Worker Voice and Union Revitalization: The Role of Contract Enforcement at SEIU

Introduction

Unions in the United States are in a state of crisis. Declining membership and faltering efforts to confront intense political and employer opposition have forced many unions to seek out innovative ways to spark much needed revitalization (Baccaro, Hamann and Turner 2003; Clawson 2004; Fantasia and Voss 2004; Fletcher and Hurd 2001; Levesque, Murray, and Queux 2005; Sullivan 2004). Despite the significant amount of union revitalization literature, there is relatively little detail regarding the impact of the grievance system. Just as importantly, the link between the grievance structure and resource allocation as an essential component of union renewal is also missing. Discussion of union resource allocation typically focuses on the “tactical disbursements” of union resources to increase the union’s ability to recruit new members (Martin 2008) or on legal access to union dues to fund political campaigns (Masters, Gibney, and Zagenczyk 2009) without an off-setting appreciation of the costs of handling member grievances.

Much of the revitalization research has instead focused on broad, high-level strategic decisions such as the need to emphasize organizing (Clawson 2004; Hurd 2004; Lopez 2004; Milkman and Voss 2004; Turner and Hurd 2001) as opposed to the servicing of members (Clawson and Clawson 1999; Fantasia and Voss 2004; Grabelsky and Hurd 1994; Katz, Batt, and Keefe 2003; Voss and Sherman 2000) or on the need to engage as actors on the political front (Baccaro, Hamann, and Turner 2003; Bruno 2005; Hamann and Lucio Martinez 2003). Sullivan (2004) found that revival efforts fell into five broad categories: (1) union-centered activity; (2) labor-related efforts by community-based organizations; (3) electoral political campaigns in which labor played a key role; (4) hybrid forms of action that included some combination of union, political, and community-based action; and (5) general strategy or policy changes within the labor movement or its organizations. Finally, others have noted that union transformation (Bronfenbrenner and Hickey 2004; Nissen and Jarley 2005) will require labor leaders to make risky trade-offs (Sharpe 2004) and pursue experimental approaches to worker representation (Fletcher and Hurd 1998).

This paper contributes to the study of union revitalization efforts by exploring the strategic underpinnings of and consideration for a restructured grievance system in a large Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local based in Chicago (hereinafter Local 1). This case study provides for a unique opportunity to examine the role that a more efficient grievance handling system plays in union efforts to reallocate resources, mobilize members, increase membership, and pursue broader political objectives that go beyond the traditional-workplace-centered role of unions. In an era when unions are confronted with the need to innovate in order to grow and buffer member decline, rethinking the grievance system may emerge as one, relatively underexplored, strategic vehicle through which to meet this challenge.

The article offers an initial review of studies on union voice and is followed by a description of the study’s methodology. The section “Grievance System Restructuring at SEIU Local 1” details how the grievance system was restructured at SEIU Local 1. The section “Shifting Resources: Evidence of the Restructuring’s Effect of Union Mobilization” examines evidence of the union’s restructuring’s effects on its ability to mobilize union members around larger social-economic causes. The article closes with a discussion of the implications of a union’s approach to contract enforcement and administering grievances as a way to better position itself vis-à-vis its mobilization goals and objectives.

A Review of Union Facilitated Voice and Fairness

As will be documented below, a union grievance system should not be viewed merely as a static homogeneous voice mechanism derived from a contractual agreement between labor and management. Rather, it can be a dynamic institution influenced by a host of strategic objectives, including union revitalization and growth. One of the core functions of the unionized grievance system is to provide union members with institutionalized access to voice. This voice, scholars argue, benefits employees, employers, and the union itself. The dominant perspective on workplace voice has examined the effects of this good on individual employees (or union members) and the organizations that employ them. How do unions conceptualize their voice roles and obligations when rethinking strategic priorities and resource allocation? In addition, the grievance system has also been seen as a way to provide employees with protections against arbitrary managerial decisions. In fact, the sociological research on grievance systems has argued that their core function is to restrain managerial authority and decision making (Selznick 1969). We briefly review the dual role of the modern grievance system, voice and managerial restraint.

First, most scholars and practitioners see the role of unions in securing and providing workplace voice as central to their very reason of being. In their seminal book, What Do Unions Do? Freeman and Medoff (1984) outlined two dominant faces of unions in the workplace and society. Unions, according to the authors, have two distinct types of effects on the organization with which they bargain. On the one hand, their monopoly face leads to increased wages and benefits above their “competitive levels” (for a similar discussion, see Bennett and Kaufman 2007). It is this face and associated effects that have received much of the attention in the traditional neoclassical economics literature (Addison and Belfield 2007; Kaufman 2007).

