I’m a member of a union that includes both office and field workers. It works well for all the big, common negotiations. We all want better wages, healthcare, retirement, hours, etc. But when it comes to working conditions, we have clear differences. The most recent example of “return to work” shines a light on this.
The field workers, understandably, don’t give a shit about “return to work”. Some even resent the office workers for having the ability to work from home. Meanwhile, some office workers will likely quit without the ability to work from home. My company has recently decided to completely remove the ability to work from home. In response, the union is completely split on how to react.
How should I approach the internal discussions? I’m hesitant to advocate for pushback because not everyone will benefit. On the other hand, no resistance at all feels like a concession of worker’s rights.
TLDR: Work from home taken away. Should a union pushback?
Pushing back would show solidarity between the two. Having the two types of employees resenting each other only aids the employer obviously.
Like, obviously the Field techs can’t work from home. But you have to get to the core of the issue. WHY do people want to work from home?
- Time to take care of at home work. Scheduling maintenance, doing chores, etc. Once you are off work you still have work to do. If you could do that work while also earning your living (say, running laundry between work tasks) it frees you for more personal time, creative time, leisure time.
- Outside of the panopticon. working in an office is like being in prison within a panopticon. Everything about your existence is observable, and scrutinized. From how you dress to how you talk etc.
- No commute. Let’s be real everyone at this business is paying out of their own pocket to commute to work. The field text probably do not get paid for their commute to the field and if they do it may simply be a mileage reimbursement.
You get the idea. This will obviously be unique to your place of employment but if the two groups of people sat down and talked about why they want to maintain their work from home, they might find that the reasons they want it are things that the others would want as well. Then you can collaborate on how to achieve each of those items for everyone.
While the office workers may work from home you may be able to identify that the field workers should have the ability to work less days a week. Worst case they may be able to work longer shifts per day so that they may have the day off later in the week extending their weekend.
Ultimately the thing that working from home gives people is freedom. Freedom to accomplish tasks that are required as a result of owning a home, renting a property, or busy simply being alive. Because outside of work you have your personal work. Buying groceries, yard work, car maintenance, house maintenance, personal development, medical checkup requirements either mental or physical. Every hour spent on the clock locked in an office is an hour you cannot use to perform those tasks.
I think everyone understands why people want to work from home. And stressing all the benefits of WFH to field workers only seemed to further the resentment.
Office and field workers did sit down last month to discuss this. Tensions were high very quickly.
I’ve been thinking a better strategy is to explain we will lose workers because of this change. And if office staff is lost, the field will have less support. This makes everyone’s job harder. Solidarity is easier if we have a common interest.
Why do the field workers care? Sounds like some people are kicking up shit that only benefits the bosses. Could be some wreckers about, intentional or not. Be careful.
Your common interest is improved working conditions and better wages. Nobody joins a union so that everyone has to work as if they’re all the most exploited worker. It’s not about stripping everyone of their benefits so that everyone’s got the same. It’s about fighting for everyone to get benefits so that everyone is the same.
If the white collar workers accept the logic that they won’t fight for what they need because the tech staff can’t get the same benefit, they should also accept that everyone should be on the lowest salary because not everyone will benefit from higher salaries.
It sounds like people in the union are doing that thing that people outside of unions do, where they look at e.g. traindrivers on good wages and say, ‘how dare they strike for better pay and conditions when I’m not going to get a pay rise’. The obvious solution there is to join a fucking union and stop being a wet mop. But it’s easier to be outraged because the right wing press told you to. It’s annoying, but not entirely unexpected, when this happens inside a union.
Sounds like there’s a real opportunity to explore what solidarity means within your union. This may require the white collar workers taking a stance in solidarity for something that benefits the blue collar workers but not them.
What are the wage differences like? If the tech staff start on lower wages, can you all demand the abolition of the lowest spine points on the pay scale at the same time as demanding WFH? The higher paid blue collar workers might not like this.
Your union is going to have to work through people’s assumptions about why workers should have to earn decent conditions as opposed to just being entitled to them. Your union will have to face the contradiction within the gap between bourgeois and revolutionary consciousness.
If it’s the other way round and the tech staff get paid more, then the problem is related to that segment of the workers not understanding solidarity. Maybe they see the white collar workers as unnecessary or already getting paid too much for doing a cushy job.
