Dishing It Out

Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century

Dorothy Cobble

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 1991
• Print ISBN: 9780252061868, 9780252018121
• eBook ISBN: 9780252096235
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Back when SOS or Adam and Eve on a raft were things to order if you were hungry but a little short on time and money, nearly one-fourth of all waitresses belonged to unions. By the time their movement peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, the women had developed a distinctive form of working-class feminism, simultaneously pushing for equal rights and pay and affirming their need for special protections.

Dorothy Sue Cobble shows how sexual and racial segregation persisted in wait work, but she rejects the idea that this was caused by employers' actions or the exclusionary policies of male trade unionists. Dishing It Out contends that the success of waitress unionism was due to several factors: waitresses, for the most part, had nontraditional family backgrounds, and most were primary wage-earners. Their close-knit occupational community and sex-separate union encouraged female assertiveness and a decidedly unromantic view of men and marriage. Cobble skillfully combines oral interviews and extensive archival records to show how waitresses adopted the basic tenets of male-dominated craft unions but rejected other aspects of male union culture. The result is a book that will expand our understanding of feminism and unionism by including the gender conscious perspectives of working women.

Notes

Introduction

1. Ann Japenga, “Granny Waitresses Picket Restaurant to Reclaim Jobs,” LAT, 23 February 1984, part 5, 1,7.

2. The term waitresses may be seen as a pejorative feminization of the standard term, waiter, which commonly refers to male food servers. I have adopted it, however, because the women themselves used the term and because it is a less cumbersome way of distinguishing the male and female groups within the occupation. A similar decision was made with regard to barmaid and bartender.

3. The classic sociological treatments of waitresses are Frances Donovan, The Woman Who Waits (Boston, 1920) and William Foote Whyte, Human Relations in the Restaurant Industry (New York, 1948). For one of the few recent book-length studies, see James Spradley and Brenda Mann, The Cocktail Waitress: Women's Work in a Man's World (New York, 1975).

4. Village Voice, 8 December 1987, 116.

5. Rachael Migler, “The Philadelphia Waitress,” Philadelphia Magazine 76 (April 1985): 108.

6. The dominant element of the postindustrial work force at first was perceived as “white-collar” professional and technical workers. Then, researchers noted the prominence of such low-paid, pink-collar occupations as sales and clerical. Statistics point to personal service jobs as the leading growth sector in the 1990s. See George Silvestri and John Lukasiewicz, “Occupational Employment Projections: The 1984–95 Outlook,” MLR 108 (November 1985): 42–57.

7. Silvestri and Lukasiewicz, “Occupational Employment Projections,” Table 5, 59.

8. Table 1 in the Appendix; U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, Career Opportunities in the Hotel and Restaurant Industries (Washington, D.C., 1982), 43; Richard Carnes and Horst Brand, “Productivity and New Technology in Eating and Drinking Places,” MLR 100 (September 1977): 9–15.

9. For an overview of the gender biases in the sociological literature, see Myra Marx Ferree and Beth B. Hess, “Introduction,” in Analyzing Gender, ed. Ferree and Hess (Beverly Hills, 1987). For the androcentric assumptions embedded in labor history, see Anne Philips and Barbara Taylor, “Sex and Skill: Notes Toward a Feminist Economics,” Feminist Review 6 (October 1980): 79–88; Susan Porter Benson, “‘The Customers Ain't God’: The Work Culture of Department Store Saleswomen, 1890–1940,” in Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society, ed. Michael Frisch and Daniel Walkowitz (Urbana, 1983), 185–211; and Mary Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1910 (Urbana, 1988), xiii–xxii. Even women's labor history has been dominated by what one review called “the industrial paradigm.” See Lois Helmbold and Ann Schofield, “Women's Labor History, 1790–1945,” Reviews in American History 17 (December 1989): 505.

10. The distinct character of service labor only now is being recognized, and the implications of these findings for basic sociological and economic theory have yet to be sorted out. For one of the best sociological treatments of service work, see Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley, 1983). Historians appear to be taking the lead in examining service occupations. Excellent analyses include David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York, 1978); Barbara Melosh, The Physician's Hand: Work Culture and Conflict in American Nursing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Susan Reverby, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850–1945 (Cambridge, 1987); and Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1910 (Urbana, 1986).

11. For example, Benson, Counter Cultures and Barbara Melosh, The Physician's Hand. By focusing on waitress union activism, I do not mean to suggest that union-building represents the “quintessential form of worker resistance” (to use Ava Baron's phrase) or that militancy connected with the waged-work sphere is more important than collective responses occurring in other arenas. For further discussion of these points see Ava Baron, “Gender and Labor History: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future,” and Dana Frank, “Gender, Consumer Organizing, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929,” in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of Men, Women, and Work, ed. Baron (Ithaca, 1991).

12. For comparisons with other service trades, see Stephen Norwood, Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878–1923 (Urbana, 1990); Sharon Strom, “‘We're No Kitty Foyles’: Organizing Office Workers for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1937–50,” in Women Work, and Protest: A Century of U. S. Women's Labor History, ed. Ruth Milkman (Boston, 1985); and George Kirstein, Stores and Unions: A Study of the Growth of Unionism in Dry Goods and Department Stores (New York, 1954).

