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[...] Because women's work was often de-valued and its skills rendered invisible, waitresses had more trouble raising the societal estimation of their worth than did their male co-workers.38 Nevertheless, through unionization, waitresses gained many of the privileges reserved for “skilled” workers. Their achievements demonstrate, as Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylor have pointed out, that “skill” is a flexible concept and varies according to the balance of power between employers and labor organizations.3
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Many waitresses had always assented to sexual display and flirtation as an integral aspect of their work. Their acceptance of the sexual character of their work was rooted in their distinctive mores, but it also derived from their situation as service workers in an occupation in which their livelihood depended on attractiveness and allure. Denial was largely foreclosed as an option because, for many, their work took place in an increasingly sexualized environment. Waitresses walked a fine line: unlike middle-class women, they wanted to express their sexuality, but they sought to do so without losing control over the uses of that sexuality. They wanted to determine by whom and for what ends it was to be used.
Waitresses saw attractiveness, in part, as an achievement and a confirmation of their femininity. The avid support among waitresses for beauty contests is one demonstration of this attitude. Detroit's local was typical: forty-two women competed for the title of Queen of Detroit's Waitresses for the first time in 1939; these union-sponsored contests continued unabated into the 1960s. Mae Stoneman, long-time business manager for Waitresses’ Local 639 in Los Angeles, frequently described her local as “the one with the most beautiful waitresses of any local in the International.” In an employee bathing beauty contest appropriately sponsored by the Rose Royal Cheese Cake Company, four of the six winners were Local 639 members. “Local 639 has always cooperated with community interests that afford some recreational benefits to our members,” Stoneman maintained. Cafeteria Local 302 Women's Committee devoted a number of columns in the union paper to bathing beauty contests. In announcing the contest for Queen of the Trade Unions at the New York World's Fair, the committee exhorted, “C'mon, let's show them some of our 302 beauties.” The Women's Committee savored the subsequent triumph of 302 members: “This will silence forever those who say that the only girls that get active in trade unions are cranks or old maids.”73
Waitresses wanted their unions to function as social organizations. Chicago's local held open house three times a week, providing light refreshments and entertainment. A New York City waitress, interviewed in 1907, volunteered that the best thing about her union were the “sociables. Sometimes they have lectures with magic lantern pictures and it gives a girl somewhere to go evenings.”110 Female locals instituted annual balls as soon as they were chartered. San Francisco waitresses held yearly dances into the 1950s and used the money they raised for their sick and death benefit funds. These affairs brought a “a better feeling among the girls,” a Los Angeles waitress organizer reported, and they forged ties between waitress locals and the local labor movement. One female organizer relied on the annual waitress dance as a wedge to gain entry into male union meetings and garner support for organizing. Social events also helped engage the uncommitted rank and file and attract unorganized waitresses.111
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At times, waitresses in the newly established, semi-industrial locals of the 1930s engaged in self-regulation and peer discipline, but usually they did so through informal means because their locals lacked the extensive web of by-laws and work rules governing employee behavior developed by the older craft locals. After a series of weekly meetings, Local 6 coffee-shop waitresses decided to punish any woman who was late repeatedly by giving her a back station. One justified her action for the union newspaper: “It is usually regarded as the function of the management to take disciplinary action,” she said, “but if we undertake to discipline ourselves we will be in a much better position when we want to ask for something.”26
Waitresses who preferred separate locals gave many reasons, but one recurring rationale involved the effect such organizations had in developing women's leadership. Separate locals ensured that women would hold responsible positions within the union and learn what was required to run a local—from grievance handling, negotiating contracts, to public relations and parliamentary procedure. Female participation was neither expected nor encouraged in mixed organizations, but in separate locals, women had no choice but to participate, even if the activities struck them as unappealing and unfeminine. Alice Lord of the Seattle waitresses understood this principle. “In a mixed local,” she wrote to the editor of the January 1906 Mixer and Server, “the girls do not take the interest that they should; they always leave the work to the boys,…but if the girls know that the success of the local depends on their efforts, they will put their shoulders to the wheel, and most invariably they will come out ahead, as the few waitresses’ locals which are in existence prove that such is the case.”23
Other aspects of the work experience of waitresses fostered women's leadership in subtle but powerful ways. The craft and sex segregation of work, for instance, solidified the occupational ties among waitresses while mitigating their identity with male workers in the craft. The strict categorizing of waiting jobs by sex meant that waitresses and waiters rarely worked together in the same house. This internal segregation of waiting work physically separated women and men food servers and created the basis for a collective identity among waitresses. Yet unlike women in many other sex-segregated workplaces, waitresses continuously interacted with male cooks, bartenders, and busboys, as well as male customers. These exchanges were often fraught with conflict that derived in large part from the structure and demands of the workplace itself. In order to survive, waitresses developed ways of manipulating these interactions and asserting their own ends. The daily adversarial maneuverings with men prepared waitresses for the conflicts that emerged in their own union. Indeed, the arguments between waitresses and their male co-workers on the shopfloor influenced their readiness to engage in conflict with these same union brothers in the union hall. How could they accept paternalism in the union when they so firmly rejected it in the workplace?