I think I assumed at first that the blue collar workers were getting in the way of the white collar workers but this seems problematic. Do the blue collar workers think the white collar workers are getting in they way of what they want? This contradiction needs to be resolved.
It’ll take time to build but it sounds like your union/branch needs to build it’s internal solidarity and work out why anyone is resentful of others for getting the benefits associated with doing different work.
Part of this (a rather slimy solution, I think) is to outline the personal benefits that everyone gets when others get a benefit. For example, if those who can WFH do so, parking will be easier and there may be an argument for lowering the cost of parking because there will be less demand. Or you could also campaign for travel subsidies or free food/drink for those who have to go in—this will be more affordable if it’s only for half the workforce.
I think the first thing to do is a fact finding exercise. Find out what they each want. Rank these things to make a priority list. Work out which ones can be achieved at the same time. Find out why people are resentful (on both sides). Institute solidarity sessions where you find common ground and have an education program to help people see that the enemy is not other workers but the bosses.
Why do the field workers care?
The bosses claimed “field workers have been calling people who WFH and have not been getting responses”. I believe this is blown out of proportion but its the biggest wedge we are dealing with.
I think part of the misunderstanding here is what kind of person a rural labor union attracts. The field workers fit the stereotype of a truck driving, Trump voting, thin blue flag bumper sticker, bootstraps believing kind of guy. They don’t join a union because they believe in workers solidarity, mostly. They join a union because they are hard workers who want to earn more. They believe the should earn more because of their hard work. So when someone can WFH, it goes against what they believe, at a core level.
What are the wage differences like?
Sporadic. Office is made up of people who make less and more. Field is more standard pay in the middle but with more OT opportunities. The compromise here is a mix of wage negotiations being percentage based and flat increase based.
Do the blue collar workers think the white collar workers are getting in they way of what they want?
I think the blue collar guys are hard workers who want to work with other hard workers. They respect the office workers who you can see putting the effort in, but not when you cannot see it. They do NOT want to support someone lazy getting something they don’t deserve. The assumption is WFH = lazy.
Or you could also campaign for travel subsidies or free food/drink for those who have to go in—this will be more affordable if it’s only for half the workforce.
HOLY SHIT this actually brings up a very good compromise. The office has a cafeteria that served lunches for everyone but stopped when covid started. When WFH was removed, they never reintroduced the lunches. I think we can request the lunches get brought back. Its actually fucking dumb this wasn’t offered immediately as an incentive from management.
The more I try to explain the situation the less likely I think I can convince others that WFH is a good thing. So let’s reintroduce some of the benefits of being in the office.
I was brought up with the blue collar attitude that you describe. It’s hard to shake. Pointing out two contradictions might help (you are facing an uphill struggle, but unions don’t build themselves and are regularly unbuilt by our enemies, so we’ve got to try something).
First, if the blue collar teams don’t like it when they can’t get hold of the white collar teams, it suggests the white collar teams are doing important work without which the blue collar teams can’t do their job. If that’s the case, work on shifting the narrative away from hard work to effective work. Get the white collar workers to instigate a conversation with the blue collar workers: ‘How can we make your job easier, with fewer hiccups?’
In relation to this, don’t let the bosses tell one segment of workers that the others are lazy. As Assata Shakur says, we can’t let our enemies tell us who our enemies are. (Note that I’m attributing this to Shakur because it’s a line in her autobiography but I listened to it in another language so there’s a chance that she was saying that someone else was telling her not to do this.)
Second, I’m assuming you’re on the white collar side, idk why, but if that’s true you or the others can’t come off as condescending. One thing we hated was being told by people (assumed to be ‘educated’) who ‘knew how everything worked in theory but couldn’t figure things out on site’. This will take humility from both sides, but there’s no reason why the white collar side can start that off. The task, subtly, softly, subtly, is to explain that if the blue collar workers ‘who do all the hard work’ want a pay rise through collective bargaining, they need as many workers in hand as possible.
It does sound like you have some wreckers trying to undermine the union. Depending on the industry, there’s a chance that they will have received training in how to undermine collective action. One way to start combating this is to start a discussion whereby people are asking, ‘How do we make this work?’ If they arrive at the only correct answer themselves, you’ll be halfway there.
Good luck with the demand for food!