On the other hand, however, Freeman and Medoff (1984) outlined another important union dimension operating through a voice face, or the facilitation of employee grievances, concerns, and problems, which can have a number of benefits for both employers and employees (Lewin 2007). Most notably, Freeman and Medoff argued that it is through their voice face that unions lead to lower levels of employee exit or turnover (Freeman and Medoff 1984, 11). The union voice face includes a number of dimensions (Addison and Belfield 2007). Voice, according to Freeman and Medoff, is attained through the collective representation of employees vis-à-vis their employer. In addition, unions provide their members with voice through an institutionalized mechanism for addressing workplace conflicts and disputes—the grievance system (Freeman and Medoff 1984, 104). Our focus in this paper is on the manifestation of voice through the union grievance system.

By providing employees with an institutionalized mechanism through which to express problems and concerns in the workplace, unions and the grievance systems they develop allow for a viable alternative to simply exiting the firm. Collective voice not only reduces exit, according to this analysis, but can also have a positive effect on management. By providing managers with information about problems and concerns in the workplace, union voice can improve organizational coordination. In other words, union voice can, if utilized by management, also enhance organizational learning (Freeman and Medoff 1984, 11).

Unions, according to this perspective, are uniquely capable of producing organizational benefits through the facilitation of employee voice (for a discussion challenging the extent to which unions are truly unique in this capacity, see Lewin 2007). What has not been clearly outlined in the literature is the manner in which unions strategically and proactively deliver this unique capacity and leverage or alter it as a means to grow and confront their own internal and external challenges.

Second, in addition to its voice function, the grievance system has also been viewed as a mechanism through which to bureaucratize managerial decision making by imposing rational and rule-driven processes. Thus, for example, Selznick (1969, 90) argues that the grievance system serves as a “source of managerial self-restraint” that promotes increased fairness and equal treatment. As such, the grievance system can also be seen as a means to constrain managerial authority in the service of predictable and uniform treatment of employees. Edwards (1979, 109) has noted that organizations themselves may also have an interest in standardizing managerial decision making so as to comply with existing policies.

Interestingly, while the sociological research on grievance systems has portrayed these as drivers of organizational bureaucracy, the actual union administration of member grievances has, for the most part, been delivered in an extremely personal nonbureaucratic manner with a great deal of discretion allotted to union field representatives. Thus, there is an interesting paradox in the design and administration of union grievance systems. On the one hand, they are vehicles through which to bureaucratize organizations and, thereby, reduce arbitrary managerial actions (Edwards 1979; Selznick 1969). On the other hand, the very administration of these systems by the union tends to be nonbureaucratic. In other words, the union interaction with members around their grievances and concerns is mostly conducted in what Selznick (1969, 82) refers to as pre-bureaucratic. In our examination of the strategic choices made by Local 1 below, we explore the factors and considerations that led to the bureaucratization of the union administered grievance system.

As noted, union revitalization research has treated the grievance system, for the most part, as a homogeneous and relatively static construct. The specific nature of union provided voice and protection of fairness has generally been treated as a presupposed phenomenon. More importantly, scholarship on labor unions has assumed that both the union production of voice and protection of fair and equal treatment are central, and frequently dominant, objectives. In this paper, we argue that the manner in which unionized grievance systems are designed and structured can, under certain circumstances, be the product of a strategic and deliberate process intended to leverage its power in a manner that contributes to broader goals and objectives through, among other things, a redistribution of internal resources. We examine this argument using a case study of a large local union in the Midwest that led an extensive and innovative restructuring of the union’s grievance system. Taken together, the overarching objectives for grievance systems identified in the literature relate to the fair treatment of employees through the standardization of managerial treatment and to the access employees have to genuine and collectively backed voice. The question we pose below relates to the extent to which unions are willing and able to revisit the structural features of their grievance systems given these central objectives.

This review of the literature points to an apparent dichotomy between a servicing and organizing model. Unions such as SEIU that have pursued and advocated for an organizing model have, for the most part, done so by redirecting funds from servicing to support an agenda centered on an organizing and mobilizing agenda. This has been done primarily by having the rank-and-file members take on more of the servicing by handling grievances and bargaining with management. As will be discussed, Local 1 has chosen to consolidate and streamline the servicing function in order to free up more staff for new worker organizing and member political mobilization.

Method

The in-depth case study analysis of SEIU Local 1 was developed based on a mix of qualitative interviews alongside the use of archival research involving the union’s grievance system databases and files, as well as other primary sources including union newsletters, website materials, training manuals, and collective bargaining agreements. The authors conducted twenty-five in-depth, semistructured interviews with the union’s top officers and relevant staff including the president, secretary treasurer, chief of staff, assistant to the president, director of the grievance center, director of the member resource center (MRC), and grievance and mobilization representatives. The interviews were semistructured with a protocol of questions that also allowed for interviewees to discuss additional topics and lasted between one and two hours.