13. See Tables 5–8 and Figure 1 in the Appendix.

14. For overviews of female union activity, see Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York, 1982), 152, 268, and Ruth Milkman, “Organizing the Sexual Division of Labor,” Socialist Review 49 (January–February 1980): 95–150.

15. See Table 6 for the organizational life of the major waitress locals; Table 7 provides an overview of female membership in HERE. Because the union did not keep records by sex and by craft, the exact number of waitresses residing in separate locals has been impossible to calculate. Nevertheless, before the late 1930s, it is clear that the majority of waitresses resided in separate locals because almost all female HERE members were waitresses. During the industrial upsurge of the 1930s and 1940s, HERE increasingly organized hotel maids and female kitchen workers. Because most of these women joined mixed, industrial locals, the percent of HERE women in separate locals drops sharply after the 1930s. The percent of waitresses in separate locals probably declined less precipitously, however, because a large percent of waitresses who organized in the 1930s and 1940s joined the already established, all-female waitress locals.

16. In contrast with the national bargaining structures that developed in auto or steel, culinary locals either bargained contracts themselves or participated through cross-craft culinary councils, known as Local Joint Executive Boards (LJEBs). Even in the latter case—which was the typical pattern after the 1930s—waitress locals still formulated their own demands and appointed their own representatives on the craftwide negotiating committees.

17. Specifically, I gained access to the voluminous archives of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union now located in Washington, D.C. The archive contained the records—correspondence, union newsletters, bylaws, work rules, and contracts—of hundreds of culinary locals across the country, including all the major female-dominated organizations. Individual HERE locals also allowed me to review their records. The holdings of locals in San Francisco, Butte, Montana, New York City, and Detroit proved to be the richest. Relevant public collections at the Walter Reuther Archives, the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, the Montana Historical Society, the Tamiment Library, the National Archives and Records Service, and the Bancroft Library yielded additional material.

18. For a discussion of the renewed interest among labor historians in the possibilities of institutional history see David Brody, “Labor History, Industrial Relations, and the Crisis of American Labor,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 43 (October 1988): 7–18.

19. In addition, questions concerning institutional structures and changing legislative and collective bargaining positions suggested the need for a national focus. Other works that take either a national or an institutional approach while also attempting to address questions of culture include, for example, Alan Derickson, Workers’ Health, Workers’ Democracy: The Western Miners’ Struggle, 1891–1925 (Ithaca, 1989), and Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers’ Union, Local 1199 (Urbana, 1989).

20. See, for example, Bylaws, Local 112, 1915–44, Reel 20, DUR, HERE Files; Bylaws, Local 457, 1946, 1964, Reel 970, LUR, HERE Files; Bylaws, Local 457, 1954, Box 13–8, WPUC-174, MHS.

21. The potential for militancy among working-class women has been thoroughly documented; the ways in which working-class female activism challenges conventional theory concerning the nature, sources, and periodization of women's activism less so. Much of that theory rests on the experiences of white middle-class women. For accounts of protest activity among working women see, Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917 (New York, 1980); and Milkman, ed., Women, Work, and Protest.

22. As labor historians have returned to questions of institutional arrangements, a number of good case studies of female workers and their unions have appeared. See, for example, Norwood, Labor's Flaming Youth, and Carole Turbin, Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, 1864–1886 (Urbana, in press).

23. See, for example, Blewett, Men, Women, and Work; Joan Scott, “Work Identities for Men and Women: The Politics of Work and Family in the Parisian Garment Trades in 1848,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 93–112; Patricia Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 (Urbana, 1987), and Cooper, “The Faces of Gender: Work and Work Relations at Philco, 1928–1938,” in Work Engendered, ed. Baron. For overviews detailing the continuing lack of attention among labor historians to gender, see Baron, “Gender and Labor History,” and Alice Kessler-Harris, “A New Agenda for American Labor History: A Gendered Analysis and the Question of Class,” in Perspectives on American Labor History: The Problems of Synthesis, ed. J. Carroll Moody and Alice Kessler-Harris (DeKalb, 1989), in particular, 225–32.

24. The definition of family wage is from Alice Kessler-Harris, A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington, Ky., 1990), 8. The impact of the “family wage” idea and the degree to which working-class women supported the concept have been intensely disputed; the meaning it held for working-class women has received less attention. See Jane Humphries, “The Working-class Family, Women's Liberation, and Class Struggle: The Case of Nineteenth-century British History,” Review of Radical Political Economics 9 (Fall 1977): 25–42; and Martha May, “Bread Before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions and the Family Wage,” in Women, Work, and Protest, ed. Milkman, 1–21.

25. Hochschild, Managed Heart, 3–12, passim. Male culinary workers argued their claim for “skilled status” on a different basis, using terms denoting technical expertise and status differentials. Bartenders considered themselves “mixologists”; waiters called themselves “service experts,” “service specialists,” and “first-class waiters.”

26. Waitresses’ notions of “respectability,” “sexual morality,” and “equality” were class and gender-based. They also evolved over time. For an exploration of evolving female working-class conceptions of virtue, see Alice Kessler-Harris, “Indep...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• I - The Occupational Community of Waitressing
• II - Waitresses Turn to Economic and Political Organization
• III - The Waitress as Craft Unionist
• IV - Controversies over Gender
• Epilogue - The Decline of Waitress Unionism
• Appendix - Tables and Figures
• Abbreviations used in the Notes
• Notes
• Index