Flowers Won’t Solve Secretaries’ Problems
National Secretaries Day is just a week away, and even conservative organizations that once seemed content to urge bosses to celebrate the day by taking their secretaries to lunch or by buying them flowers (at company expense) now say those nice little touches are just not enough to ease the problems of the nation’s 4 million secretaries and 15 million other clerical workers.
About 12% to 15% of the total--mostly those employed in the public sector--now belong to a union. Probably few of them--in or out of unions--would turn down a free lunch or even a flower or two. These gestures are promoted with such enthusiasm that one would think that secretaries would surely be content for the rest of the year. But the indications are that that isn’t true any longer, if indeed it ever was.
One sign of the changing times is the attitude of the Professional Secretaries International, which is more and more outspoken in its criticism of the working conditions of secretaries, although it is still convinced that they have a better chance of getting higher wages and better jobs by dealing with their bosses on a one-to-one basis rather than through a union.
The PSI, along with the florists, were once among the most ardent advocates of giving flowers for Secretaries Day. But when the union-minded 9to5 organization started winning adherents with its slogan “Raises, Not Roses” for Secretaries Day a few years ago, PSI, founded in 1942, countered with “Raises and Roses.”
In fact, the unions and the conservative PSI have increasingly similar views of secretaries’ problems, even though their proposals for solving them differ sharply.
PSI joined with Panasonic Industrial Co. to sponsor a survey of secretarial problems and concluded, among other things, that “secretaries are underutilized and isolated.” Many are under heavy stress that “contributes to absenteeism, diminishes productivity and adversely affects (their) health.”
Not surprisingly, the problems also cited included “perceptions of insufficient pay (70% of those surveyed said they were underpaid), lack of advancement opportunities, lack of input into decisions and lack of communications from supervisors.”
9to5, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO Service Employees International Union, offers a batch of revealing statistics to ponder in “celebration” of Secretaries Day. For instance, 98% of all secretaries, stenographers and typists--and 80% of all clerical workers--are women.
Where they compete directly with males, women make only 69% of the wages paid to men in similar clerical jobs. The median income for full-time female clerical workers is $14,040--but $20,332 for males. And, while women make less than men at the clerical jobs, black women make only 90% of the earnings of white women working at similar jobs full time.
Karen Nussbaum, executive director of 9to5, says office jobs are no longer an alternative to the diminishing number of positions in “smokestack” industries such as autos and steel. Not only do the office jobs pay considerably less than jobs in manufacturing but the Bureau of Labor Statistics is now giving support to the union’s earlier contention that the growth in office jobs is slowing considerably.
Computerization, Nussbaum insists, is threatening the number of office jobs, the wages that they pay and the chances of promotion.
National Secretaries Day would be an ideal time for secretaries, clerks, stenographers and other office employees, individually or collectively, to tell their bosses about the real problems that they face on the job and offer suggestions for resolving them.
UTU Leaves AFL-CIO
Battles between and within unions have attracted widespread public attention in recent months, but harmony within the labor movement is actually much greater than the sensational divisions so visible to the general public.
That doesn’t mean that there are no serious rifts within labor. On Tuesday, for example, the 90,000-member United Transportation Union, the country’s largest railroad workers union, announced that it had withdrawn from the AFL-CIO after the labor federation found that it was improperly trying to recruit members from other AFL-CIO unions.
Also, the UTU said it didn’t approve of some political decisions of the federation, such as the AFL-CIO’s refusal to endorse Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, who the UTU said has been of considerable help to the railroad union on legislative issues.
The UTU was the first AFL-CIO affiliate to leave the federation since the United Auto Workers pulled out 18 years ago.
These and other headline-grabbing signs of division within organized labor tend to obscure the increasing cooperation between unions. Three examples:
- The UAW has decided, after an 18-year split, to rejoin the AFL-CIO Los Angeles County Labor Federation this week, bringing about 30,000 UAW members into the county federation, which represents more than 700,000 AFL-CIO members.
William R. Robertson, head of the county federation, and Bruce Lee, UAW regional director, said the enemies of unions are continuing to grow in numbers and effectiveness and so a united labor movement is more essential than ever.
In 1968, the UAW left the AFL-CIO in a quarrel over everything from conservative AFL-CIO foreign policy positions to personality differences. In 1981, the UAW reaffiliated with the AFL-CIO--but only at the national level. UAW affiliates were not required to rejoin local and state central labor organizations, and almost none have.
Until the UAW reaffiliation here, there have been no local-level reaffiliations. At the state level, the Michigan state UAW rejoined the AFL-CIO, but the UAW there is by far the largest union and its officers dominate the federation. There have been partial reaffiliations at the state level in New York, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Since labor unity makes so much sense from the unions’ point of view, the decision by the UAW to rejoin the Los Angeles County Federation should be used as a model for the rest of the UAW at both the local and state levels around the country.
- Adding to the unity theme was the decision announced Tuesday by the Independent Assn. of Publishers’ Employees to affiliate with the AFL-CIO Graphic Communications International Union. The independent union, labeled by its own leaders as no more than an “arm of a paternalistic employer,” represents about 2,000 of the 6,000 employees at Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
Eric Frankland, president of the independent union, which was founded in 1937, said, “There is a feeling among the membership and leadership that it is time to join in the mainstream of labor and become a genuine union.”
- Members of three Los Angeles-area locals of the United Food & Commercial Workers have started voting on a merger. Uniting UFCW Retail Clerks Local 770 and Meat Cutters Locals 274 and 421 into a single union with more than 30,000 members would make it the largest union local in the West.
There is some opposition to the merger because it will mean that Rick Icaza, president of the 24,000-member Local 770, will be president of the merged union for three years.
While the merger agreement itself is subject to a membership vote, Icaza, as head of the largest of the three locals, automatically becomes president of the new local if the merger is approved. Critics say this allows him to avoid his own scheduled election within Local 770 this year.
But, with food industry workers being forced to take cuts in wages, hours and fringe benefits, combining the strength of all three locals is obviously good strategy.
Union mergers generally are continuing at the national level. There were 134 separate unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO in 1955, when it was created by a merger of the nation’s two labor federations--the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Because of union mergers, there are only 93 affiliates today, and the number continues to decline.
