Labor Unions and Telephone Operators
April 30th, 2007
Academic research on the the history of telephone operators in the US began with top down histories of telephone unions and evolved towards broader histories of telephone operators, not just their unions. Four of the most important works on this topic are Jack Barbash's Unions and Telephones, John Schacht's The Making of Telephone Unionism, Stephen Norwood's Labor's Flaming Youth and Venus Green's Race on the Line. The more recent works tend to be better than the earlier ones, which is probably a good sign for the field. Only Green's work, the most recent of the four, uses quantitative data.
Jack Barbash's Unions and Telephones: The Story of the Communications Workers of America, published in 1952, is an institutional history of the union. Relying primarily on CWA records, it takes a top-down approach common to labor history in the time period. The CWA was an industrial union that organized all telephone workers, including telephone operators. Barbash has two objectives in his work: “to give CWA members a sense of pride in CWA traditions and history” and “to tell the general reader interested in the labor movement something about a union which reflects most of the main currents of union development in this generation.” [1] His first objective leads him to depict the CWA seem better than it is, ignoring its flaws. His second objective is better supported, but overstated.
Barbash tells the story of how telephone unions went from AT&T's “employee associations” (company unions) to a normal industrial union in the late '40s. For most of the twentieth century AT&T had a monopoly on telephones in the US. When the Wagner act outlawed company unions in 1935 AT&T's company unions became formally independent unions without company control or national structure. AT&T hoped to keep them disorganized and conservative, but they began organizing themselves into a national union independent of both the CIO and the AFL – the National Federation of Telephone Workers. The NFTW was relatively conservative and extremely decentralized, giving affiliates complete autonomy, including the ability to negotiate contracts separate from nation-wide agreements. The inability of the NFTW to take on AT&T ultimately led to the reorganization of the union into a more centralized union, the Communications Works of America. The CWA joined the CIO in 1949 and ultimately succeeded in establishing itself as a major industrial union.
Barbash's argument is flawed. He tends to glorify the union, portraying it as a hero. Barbash glosses over the many flaws of the CWA, including its tendency to emphasize the interests of skilled white male workers over other workers (including female workers, such as telephone operators), racism among CWA members and leaders, undemocratic tendencies in the union, and its failure to oppose management's use of technology against workers. Barbash's argument that the union reflects much that is typical of unions in the mid-twentieth century is better supported, but still flawed. Most unions did not originate as company unions, did not go through a period of decentralized unionism, and were not independent as the NFTW/CWA was before 1949. However, after the CWA joined the CIO in 1949 it became in many ways a typical industrial union and so his argument is somewhat valid, if overstated.
Like Barbash's work, John Schacht's The Making of Telephone Unionism 1920-1947, published in 1985, traces the origins of telephone unionism in the thirties and forties. Like Barbash's Unions and Telephones, Schacht's work is ultimately an institutional history and this focus carries with it a tendency to pay more attention to the workers' union instead of the workers themselves. Schacht claims that union structure tends to mirror the structure of the industry and argues that the CWA adopted a centralized structure as a result of the telephone industry's centralized structure. The NFTW's structure made it difficult to coordinate actions on a national level, which AT&T used to its advantage. The Bell system's ability to coordinate negotiations and strategy on a national level allowed it to pit different local unions against each other and to more effectively marshal resources to defeat strikes. Schacht chronicles how repeated defeats, including several failed strikes, drove unionists towards centralized industrial unionism, ultimately culminating in the conversion of the NFTW into the CWA.
Although Schacht avoids many of the problems in Barbash's work, The Making of Telephone Unionism is not without problems. Its primary flaw is its tendency to equate the interests of the union with the interests of the workers it represented. As he admits, skilled workers tended to dominate the union and the interests of less skilled workers, including telephone operators, sometimes fell by the wayside. More importantly, at no point did the union challenge management's use of technology to harm workers, including telephone operators, by deskilling their jobs, replacing them with machines, and undermining what little control they had over their own labor. The union, and apparently Schacht, accepted these changes as part of an inevitable “technological progress,” rather than seeing them as the result of managerial choices designed to enhance its position.
While Barbash and Schacht focus on telephone unionism in the '30s and '40s, Stephen Norwood's Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy 1878-1923 (1990) examines telephone unions in an earlier era and focuses specifically on telephone operators. Norwood argues that the rise of telephone operator unionism was due to the overlap of the women's movement and the labor movement and to cultural changes that encouraged youthful rebellion. Although focused on unionization, Norwood tends to place greater emphasis on the rank and file of the union than Barbash and Schacht. His sources include a mixture of newspapers, magazines, company records, union records, and government records.
Norwood begins with the origins of telephone operating in the late 1870s. Originally most telephone operators were teenage boys, but the bell system began switching to young women in the 1880s because they believed girls would follow instructions better, be more civil to subscribers, and were more tolerant of a monotonous dead-end job. Companies attempted to employ operators they believed would interact well with its mostly middle and upper class subscribers; hiring mainly better educated Christian white native-born workers between seventeen and twenty-three years old.
In its early years telephone operating was relatively unhurried and operators were often on friendly terms with subscribers, sometimes engaging in lengthy conversations; scientific management made it a more hurried job. The position was routinized and standardized, reducing operator autonomy. Management attempted to maximize the number of calls taken by each operator, subjected operators to greater scrutiny, and restricted her conversation to “set phrases memorized from an instruction manual.” [2] Operating was reduced to a series of simple motions and phrases.
