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In San Francisco, waitresses enjoyed not only a long tradition of separate-sex organizing among workers and city residents, but also a solid union-consciousness that resurfaced with a vengeance in the 1930s.13 Waitresses’ Local 48 organized first in restaurants patronized by union clientele, spread its drives to restaurants outside working-class neighborhoods, swept up cafeteria, drugstore, and tea-room waitresses, and then embraced waitresses employed in the large downtown hotels and department stores. By 1941, waitresses in San Francisco had achieved almost complete organization of their trade, and Local 48 became the largest waitress local in the country. Their success resulted from a combination of factors: an exceptionally powerful local labor movement, sympathetic, fair-minded male co-workers within the LJEB, and the existence of a waitress organization committed first and foremost to organizing and representing female servers.
Employers who failed to recognize the good business sense of unionization were asked to justify their refusal before the united board of culinary crafts. If this interrogation proved fruitless, the employer was reprimanded to a higher body: the executive council of the SFLC or a conference of retail and service unions including the Bakery Drivers, Milk Wagon Drivers, Bakers, and other involved parties. When these oral persuasions went unheeded, the restaurant faced increasing pressure through the council's “We Don't Patronize” list. Few employers could withstand the business losses of withdrawn union patronage when approximately one-fifth of San Francisco's entire population belonged to a labor organization. The Duchess Sandwich Company, for instance, explained that they refused to “force unionism” on their employees and declined to recognize the culinary workers. After less than a month on the council's unfair list, the co-owners of the company wrote that “we have given further consideration to your request that we take the initiative in bringing our employees into the Culinary Workers Organization…. We will be glad…to work out ways of bringing our plant into complete union membership…[and] to get away from the penalties which have piled up on us as a result of your putting us on the unfair list.”
Yet as the sit-down fever spread through Detroit, Local 705 jumped in to organize women as well as men. In the fall and winter of 1936 and 1937, after nearly five years of bitter unemployment punctuated by marches, demonstrations, and clashes with police, Detroit's workplaces blazed up under the spark of this new confrontational tactic. In February and March of 1937, sit-down strikes in Detroit involved close to thirty-five thousand workers. “Sit-downs have replaced baseball as the national pastime,” one Detroit news reporter quipped. The eruption in the hotel and restaurant industry commenced when twenty-three-year-old organizer Wolfgang strode to the center of Detroit's main Woolworth store and blew her strike whistle, the union's prearranged signal for workers to sit-down. After Woolworth capitulated, signing an agreement covering 1,400 employees, the union toppled department stores, candy and soda shops, and eateries of every description “like nine pins in a bowling alley.” Union inroads into the hotel sector began with a “terrific uproar” at the Barlum Hotel: two days after serving the Woolworth strikers a victory dinner, the hotel's coffee shop waitresses occupied their own workplace. After union activists barricaded themselves inside other key hotels, the Detroit Hotel Association granted union recognition and raises of 10 to 15 percent.47
sick
Men outside the culinary industry, however, saw female servers in a different light. Men from many different well-organized trades—longshoremen, logging, and mining—for example, frequented local cafes and restaurants, knew the waitresses personally, and saw the unionization of the eating establishments they patronized as a logical extension of the organizing of their own workplaces. Others, like the teamsters, delivered such daily necessities as fresh bread, milk, and vegetables to restaurants. These men—men for whom the enhanced power of waitresses would threaten neither their male privilege at the workplace nor in the union—proved reliable and quite effective allies, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. In short, the cross-craft, cross-sex ties between waitresses and male workers in other trades provided more crucial organizing support than did either same-sex or same-craft bonds.99
Calls for eliminating tips and demanding a compensatory raise in cash wages issued forth frequently from culinary union spokespersons, especially during the Progressive Era.29 Food servers themselves, however, were divided over the issue, with the ranks of those interested in reforming the system thinning as tip income increased and public condemnation of tipping diminished. By 1945, according to the national union journal, most culinary workers did “not like the tipping system and freely complain[ed] about it…but many would not say a word lest it should be replaced by another system that would mean a financial loss to them.”30
[...] 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
YES
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