MAIDA ROSENSTEIN

                                         MAIDA ROSENSTEIN

Today in #LaborHistory : October 13 -- via -- www.unionist.com

More than 1,100 office workers strike Columbia University in New York City. The mostly female and minority workers win union recognition and pay increases – 1985

PHOTO BY Thomas Altfather Good - Maida is pushing the stroller.

Sharing from an interview by Gerrie Casey in the Fall of 2003

Non Traditional Organizing A Conversation With Maida



Maida Rosenstein has been a leading UAW organizer among university teaching and research employees as well as clerical workers,and is now the President of UAW Local 2110, based in New York City. Last April, she spoke with Gerrie Casey.

 Q: Could you first tell us a little bit about your personal background, your own history in terms of how you grew up and how you became a union organizer?

 MR: Well, I grew up here in New York and ended up going to college in New Jersey from 1969 through '73. I was an art major there so I graduated very well-prepared to earn a living! I wanted to get a job that wasn't in the corporate world. I came from a pretty progressive background. And I thought maybe I would go to graduate school.



So I got a job as a clerical worker at NYU, as a University secretary. One day I was walking through Washington Square Park and I saw a notice posted that said "We are trying to organize a union. Come to our next meeting." I already had a very positive viewpoint of unions because of my family background.

I grew up where unions were a good thing, even though I had no experience with them. And I thought the initial strategy of secretaries and clerical workers having a union was really strange. But I responded to this sign and walked into a club. I was also coming off the sixties view where being an activist was a good thing and not a bad thing. And so, going to a meeting was a good thing not a bad thing.

So I went this meeting and it turned out people were trying to organize a union for the clerical workers at NYU. That was my first sort of contact with union. The union was District 65, which later on became part of the UAW.

It was probably around 1975. That campaign really never took off. We didn't know what we were doing. We had an organizing committee and we spent a lot of time writing very long leaflets. But, we didn't really give them to anybody, and we didn't talk to anybody. But, basically that was the first contact that I had. And I remember going over to 13 Astor Place, where the union's headquarters was, and being very impressed. My parents knew about District 65 s and they had been to the union headquarters in the old days. So I felt like, wow, this is really a place that had some history to it.

I was kind of going to graduate school at the same time. I was trying to be a painter and I was sort of fumbling around with my life and my identity. Not unusual for those times. And I decided that I ought to get my act together and get a professional degree, a real job. So I thought I would go to library school. And I applied to library school at Columbia. And then I decided to get a job up there so that it would cover tuition.  And -- you know, get some tuition benefits.  So I got a job as a clerical worker at Columbia.


Well, I was working for a while when the woman who was the [District 65] union organizer said, "You know we might be organizing up at Columbia. So can I call you if we do?" And I said, "Sure, of course." So, a couple of years later, she did call me. Maybe it was in '78 or '79. She did call me and we had a little house meeting. She said they were going to start a campaign at Columbia. And it took a long time to get off the ground. I mean, I think we had that one meeting and then I didn't hear from her again for months.

Then a campaign started. I wasn't real involved with it at first. I was very supportive but I was probably a little wary of getting involved. In the meantime, my pursuit of graduate school was not going all that well. And I was, you know, chugging away at the 9 to 5 job.

Eventually I did get more involved in the union and joined the organizing committee. In 1981, we actually filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for an election at Columbia. And I've got to say I was on the organizing committee but I wasn't super active in it. I was probably more peripherally involved. But when we got to that point where we filed the petition, I got more involved in it and made more of a commitment to it. The petition was caught up in litigation so this campaign went on for a long time. I became a regular on the organizing committee for several years.

Soon it became really the most important thing that I was doing in my life. Far more important than trying to go to graduate school, a lot more real than trying to be an artist. And certainly more consuming and of greater interest to me than the office job that I had.


