Bowsher, a white general manager they respected. Inviting him to dinner, they told him about the racist jokes, derogatory comments, and overt and covert obstacles that they and others had faced at Inland. Although Bowsher was sympathetic, he found the examples abstract and remote from his experience. But he was interested enough to take a two-day race relations seminar led by a longtime civil rights activist, and unexpectedly saw his company with new eyes.
"Suddenly, we weren't talking at each other," Scharlene Hurston recalls, "we started to talk with each other." Bowsher had his entire team of managers attend the seminar, then established an aggressive affirmative action plan. His department began to systematically promote minorities on the basis of their total years of experience and the general strength of their skills, even if they'd been stuck for years at the lower levels of the corporate hierarchy. After some prodding from Bowsher, Inland's president attended the same seminar, convened a meeting of top officers to deal with racial issues, and seriously solicited the opinions of women and minority employees.
Scharlene's group met resistance, of course. "When you take on something controversial, you're going to get shot at," she says. "We all had colleagues who explained to us how our future looked so bright--if we just divorced ourselves from those other people who were causing trouble. Most of our opponents weren't bad people. They were simply ignorant, afraid of controversy and change."
But that didn't stop the reformers. "We energized each other," said Scharlene. "When one of us got tired, the others were there to pick them up." Besides, it was no longer just the four of them. Each major department and manufacturing plant now had a group to address racial and sexual inclusion. When Bowsher became head of Inland's now-independent Ryerson Coil division, he appointed the company's first African American general manager and first Latino and female plant managers, conducted a major campaign against sexual harassment, and revoked a long-standing policy that made the office areas off-limits to ordinary workers. When the division finally turned a profit, after years of losing money, he attributed its success to unleashing the energy and creativity of workers who finally felt they had the respect and support of management.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