The kinds of skills acquired by waitresses in their daily work life transferred directly to union leadership. At work, waitresses learned to take charge verbally with customers, to deflect criticism and sarcasm by developing their own quick-witted retorts, and to be persuasive in their interactions so that their needs as waitresses would be met. Practice in “thinking on your feet” and in sharpening sparring skills came in handy during union debates, grievance meetings, and negotiation sessions. The women who survived as waitresses were the ones who learned to control situations by initiating action rather than those who let the customer define the interaction.53 This boldness became a habit with some waitresses and aided them in their union activities. They were not intimidated by men, nor were they accustomed to following the male lead. Unlike the office environment, for example, waiting work discouraged traditional female behavior.54
The hotel and restaurant industry was shifting geographically. In the 1940s and 1950s, the center of the industry moved away from its traditional urbanized core to new unorganized, hostile territories: the Deep South, the Southwest, and into the suburbs.7 With the lower and middle classes relying as never before on eating out, the restaurant sector also burgeoned at a dizzying rate. Low-priced, quick-style eateries opened by the thousands, scattered haphazardly over the new decentralized landscape and drawing in a rash of young new recruits with little experience or understanding of unionism. The union found it virtually impossible to keep control over such a rapidly expanding, geographically dispersed work force.
Perhaps the most significant structural change, however, was the transformation of countless small independent proprietorships into chain outlets under the control of national and international conglomerates.8 In 1931, fewer than 3 percent of the nation's restaurants were chain-operated; in the 1980s, McDonald's alone accounted for 17 percent of all restaurant visits. From the family-style chains (Howard Johnson's, Denny's, Sambo's) to the fast-food empires (McDonald's, Burger King, and Pizza Hut), the species proved almost invulnerable to organizing.9
As nonunion competition proliferated, skepticism about the benefits of unionism spread among organized employers. When enterprising young applicants appeared daily at their kitchen doors seeking work, union employers resented having to hire through the union. Although inexperienced, these fresh-faced workers, so flexible and eager to please, seemed preferable to seasoned, union-conscious workers who were accustomed to strict craft classifications and other contract protections. Moreover, as the unionized work force aged, employers had to call the hiring hall three or four times before a young attractive woman would be sent.10
With the extension of the Taft-Hartley Act to the hotel and restaurant industry in 1955, and the passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959, the ability of waitress unions to exert control over their occupation was severely hampered.11 Closed shops, the removal of members from the job for noncompliance with union bylaws and work rules, union membership for supervisors, top-down organizing, long-term recognitional picketing, and secondary boycotts all became illegal. Locals lost their ability to set entrance requirements for the trade, to oversee job performance, and to punish recalcitrant members.12 And once the fining system lost its teeth, “you couldn't enforce the contract, you couldn't even get a quorum” for union meetings, recalled waitress official Clela Sullivan. Union-sponsored training programs declined; hiring halls fell into disrepair and neglect.13 By the late 1960s, the key tenets of occupational unionism lived only in the minds of an aging waitress membership.
What's not in this book is a roundup of the Valley's Most Important People [...] The Valley is about the opportunity to become a mover or a shaker, not about being one. That opportunity is what gets young people to move here every day from Illinois and India and Canada.
this is interesting cus i think this is part of the myth of sv even tho it's clearly wrong about the way things actually are