The questions asked involved the impetus for the transformation in the grievance system, the allocation of budgetary resources, effectiveness of the MRC, role changes for union representatives, and organizing and mobilization efforts. All interviews were recorded and transcribed to allow for coding of the data. The interviewees granted permission to have their actual names used in the paper. Taken together, these sources of information allowed us to construct a portrait of one union’s efforts to experiment and innovate with their long-standing grievance practices. We describe the union’s background, efforts to restructure voice, and the manner in which this has affected the union’s efforts to revitalize.

In addition to qualitative data, we also had access data regarding all of the complaints and grievances filed as part of the new system. For this paper, we analyzed all events filed with Local 1’s MRC between September 2003 and June 2009. As noted above, one of the features of the grievance process restructuring was the establishment of an electronic tracking system that recorded all events. This tracking system kept a record for all calls received, their substantive category, and the actions and steps taken to address or resolve the complaint or grievance. In an effort to insure that accurate data were being collected, Local 1’s leadership established a protocol and data collection guidelines for MRC grievance representatives.

Grievance System Restructuring at SEIU Local 1

Background: Pressures to Innovate

Local 1 along with other large SEIU locals has undergone a comprehensive and dramatic restructuring of its grievance system. Motivated by the national union’s direction that locals restructure to increase and better utilize resources to apply power, Local 1 reconfigured how it operates and dramatically departed from conventional practices with respect to its technological, procedural, and substantive dimensions. Thus, this study offers a unique opportunity to assess the considerations leading to a grievance system transformation and some of the outcomes associated with this shift. Furthermore, we believe that the forces that motivated Local 1 to reconsider how it delivers voice to its members are likely to affect many other unions. As such, lessons from this case study, described below, could have broader implications for labor organizations in the United States.

According to the union’s membership database, SEIU Local 1 has approximately fifty thousand members and represents a variety of service sector employees, including janitors, security guards, and residential maintenance workers. Headquartered in Chicago, the majority of Local 1’s members reside in the Chicago area. Local 1 has recently broadened its geographical reach and now represents members in Indianapolis, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis, and Houston. Among the membership, gender remains fairly equally divided, and there is great diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, immigrant status, and first language spoken. The local’s demographic makeup is largely unchanged from the years immediately prior to the MRC’s installation (see Tables 1-4).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Gender of Membership.

Gender	Percentage
Male	52
Female	48

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 2.

Race of Membership.

Race	Percentage
Spanish	35
Black	31
White	31
Other	3

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 3.

First Languages of Membership.

Language	Percentage
English	47
Spanish	35
Polish	13
Yugo	6

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 4.

Members Organized Post-MRC.

Location	New Members
Chicago	5,600
Houston	3,200
Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus	3,000
Total new members	11,800

As a consequence of the restructuring effort in 2000 led by the SEIU at the international level, Local 1 was confronted with the need to rethink its allocation of resources if it was to sustain and support its growth and increase its membership. Interestingly, the union decided to explore the possibility of addressing this need by reconfiguring its approach to member grievances and how they were handled. As will be discussed below, the restructuring of the union’s grievance system was motivated by three central, and in some ways conflicting, strategic goals.

First and foremost, the union was interested in reallocating resources devoted to voice to its efforts to grow and organize new members. Given the fact that the lion’s share of union resources, estimated at 70 percent, was being utilized to administer its grievance system, this became one of the likely targets for restructuring. Second, the union was also interested in shifting from a grievance system that appeared to deliver voice to a limited proportion of its members due to language barriers and social ties to one that extended this good to a broader pool of members (interviews with Anderson ¹ and Balanoff ² 2010). Language was a barrier because many of the members spoke limited English and preferred to speak in their native languages primarily Spanish, Polish, and Serbo-Croatian. While the local did hire bilingual staff representatives, there were none who spoke more than English and one other language. Inevitably, the multilingual nature of the workforce meant that there were members who could not communicate with the staff representative assigned to them (interviews with Anderson and Muntz ³ 2010). Finally, the union sought to deliver voice to its members in a more efficient and streamlined manner. In what follows, we discuss the background that led to the strategic restructuring of the grievance system focusing first on the repositioning of resources.