PS another thing to point out if you want to secure WFH, is that the company is paying for heating, lighting, office space, etc, and that could be used towards a pay rise or subsidised food. (Later on you can argue that if you’re working from home, the company should be paying your home office bills but that’s an up hill struggle in torrential rain.)
I think through your argument and question you provide a false definition or perceived difference and others here respond based on the false premise of this difference.
The difference between “blue collar” “white collar” is not whether the one is working inisde an office/lab/building or outside in the field/machine room/dock etc. The difference has to do with the hierarchy of work/production itself. Whether you are doing the actual work that is part of production or overseeing the work done by others. Whether you are a secretary, a truck driver, a lab analysis technician, or a stock room clerk is not what makes you white collar. To oversee and direct the work of others doing work is what makes you white collar, even if you are in the field, whether you wear a suit or blue overalls doesn’t matter. I even had worked in a machine shop many ages ago where the owners themselves (2) would wear blue overalls and come to the shop and actually work the machines and tell new comers how to do something right, or how they wanted it done. Meanwhile there were people who wrote code/programmed machines to do mass-production (3d printing they call it 40y later) and never wore blue uniforms, they sat on a desk, read blueprints and typed in codes.
In some work settings those who are “managers” and oversee others’ work can terrorize them to do it right or do more or face unemployment, they do evaluations and if they don’t like your face or think threatened by you as knowing more than they do, especially when you prove them wrong, and will burry your future of raise or promotion. Those are problematic when they are in union as they act as snitches of the bosses and are really never on the side of the worker.
There can be engineers, material scientists, expert machinery technicians in the field, with construction boots whose only office may be a trailer parked in the mud. The bosses (owners) can not live without them, but their actual role of getting work done correctly or snitching on who is lurking and who is not, is a different issue.
Who tells you what to do and what to not do, who threatens you with having work tomorrow or not having any, or how necessary it is to put in overtime (sometimes for free) or don’t expect to work too long or at a higher pay, or in a better position, are they in the union?
Work for home is some bullshit notion that never did and never will work. The pathology of the capitalist is to actually see the army of the exploited and their managers on their means of production, not invisibly having work done off-site. There is “out-sourcing” for those things that can be done off-site. It is almost as a test to see who and when are essential and with the production can do without. So if your boss says take this task and do it home and bring the results in (or mail them in), it is a trap for being able to do without you. Those that physically must be at work are always more secure than those that work from home. Say people working on IT who must have access to the systems that need to be available for those lurking at home on their pijamas. If the servers are down and don’t respond there is not much you can do remotely to reset them or solve the problem.
There is much of capitalism producing and reproducing psycho-pathology that results from the insecurity of the bosses, which of course is caused by class struggle. They have no illusion there position in wealth and power is never secure, everyone around them can benefit from their demise. In this respect they want to see faces, they want to employee people who are actually useless in production but assure them their ownership and operation is secure. So they pay extra for some white collar thugs to maintain a buffer zone between the exploiter and the exploited. They want someone else to be mean and nasty to workers so they don’t have the emotional weight of doing it themselves.
I think you’re right to point out a difference between the role of different workers (some to do the work and some to manage those who do the work). And this probably is crucial in working out how to build solidarity in a union.
That said, I wonder if blue collar / white collar does map onto the concepts of proletariat / professional-managerial class? Are these consilient? It seems like there are two separate thought-systems / models here. Similar to the difference between ‘working class – middle class’ and ‘proletariat – bourgeois’. They both have their uses (‘proletariat – bourgeois’ is perhaps more useful) but they don’t really align and the terms are not generally interchangeable.
I’ve always seen blue collar as referring to manual work and white collar to office-type (mental?) work. To say that the small-business-owner-plumber is ‘white collar’ when they’re down in the sewage everyday with their employees doesn’t feel right to me. And I’d say the plumber’s self-employed accountant would be white collar, even if they don’t have any employees to instruct. At the same time, the plumber would likely be petite-bourgeois and the accountant would be petit-bourgeois/professional managerial class. And both (possibly along with the plumber’s employees) would be labour aristocrats. Assuming the workers are in the imperial core.
Think of a biologis, working at a lab, wearing a white robe and being in a nearly sterile environment, alalyzing sample after sample. They are not managing anyone, neither is their opinion on other workers weigh in firing, demoting or promoting anyone. A teacher or professor on the other hand is managing students, and can be abusive due to the power she/he holds on them (pass/fail them).