Operators rebelled against scientific management, but it was Boston, where a large labor movement overlapped with a large women's movement, that launched a major operator's union movement. Operators in several communities with strong labor movements unionized but they tended to be dominated by allied male unionists, stifling their growth. In Boston operators were assisted not only by local labor unions but also by middle and upper class female reformers in the Women's Trade Union League, which served to weaken male control over the operators' union. The operators successfully established a union in Boston, and proceeded to organize operators in the rest of New England and, later, nationally. The emergence of the flapper – usually associated with the twenties but which Norwood claims originated in this era – also played a role in operator organizing by encouraging them to be more independent and assertive. The operator's union reached its height in the post-World War One strike wave, when it defeated Bell in a major nationwide strike and organized a larger portion of the workforce than it ever had previously.
Like other unions, the operators' union was destroyed in the early '20s. In order to break the union and keep labor costs down Bell implemented the dial system, allowing subscribers to dial telephone numbers themselves without having to speak with an operator. The union opposed the dial system, insisting subscribers were not capable of dialing their own numbers, and proposed reducing work hours to reduce operator unemployment if it could not stop the dial system. It waged another strike in 1923 over this issue, but Bell won a crushing victory and destroyed the union. In the wake of its victory AT&T set up company unions and implemented other aspects of welfare capitalism to prevent the return of unionization.
While these three earlier workers focus on Telephone Operators' unions, Venus Green's Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, & Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980 (2001) focuses specifically on operators and less on their unions. Green analyzes the influence of class, race, gender, and technology on telephone operators and their work processes. She “argues that work degradation and deskilling are not inherent in new technologies” but that “management deliberately chose to develop and use technologies that would increase their control over workers.” [3] She analyzes how operators responded to these technological changes, how management reacted to their resistance and the role of racial and gender segregation. Green relies heavily on AT&T records and publications, but also uses union records, government records, and magazines. Unlike the preceding three works, Green uses quantitative data, although it is not the main focus of the book. Her data draws primarily on company documents and investigations by the government and social scientists.
Starting in the 1880s the Bell system began developing a racist image of its operators as civil and polite “White Ladies.” This image was originally developed with the objective of obtaining middle and upper class subscribers. According to Green it had a side effect of enhancing management's control over the operators, but this aspect of her argument is not as well supported as other aspects. After the dial system was implemented the importance of the image to the company declined and AT&T eventually abandoned it. Operators held on to it for a longer time period and resisted its abandonment because it was one of the few elements of prestige they retained in an occupation that was becoming increasingly deskilled and degraded due to management's imposition of new technology.
The Bell system abandoned its policy of hiring only white operators during Wold War Two due to pressure from civil rights activists, orders from the Fair Employment Practices Committee, and, most importantly, to labor shortages resulting from the expansion of telephone service. Most operators remained white until the late sixties, when AT&T began hiring large numbers of African-Americans. Although the company attempted to persuade the public that AT&T was acting out of a sense of racial justice, the main motive was the need for sufficient cheap labor to meet the company's needs. AT&T was unable to find enough white workers willing to work for low wages in dead-end jobs and so turned towards black workers as replacement. One company document she quotes states:
Population and labor force projections are not at all encouraging. The kind of people we need are going to be in very short supply. ... Most of our new hires go into entry level jobs which means we must have access to an ample supply of people who will work at comparatively low rates of pay. That means city people more so than suburbanites. That means lots of black people.
There are not enough white, middle class, success-oriented men and women in the labor force – or at least that portion of the labor force available to the telephone companies – to supply our requirements for craft and occupational people. And from now on, the number of such people who are available will grow smaller even as our need becomes greater. It is therefore perfectly plain that we need nonwhite employees. Not because we are good citizens. Or because it is the law as well as national goal to give them employment. We need them because we have so many jobs to fill and they will take them. [4]
Management repeatedly used new technology to enhance its control over its workers but, with a few exceptions, their unions accepted this new technology. Telephone operator technology went through three main phases: electro-chemical (switchboards), automation (the dial system), and computerization. Each reduced the amount of labor AT&T expected to need and enabled the company to exert greater control over its workers, overworking them and subjecting them to greater stress.
Green argues operator resistance to this process was diverted by trade unions and female reformers into demands for better pay and fewer hours. She criticizes unions for failing to oppose this use of technology by management against workers. The only exception she cites were attempts by the CWA to ensure workers displaced by technological obsolescence were compensated or provided other jobs. These were limited and did nothing to oppose management's technological prerogatives. She ignores the case of unions opposing the dial system in the 1920s, which Norwood covered. Other than that one example, her argument is well supported.
Green's book is probably the strongest of these four books, although Norwood's work is also well written and well researched. Barbash's work romanticizes the CWA and provides a top-down account of the union. Schacht also provides an institutional history of the CWA but avoids romanticizing it. Norwood provides a quality history of telephone operator unionism before the CWA and focuses more on the rank and file than Barbash and Schacht. Focusing on race, gender, class, and technology, Green gives a larger history of telephone operators from 1880 to the end of AT&T's monopoly in the 1980s.
Endnotes
1 Barbash, p. vii.
2 Norwood, p. 35.
3 Green, p. 7.
4 Green, p. 213.