I drove my office crazy too because I was so involved in the organizing. You can imagine -- they would've loved to have gotten rid of me. And they actually seized the opportunity to do so when in 1983 we had an election. We won the election but there were a huge number of challenged ballots. So we went back into litigation at the Labor Board. And the union at that point decided they were going to bring on a couple of people from the committee to continue the organizing so that we wouldn't lose ground given the turnover among the workforce. So I was asked to go on staff.

I was really scared to become a union organizer. First of all, I didn't see myself as having the organizing personality at all. And second, I was just so afraid of being stuck into that hole, you know, totally consumed by the organizing campaign. So, I -- so there was a part-time job available -- openings in the office that I work in at the School of Social Work. And I asked to be transferred to the part-time job and I said to the union that I would work part-time on the union campaign
and I would still work part-time at Columbia. I think I was just postponing the inevitable. But I did that for a few months and then --

　
 Q: What did you think the personality of a union organizer was?

  MR: Oh, you know somebody very outgoing, social person who loves talking to people and was good a public speaking and was a complete take charge person. And I didn't see myself in that way.




Q: Looking back on that, what do you think... that perception that you had of yourself?

  MR: I think -- I actually think I had mistaken -- I had a mistaken impression about what the important things were about being a union organizer. I thought being a union organizer was -- I don't know -- somehow a... difficult and was great at making public speeches.




Q: And how did that shift? What did you learn later about being a union organizer?

  MR: Well, I think there are other things that became obvious once you're doing the work that that doesn't tell you. You have to be able to -- it's hard work. It's work that you have to work at very hard and it takes a great deal of dedication and commitment to work through it. And you have to be willing to work though problems and deal with very down side. You have to be willing to work with loses if that's necessary.  You have to be willing to push people.





Q: Does being a woman -- did that have something to do with you being a little unsure about being a union organizer in the beginning?

  MR: Probably because I don’t think there were too many models for women leadership at the time. And -- I mean union organizers that I've met, men and women seem so knowing and competent. And they knew all about labor movement. And they were sharp politicos. I mean, they knew all about so many of these things.





Q: And so once you went on staff, then what happens in terms of your own history with the union? 
 
MR: Well -- it was so hard. It was so hard. And I think this is true for most organizers. It's like the first year the learning curve on these jobs is long, and the first year was just murder. And I -- first of all, the internal politics of the organization: I didn't know anything about and I was really unprepared for it. And it's a tough atmosphere. The pot is always simmering in a union. And you're consumed with your job, you're consumed with conflict.  And it was so hard.
But I was primarily doing organizing at Columbia. We had the election behind us but we were not recognized as a union. So we had to continue to organize workers. And I did that and that part was good. It was fun even though it was hard. And I did that for a couple years. Finally in 1985, we got recognition for the union. And we started negotiating contracts.

 Q: But this must have been one of the first trade union contracts that stuck hard language on the issue of a spouse equivalent for any kind of rights? So it was trend-setting in a way, right?

 MR: Right, right. And we got an equity fund to try and deal with some of the inequities. We did this analysis on the basis of race and gender which we looked at the back across pay rates to see whether there was a pattern whereby white workers and male workers who didn't earn very much earned more than women workers and workers of color. And this was something we tried to grapple with over several contracts. But the first contract we got an equity adjustment. 

My only experience was in going to the negotiations at Columbia. So I had to kind of learn everything from scratch. Well, we elected stewards. We weren't really a local at that point. I guess you'd call it the Columbia local. We elected stewards and so on. And I was supposed to work with the stewards. And none of us knew how to do anything. None of us [LAUGHS] -- you know, we sort of learned. We kind of trained ourselves. There was a contract. We struggled with it. We tried to figure out how to do things. But none of us knew how to do anything. And then I handled a lot of grievances. It was like a sink or swim situation. So, I'm kind of grateful for that experience in a way because over a period of a few years I just handled hundreds of grievances and I really became immersed in that.

  Q: That's great. And you probably went into training to know how to do it too?

  MR: Eventually I did.



READ MORE OF MAIDA'S STORY HERE
 http://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/academics/colleges/hclas/cld/cld_rlr_f03_nontraditionalorg.pdf