In 2000, three SEIU Chicago locals (1, 73, and 25) merged as part of the international union’s initiative to create greater consolidation of local unions across the service sector industry. ⁴ Thomas Balanoff, who served as the president of Local 25, was elected the first president of the newly merged Local 1. As noted, one of the key strategic objectives for both the international and the “new” Local 1 when it formed in 2000 was to extend the union’s reach beyond Chicago and to increase its membership and strength as a union. It was this overarching strategic objective that motivated the union’s leadership to explore ways in which to overcome the inherent challenge of servicing a large and diverse membership in a period of diminishing resources. In analyzing the expenditure of their resources, Local 1’s leadership came to the realization that approximately 70 percent of the union’s resources were being allocated to the enforcement of collective bargaining agreements primarily by addressing member complaints and grievances (interviews with Anderson, Balanoff, and Muntz 2010). Thus, like many unions in the United States, maintaining their grievance system accounted for the vast majority of union resources.

Local 1’s new leadership was intent on rethinking their strategic decisions about how to allocate resources and restructure core member services. At the heart of this decision was the need to shift voice-related resources in order to provide greater attention to organizing new members and to mobilizing existing members for strategic political and legislative efforts on the broader social and economic issues affecting workers. To accomplish this shift, the union also acknowledged that prior to restructuring, an “involved” union member likely meant being a grievant. Thus, in keeping with the revitalization literature reviewed above, Local 1 leaders sought to fundamentally redefine their role as a union and the means by which they would operate. By 2003, the newly merged local had bargained stronger contracts for its three units: residential, institutional, and commercial, but the leadership remained committed to moving forward with their political and mobilization objectives. Balanoff described Local 1’s vision and strategic focus by stating,

I’m looking at it, and I’m saying grievances are important. We’ve got to defend the contract, and we’ve got to defend our members. But we’ve got to be a strong organization, and we’ve got to be able to mobilize members because the issues that we’re facing and confronting are much bigger than this grievance and that grievance. We’ve got to grow, and we’ve got to protect standards. We’ve got to activate our members in a bigger way if we want them to look at politics, in a way we think they should. That it’s a vehicle for social change. So that was the key issue, how do we create a situation where we can free up resources so that we could have internal organizers to go out and build the movement, identify leaders in the workplace, build a workplace structure, move the union’s programs . . . to build our union and to mobilize as many members and activate as many members as we can. (Interview with Balanoff 2010)

It is this mind-set that brought about Local 1’s decision to explore new means of delivering member voice. Fundamentally, Local 1 was confronted by pressures experienced across the U.S labor movement—namely the need to achieve a number of core objectives with limited resources. Local 1, for example, did not have sufficient staffing resources, including field representatives, necessary to launch a new membership focused campaign that would accomplish their increasingly ambitious organizing and mobilizing goals. The local had approximately fifteen field representatives on staff before the reorganization.

Field representatives, under the traditional model, dedicated the majority of their time and efforts to addressing and processing member grievances. In this sense, representatives had very traditional union staff roles with complete responsibility for all of the members in an assigned geographical area within the local’s jurisdiction. Due to the nature of work for the majority of union members, the representative existed as the members’ primary, if not only, point of contact with the union and addressed everything from possible grievances and employer disputes to union education and political mobilization. The employment structure for janitors and security working in commercial and urban residential buildings is diffused among numerous worksites. The scattered geographic dispersion of the membership working in buildings across the Chicago area meant that representatives had limited time at each worksite, and grievance handling easily devoured time. One of Local 1’s high-level staff framed this situation by stating,

A rep job is A to Z. You’re supposed to be in the buildings, doing internal organizing. You’re supposed to be doing leadership development. You’re supposed to be doing politics. You’re supposed to be doing a lot of things, and handling grievances and all that. We found that it was just a vacuum. That it would just suck people’s time. (Interview with Muntz 2010)

The local’s leaders and staff were confronted with a reality in which attending to the employees voice needs was an extremely time-consuming dimension of the union’s activities.

The Inner Workings of the New Grievance System

In addition to interviews with union leaders and members of the MRC staff, we also had access to data regarding all events filed with Local 1’s MRC between September 2003 and June 2009. As noted above, one of the features of the grievance system restructuring was the establishment of an electronic tracking system that recorded all events. This tracking system kept a record for all calls received, their substantive category, and the actions and steps taken to address or resolve the complaint or grievance. In an effort to insure that accurate data were being collected, Local 1’s leadership established a protocol and data collection guidelines for MRC grievance representatives. We present this descriptive data in an effort to provide a portrait of the new grievance system. We believe that the portrait presented below supports the argument that this was a fully functioning and stable grievance system.

The total number of events documented in the MRC dataset as of June 2009 was 140,614. As will be discussed below, events processed through the grievance system include formal disputes (i.e., possible grievances, which are approximately 30%) and informal questions and issues (approximately 70%). Our analyses reported below use different slices of this dataset to report evidence regarding the entire population of events, formal grievances, or informal complaints and questions. This descriptive data provides a portrait of the way in which Local 1’s new grievance system operates. Since we do not parallel data regarding the inner working of the pre-MRC grievance system, we cannot make any claims about the extent to which voice in Local 1 was enhanced or hindered by this restructuring. Nevertheless, we do believe that this data suggest that in restructuring its grievance system, Local 1 allowed for an active and robust means of providing members with access to voice. This is important, since we maintain that the restructuring of voice was, primarily, driven by an effort to free up resources that could be allocated to mobilization and political action efforts.

