This is the story of eleven hundred women clerical workers who waged a militant strike against eye strain, Mafia hoodlums, and a psychotic Texas billionaire.
I was a teamster delivery driver in 1980 in San Francisco. As I drove through Fisherman’s Wharf one day, I noticed some women carrying picket signs in front of an office building. I parked and talked to them. They were several Filipino women, striking against Blue Shield. Some were too shy to look me in the eye, but they weren’t afraid to talk about how they hated the Video Display Terminals, the horrific eye strain, the uncomfortable chairs, and going home every night with their eyes and arms and back hurting. Their main demand was for additional break times away from the terminals every two hours.
I picketed with them, and then finished my delivery route. That evening, I smoked weed with my Trotskyite neighbor in the apartment upstairs. At that time in the Bay Area, there were several ultra-leftist groups; the Socialist Workers, the Spartacists, the Revolutionary Workers, the Freedom Socialists, the International Socialists, and so on.
My neighbor’s group was the Rank and File Coalition, which supported strikes. Some of the groups’ members simmered with paranoia about oncoming fascism. Others took guidance from Enver Hoxha, leader of Albania. Yet one thought we all shared, to paraphrase Martin Niemoller, was that the big corporations had came for the unions first, right now. We had to fight.
The Coalition considered the Blue Shield Strike crucial. Hundreds of thousands of mostly women non-union clericals worked in downtown San Francisco. Some of the bank data centers had 10,000 women workers cooped up punching keys in windowless basements.
We wanted to unionize those clericals. But if Blue Shield defeated the strike, it would be impossible to make inroads at other companies.
So this few dozen ultra-leftists began supporting the Blue Shield workers. We had strike experience. You had to stop strikebreakers from taking the jobs, and you had to interrupt supplies going to the struck company.
We met again with the strikers, and they invited us to their strategy meetings. The workers asserted Blue Shield had been a great place to work, until Ross Perot, a crazed Texas billionaire, moved in, and his company, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) took over. The workers said the EDS personnel were racist and sexist and sought to speed up work to a maddening pace.
Perot was a corporate welfare bum, sucking administrative fees from Medicare, Medicaid, and Medi-Cal (The State medical safety net), while loudly touting individual initiative. Perot won 19% of the Presidential vote on a 3rd party ticket in 1992.
The Office Workers Union was initially based among clerical workers for unions, who handled paperwork for the union members' health and dental and pension plans.
But some of those clericals looked out over the San Francisco skyline at the buildings where a hundred thousand of their sisters worked. Their hearts beat faster until the sound roared in their ears. Perhaps Mother Jones’ spirit whispered to them, “Organize the working women of San Francisco.” Joan of Arc didn’t hear a clearer message. The clerical union organizers approached women workers in break rooms, on park benches at lunchtime, in bars after work, and at home.
They gathered union “pledge” cards, which meant the signer wanted a work place election on whether the workers there could form a union.
The union organizers had to overcome divisions between Asians (mostly Filipino), blacks, whites, Hispanics, and a relatively new identity, lipstick lesbians, to initially organize Blue Shield. About 90% of the workers were women.
The union successfully petitioned for an election at Blue Shield, and most of those 1100 workers voted for the union. That meant the clerical union had grown to 4500 members. But employers were gearing up resistance.
The employers hired with an eye to divide their work force into a dozen ethnic and racial groups, but not too many of any one type. They recruited the supposedly shy Filipino women, but many of them had fled the Marcos’ dictatorship in the Philippines, and were now ready to fight.
The strikers, the union representatives and the motley crew of ultra-leftists, schemed an aggressive strategy. While no Teamster driver would cross picket lines to deliver crucial office supplies to Blue Shield, we learned Blue Shield had set up a secret offsite warehouse, manned by Teamsters Local #856.
Rudy Tham, the head of #856, was a prize-fighter right out of “On the Waterfront.” Tham was indicted along with “Hickey” DeLorenzo, head of the New York’s Genovese Mafia Family and narrowly escaped an extortion conviction.
Tham then schemed with Jimmy Frantianno, confessed killer of 20 men, to set up a dental plan for Local #856 members, that kicked back money to Tham. Frantianno turned squealer and Tham was convicted of a felony. So Tham turned to Abe “Trigger” Chapman, a mob killer with “Murder Incorporated” who’d served a 30-year prison term, to corruptly influence a federal judge, in an effort to overturn Tham’s felony conviction. God knows what kind of unholy deal Tham had schemed up to man the secret Blue Shield warehouse.
While his conviction was on appeal, Tham also headed the Teamsters Joint Council, a powerful umbrella group that oversaw the activities of about 20 Teamster local unions representing around 100,000 workers in the Bay Area.
I went to the Joint Council’s office.
“I’d like to file charges against the members of Teamsters #856 working at the Blue Shield warehouse, for scabbing on a strike,” I said. The office fell silent. The staff workers said they’d put it on the Council's agenda.
The San Francisco Teamsters had their own code. A picket line meant don’t cross. The oldest San Francisco Teamsters had waged not one, but two bloody general strikes, in 1934 and 1946. Most had also hit the bricks during recent brutal strikes in the freight and grocery industries.
Tham hadn’t shown up for the Joint Council meeting. In his absence, the Joint Council voted support for the Blue Shield picket lines. Even the Mafia wasn’t allowed to cross a San Francisco picket line.
The next day, multitudes of burly sullen Teamsters stalked the sidewalk in front of the strikebreaking Blue Shield warehouse. A dozen Blue Shield strikers welcomed them. Satan himself couldn’t have gotten a truck through that picket line that day. That warehouse was on Rincon Hill in San Francisco. In the opening rounds of the General Strike of 1934, police had killed union workers on those very sidewalks.
Next, we sought to stifle the strikebreakers going into Blue Shield every morning. Hotel and Restaurant Workers Local #2 offered help. Local #2 had organized thousands of hotel maids into the union. These maids shared racial, ethnic, language, and often family links with many of the Blue Shield strikebreakers.
One foggy morning as the strikebreakers approached Blue Shield, the first picket line was several Local #2 workers, who sought, in a cavalcade of different languages, to persuade the strikebreakers not to go in.
If they continued, a second, less conciliatory picket line awaited. Here’s how we wrote about it, at that time.
But Blue Shield eventually opened up non-union satellite operations in small faraway towns to do the work, and limped on. The union settled for a new contract with a 25% pay raise over the next three years, but failed to win relief from the hated VRT screens.
Many of the pro-union women, energized by fighting Blue Shield to a stalemate, turned to organizing bank workers in the Bay Area. By then, however, the newly-elected President Reagan’s appointees had destroyed the National Labor Relations Board’s effectiveness to oversee union representation elections.
Although a majority of workers signed union membership cards at several large banking data centers, we were never able to hold an election. Here’s a scan of one leaflet we handed out.
AFTERWORD
Finding these tattered mementos of old newsletters in the attic reminded me of the battles we fought. Folks may not know that unions and their members battled the bosses for every inch of contested economic terrain, even while we lost many times. I wanted to tell this story, because even during Labor's 40-year retreat, not all of us sat in offices puffing cigars. We did everything we could, even in failure. It was hard beyond words and devotion to the cause wasn't enough.
Despite the founding of other groups dedicated to organizing clericals, including SEIU 925, scarcely 1% of bank workers are currently unionized.