A plumber, or an electrician can work alone, they are self employed (meaning they work for a different boss in every site they go to work at) but are they above workers, maybe industrial plumbers working for a large manufacturer/constuction co. In some repair work due to the nature of the work one may need an assistant because 2 hands are not enough, or are not long enough, … (AC installations).
So what boils down as the difference among them is the authority they exercise within the workplace. The higher in hierarchy the more their interests are closely resembling the owners’, the lower they are the more likely they are to be in alliance at least with workers struggles.
More good points. And I largely agree with the thrust of your argument:
what boils down as the difference among them is the authority they exercise within the workplace.
Blue/white collar, though, do not seem to be relational categories in the same way as proletariat/bourgeois. The two don’t seem to be compatible as they come from distinct systems of thought. Blue/white seems to be bourgeois in the same sense as working class/middle class.
Blue/white collar seem to be defined in relation to the type of work, whether the work is manual/mental. They are fixed, binary categories. As you point out, they can be helpful but they are flawed. This is probably because they’re not dialectical.
Historically, blue collar would have been a rough synonym for working class and white collar would have been a rough synonym for middle class. Workers in the field or factory would wear blue shirts because they would look cleaner even when muddy or oily. Workers in the office could wear white shirts because they weren’t going to get oily or muddy.
This bourgeois approach to class doesn’t have much explanatory power, except as shorthand. Attempts to make them more nuanced will always be limited because they’re fundamentally non-dialectical.
Whereas proletariat/bourgeois are dialectical. Defined in relation to the means of production, we can identify strata within the proletariat. The lower paid proles might shift between prole and lumpen. The higher paid proles might shift between PMC (professional/managerial) and labour aristocrat. These might earn more and have more security than the lowest strata of the ruling class, the petty bourgeois. And some people might be in more than one category.
Blue collar/white collar can be useful. This can be seen in the OP’s post. The type of work can dictate a different culture and different day-to-day interests (distinct from the differences between prole/labour aristocratic interests). But blue/white collar does not map on to dialectical concepts of class.
Additionally, there may be an office worker (white) or a joiner (blue) who has no power in their own workplace (because they’re at the bottom of the ladder) but who is also a landlord or owns stocks and shares, outside work, making them petty bourgeois, indicating that blue/white are not interchangeable or compatible with dialectical concepts of class.
Reducing dialectical concepts of class to a bourgeois binary of blue/white collar will lead to confusion because it strips the nuance from the dialectical categories. This is what makes it difficult to place the plumber who owns a small business. They are 100% blue collar if they’re still on the tools. But this tells us nothing (and is designed to tell us nothing) about their relation to the means of production (i.e. they’re a blue collar boss).
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Umm. Sorry, didn’t mean to provide flase definitions or anything like that. I was unsure how much information I wanted to share for the sake of anonymity. But let me provide additional context.
The “company” is an Irrigation District. Its a non-profit, community owned, public utility company.
By blue collar, I meant field workers. Linemen, operators, etc.
By white collar, I meant office workers. Engineers, technicians, and clerks.
All of those people are in the union. The managers (non-union) are pushing for removal of WFH. The managers are mostly chosen by the board of directors, who are elected every 5 years by the customers.
I guess by the “correct” definitions, everyone I’ve been talking about is blue collar?
That’s how I’d use blue/white collar, too.
iriyan does raise an interesting question, though: are there any workers in either camp who are also managers? Maybe gang leaders in the linemen? Or a chief engineer who instructs you and a few technicians/clerks? These people, if they exist in your org, will be most used to people doing what they say. Are these the loudest voices in the union, too?
I suspect the reason that white collar workers get paid more than blue collar workers is because the owners of the company see and interact with them regularly and it is harder for bosses to see them just as a number on a spreadsheet.
That’s my two cents anyways. As a white collar worker that doesn’t do much considering how much he’s paid, I don’t mind if blue collar workers get paid a little more. I think it would be cool to demand higher wages for blue collar workers and more work from home days for white collar workers.
Wages are very much based off industry standards. The company is non-profit and the “owners” are elected, so its not as clear cut as that.
I provided a little more context in my other comment.