With regard to the characteristics of members using the system, 54 percent were men, the average age was forty-four, and average tenure of members was just over four years. Sixty-seven percent of members using the system requested to speak with an English-speaking representative, 22 percent requested to speak with a Spanish-speaking representative, and 9 percent requested to speak with a Polish-speaking representative. Finally, members based in the Chicago area filed just over 95 percent of the events.

As seen in Figure 1, over the course of the first six years of operation, the MRC handled a substantial number of grievances, claims, questions, and other matters. Thus, as noted above, over the course of this time period, the union dealt with a total of 140,614 events, ranging from general informational questions to formal grievances. In addition, the MRC data indicates that just over 19 percent of the union’s members (29,443) made use of the system at least once, with just fewer than 5 percent of the membership using the system more than five times.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

MRC Usage by Category of Event over Time.

The MRC data points to a wide range of issues that were processed through the system. Thus, for example, over the course of its first six years of operation, the MRC system dealt with 59,691 general questions or concerns, 11,468 questions or concerns related to hours and working conditions, and 32,455 formal grievances. A grievance system provides multiple dimensions of voice, according to these descriptive findings: an opportunity for unions to not only “fight” on behalf of their members through the resolution of disputes and grievances but also inform and educate them about crucial aspects of their work while resolving problems informally. Figure 2 below provides a graphic depiction of the formal versus informal volume of cases dealt with using the system.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Percentage Distribution of Total Formal and Informal MRC Usage over Time.

A third issue associated with the inner workings of this system has to do with the pattern of usage over time. Figure 2 below summarizes usage patterns from 2003 to 2008. The figure documents a number of interesting patterns. First, the system appears to have gradually developed legitimacy among union members over the course of the first two years of operation with a relative stabilization in year 3. In other words, the transition to this new grievance system was not automatic and called for an adjustment on the part of the members and the union, which appears to have lasted approximately two years. Members were made aware of the MRC through the distribution of cards listing the number to call and via information posted on Local 1’s website.

Members made a greater relative use of the system for informal questions and concerns in the initial implementation period. Interestingly, the pattern of usage of the system for formal grievances was different. In contrast to informal questions and concerns, the usage of the system for grievances increased over time. It is unclear whether this pattern is the result of external dynamics leading to an increase in grievance filings or whether these changes reflect a growing comfort level of the members with the new system. Either way, the data suggest that the overall membership patterns of system usage are different for formal and informal issues.

A third interpretation of usage is also possible. The MRC may have simply created a more efficient and worker-centered mechanism for members to register workplace problems. Instead of having to wait for worksite visits scheduled by union representatives to raise concerns, rank-and-file members could initiate a complaint at any time by dialing a phone number. By allowing the members to easily initiate a possible grievance investigation at their discretion, the MRC may have subtly shifted some contract enforcement power to the individual worker. After the MRC, members may have felt a greater ownership of the grievance process and were, therefore, more mobilized to serve as contract enforcers. If, as the evidence of total use over time implies, members saw the MRC as a way to have “voice” in their working conditions (regardless of the reason for calling), then the call center likely became an effective structure for membership engagement around workplace issues.

Finally, the MRC data also allows us to examine the speed and efficiency with which the grievance system processed both formal and informal issues. The majority of the issues brought to the system were resolved relatively quickly. Thus, for example, 71.1 percent of all events (i.e., not formal grievances) processed through the system were addressed on the same day. As seen in Figure 3, the majority of formal grievances were addressed within six months, with 66 percent of grievances addressed in less than a month. We also examined the number of steps necessary to resolve formal and informal issues. Close to 80 percent of all issues processed through the system were addressed in one to five action steps. Thus, although we cannot compare this element of efficiency to the use of the grievance system prior to the restructuring, this data suggests that Local 1’s new system is addressing a great number of member grievances and concerns quickly and in a relatively limited number of procedural steps. Taken together, this descriptive data points, we believe, to a grievance system that dealt with a large number of cases, serviced different member groups, and provided a high resolution rate.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Grievance duration, 2003-2008.

Shifting Resources: Evidence of the Restructuring’s Effect of Union Mobilization

Having outlined the contours of Local 1’s new grievance system, this section provides a review of how this restructuring has affected the union’s ability to deliver on broader strategic objectives. The restructuring of the grievance system has allowed Local 1 to reduce its expenditures on servicing from approximately 70 percent of the local’s budget to 30 percent, enabling the local to vastly expand its roles in the realms of political activity, worker organizing, membership mobilization, and community engagement (interviews with Anderson, Balanoff, and Muntz 2010). Grievance management consumed a disproportionate size of the local’s resources because representatives were spending a lion’s share of their time handling workplace issues from initial individual complaint to formal resolution. While an actual estimate of time was indeterminate from available local records, Ken Muntz lamented that “grievances had a way of consuming reps’ time, and they got bogged down.” He added that the local “spent a lot of staff resources dealing with grievances that were in large part generated by a small percentage of members.”

Staff time was equated to payroll expense and opportunity costs. Confronted with an untenable situation where full-time paid representatives were preoccupied by grievance investigations and hearings, instead of, for example, developing internal organizing plans, the local leadership decided to better align its resources to its strategic goals. The MRC allowed a realignment to occur by centralizing grievance handling into a designated unit and freeing up representatives to concentrate their time and energy on activities that the local determined were critical to the union’s fortunes. Organizational costs consequently shifted. Grievance processing dropped as a percentage of the local’s total budget, while the time spent on and the equivalent cost of leadership development, political outreach, coalition building, and internal organizing increased.

Resource allocation was not the only dysfunctional aspects of the process. Despite the time representatives were consumed in grievance work, the impacted member had minimal interaction with the assigned staffer. The process typically began with a member calling a representative and ended, if necessary, with a grievance meeting with a supervisor. Standard grievances, no matter the time they took to resolve, rarely involved more than two contacts between the rank-and-file and his or her representative. Under the pre-MRC system, a member’s best opportunity to engage with the local staff occurred when the member raised a complaint. But when the MRC was constructed and staff assignments reorganized, members now had additional opportunities to interact with their representatives on multiple fronts.

The positive human-resource-related outcomes provide an additional advantage for the union because the main driving force for the MRC was to support the change in the union staff roles that allowed staff to spend more time in the field mobilizing and organizing workers. The representatives’ more focused time in the field with members allows for a broadening of member engagement with the union. Members are now able to spend more time discussing the larger social and political issues impacting them with their union representatives (interviews with Anderson, Balanoff, and Muntz 2010).

Strategic changes to the grievance system allowed, among other things, for an increase in Local 1’s electoral contributions, particularly at the state level. A 2012 report by the National Institute on Money in State Politics provides detailed information on Local 1’s campaign spending at the state level. In 2002, a gubernatorial election year when Democrat Rod Blagojevich, a big supporter of labor, won the governorship, Local 1 spent $412,170, but in 2006, when Blagojevich sought reelection, Local 1 spent $1,749,857 on Illinois elections. The union was the Governor’s biggest overall contributor. They matched this amount in 2010, spending $1,728,495 and helping Democrat Pat Quinn to be elected governor by a very close margin of 0.9 percent. Lead by Local 1, SEIU was the largest contributor to Quinn’s campaign, easily eclipsing the spending of all other Democratic Party and labor organizations. In addition, since the 2002 election, all SEIU affiliates, including its International PAC, have contributed in excess of $16 million to Illinois state election campaigns. SEIU statewide political spending was nearly three times the amount invested by the next biggest union spender (Illinois Campaign for Political Reform 2013).

It is interesting to note that many Republicans won elections for governor in 2010, heralding in legislation to limit the power of labor unions in the Midwestern states of Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. But having a Democrat in the governor’s house allowed Illinois unions to weather much of the legislative storm occurring in neighboring states during 2011 and 2012. The increase in Illinois election spending from 2002 to the levels in 2006 and 2010 represents an increase of 424.54 percent and 419.36 percent, respectively. While Local 1 did see their income increase to $22,450,617 in 2006 and $28,148,610 in 2010 from $14,697,105 in 2002 (an increase of 152.75% and 193.57%, respectively), the increase in state political spending represents not just a larger budget but also an allocation of more resources to Illinois electoral politics (U.S. Department of Labour Office of LaborManagement Standards 2011).

Local 1 also became active in Chicago electoral politics and, in the 2007 aldermanic contests, led a concerted effort with volunteers on the ground and $1.8 million in contributions, resulting in nine SEIU-backed candidate victories (Washburn and Mihalopoulous 2007). The Local was also the heaviest financial backer of any union in seven of the races. In 2011 (the last year data are available), the union contributed $586,465 to candidates who won or retained their aldermanic seats and spent another $118,035 on uncoordinated expenditures to help defeat candidates. The local spent money in twenty of the fifty races. No union spent more or entered more contests. In the twenty races entered, SEIU was the leading union contributor in thirteen contests and second in two. No other union topped the contributors’ list more often, and in the two that SEIU was runner-up, they trailed a union who had two of their members running (The Illinois Campaign for Political Reform 2013).

The new system also allowed for additional time and resources to be directed toward the organizing of new members. Between 2000, when Local 1 formed from a merger of multiple SEIU locals, and 2003, when the MRC was implemented along with staff role changes, neither Local 1 nor the smaller city locals had engaged in any major organizing drives. After the implementation of the MRC, Local 1 organized approximately 4,800 new members in the Chicago area including 1,200 school janitors, 1,800 school-based food and service workers, and 1,800 city commercial janitors. Local 1 also has two ongoing organizing campaigns involving a thousand customer service airport workers in Chicago and twenty-thousand security officers working for three large security firms in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Houston, and Milwaukee (interview with Muntz 2012). ⁷

The strategic changes in the local’s staffing and servicing have also allowed Local 1 to deploy field representatives outside of Chicago, first to Houston, Texas in 2005 to organize janitors working in the city’s downtown buildings, as part of the highly publicized Justice for Janitors campaign (Karson 2007). Against stiff cultural and political odds, the local successfully organized 3,200 new janitors in a decidedly antiunion southern city. In addition to Houston, Local 1 organized three thousand janitors and security guards in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Columbus. Even with half of their full-time staff away organizing out of state, members back in Chicago were still able to have their concerns heard, questions answered, and grievances filed because of the MRC and the grievance representatives working full-time on servicing members’ needs (interviews with Bowen ⁸ and Razwadowski ⁹ 2010). As an illustration of the restructured system’s ability to allow for greater union agility and responsiveness, Local 1’s secretary treasurer described the union’s 2009 contract negotiations in Chicago with a major commercial building services firm as particularly tense because the local wanted contract language allowing members to honor picket lines in buildings where they worked. The local’s secretary treasurer thought this was a crisis moment for the local that required more staff support than normal.

It looked like we were going to strike . . . It was a fight over what we felt the union had a right to. We walked out. We called our staff and said, “Okay, we are in a fight.” All of the reps throughout the city, field reps, moved over to commercial . . . The members didn’t suffer one bit. They could call in and talk to someone in four languages…We couldn’t have done that before we changed, without the members knowing there was something collapsing. (Interview with Anderson 2010)

The local’s president articulated the importance of being able to balance the need to address individual member’s concerns, while also having the strength to influence larger scale changes:

Our members’ lives are not just dependent upon the contract. What happens in public policy is important to us so we need to move our members on bigger economic issues . . . Every place we go, we talk to our members and we say we got to fight for a good contract. We got to fight for job security. But is that going to solve your economic problems? We push that issue because the answer is no. You know what? We could do as good a contract as we want here. For my members who lost all their home equity in their houses on the southwest side (of Chicago), none of that’s going to change if we don’t figure out how to do bigger public policy . . . If we’re really going to define what’s in the best interest of our members, it’s not hard for me as a leader or our board to define it as the bigger fight. (Interview with Balanoff 2010)

The MRC and field/grievance representatives’ staff roles enabled the local to begin the process of pursuing these larger goals through more political work and organizing activity.

To help accomplish their political goals, in 2010, Local 1 established Stand Up! Chicago, a coalition of community and labor organizations with the goal of advocating for living wage jobs, strong support for public schools, and economic development for local neighborhoods (Stand Up! Chicago 2011). ¹⁰ The organization canvasses in Chicago’s working class wards, holds neighborhood meetings, and organizes marches in downtown Chicago. In 2012, the local spent $169,092 on the organization and devoted one full-time SEIU Local 1 staff member to direct the organization.

Local 1 has also been working to engage SEIU members and to identify activists among the membership who wish to become involved with the “Membership Leadership Action Team.” The program exists as part of the SEIU international’s efforts to involve at least 10 percent of its membership or two hundred thousand members in union activism. SEIU also identifies “TEAM leaders” among the 10 percent or “1% of member activists” who recruit and motivate other member activists, educate members on political and economic issues, and plan events and activities to address these issues. To coordinate the development of the Member Leadership Action Team, the local hired a full-time director (payroll cost in excess of $100,000). The union also extensively augments the director’s work by paying the lost time for volunteer members who are provided training and then assigned to campaigns to develop their leadership skills.

Local 1’s Membership Leadership Action Team represents intense member involvement but with a shift from traditional workplace or shop floor problems and concerns to broader political, social, and economic issues. Having field representatives who solely focus on member mobilization and education and additional resources from the restructuring of the grievance system through the creation of the MRC has allowed Local 1 to devote staff and funds to developing the Membership Leadership Action Team and Stand Up! Chicago. In contrast to the argument advanced by Edwards (1979) that dealing with individual grievances distracts the union from engaging in collective activities, the Local’s revamped grievance process serves as a vehicle through which to organize, engage, and mobilize employees.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this paper, we outlined the rationales and consequences of the restructuring of a traditional grievance system in a large local union. In doing so, we provided evidence regarding the strategic considerations underlying the decision to innovate in the delivery of voice and fairness through the grievance system and the outcomes associated with this change. Central to this restructuring was the vision articulated by the union’s leadership that resources and structures dedicated to handling grievances could be reengineered in a manner that would allow for expanded organizing and mobilizing, and political action. Thus, Local 1 was applying a strategic lens to a dimension of union activity that has been, for the most part, viewed as static and mostly taken for granted. In assessing this union articulated proposition, the case study has contributed to the literatures on union voice and revitalization in a number of key ways.

In detailing the considerations driving Local 1’s decision to restructure its grievance system, the study provides evidence regarding an avenue for union revitalization that has not received much attention. As noted above, over the past two decades, scholars and practitioners have been examining different strategies and tactics employed by unions in an effort to increase their power and withstand the tremendous forces that have led to a dramatic decline in union membership. The grievance system, which is one of the dominant services provided to union members and to which a great deal of resources are dedicated, has not, for the most part, been seen as a vehicle for such growth.

The case study challenges this common conception and illustrates ways in which unions can innovate around the manner in which they deliver voice and fairness through grievance systems. Thus, for example, we demonstrate the mobilization gains that Local 1 was able to secure in large part due to the reengineering of its grievance system. The union’s ability to increase its geographic reach alongside its political power is indicative of the potential inherent in a strategic approach to grievance system design. Future research is needed in order to assess the extent to which voice-related innovations are taking place in other unions and their associated consequences in different settings. Furthermore, our case study describes one model of grievance system restructuring. It is important for additional research to examine other strategic motivations and associated innovations.

Like many unions seeking to grow and revitalize in the face of tremendous pressures, Local 1 decided to enhance its focus on mobilization and political action. As noted by top leadership, the union decided that, alongside its traditional responsibilities, it must also increase its influence over bigger picture issues and challenges. In doing so, Local 1 was seeking to realign its strategic priorities as an organization so that it could still address individual grievances without losing sight of their ability to address broader collective interests.

Beginning in the 1990s, the SEIU international union encouraged its locals to shift resources into organizing and mobilizing. The challenge with this has always been how to make the shift without sacrificing the union’s ability to handle grievances and engage in collective bargaining. A number of SEIU locals sought to accomplish this by having members take on more of these servicing tasks with unsuccessful results because of the staggering costs of training and supporting members in this work, and the limitations in time and ability among rank-and-file members. Local 1 took a decidedly different approach involving the centralization of the servicing function with the creation of the MRC and the specialization of union staff. The approach has allowed Local 1 to reduce its expenditure of resources on servicing, freeing up funds and staff to organize many more workers, engage more in electoral politics, and mobilize its membership and the community around the economic and political issues deemed most pressing.

Local 1’s restructuring entails a substantial departure from established wisdom regarding the link between grievance systems and union strength. By separating the servicing role of the union from its organizing and mobilizing function, Local 1 has transformed the traditional grievance handling model in order to support organizing and political objectives without diminishing its workplace representation. The core argument advanced in this article is that, faced with growing pressures, unions are likely to strategically experiment with new models of delivering member services while extending their reach. It is possible that their grievance system experimentation will create new challenges for Local 1. This, in itself, does not undermine our claim that unions are and will continue to seek out ways to restructure and reconfigure traditional roles and structures. It is our role as researchers to document these efforts and to carefully highlight the inherent trade-offs associated with them.

From a substantive standpoint, it is important to note that our case study of the MRC found evidence suggestive of mobilization and collective action benefits associated with the union’s transformed grievance system. In contrast to the claim that a bureaucratized grievance system will weaken collective solidarity and disengage members, our findings indicate that by decoupling individual grievances from the organizing work of union leaders and field representatives, and by freeing up scarce resources, the union was able to better position itself vis-à-vis its mobilization goals and objectives.

Nevertheless, it is important to note that we only examined grievance system restructuring in one local union. It is possible that in other contexts and settings, the risks associated with the MRC model are more likely to materialize. But the fact that there is a clear potential downside in shifting from a traditional face-to-face-centered grievance system to an alternative one only serves to support the claim that unions, like employers, make difficult strategic decisions that have both potential benefits as well as costs. In shifting to the MRC model, Local 1 sought to increase member mobilization and prioritize political action, realizing that other objectives may be jeopardized. This is the kind of a calculation, we believe, that is at the heart of the union renewal effort.