“We Were Democracy Mad:” Clerical Workers’ Unionism, Antiracism, and Feminism at the University of California, Berkeley, 1966–1972

In April 1968, two Berkeley campus unions—the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1695 representing clerical, technical, and professional workers, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 1570 representing graduate students—held a work-stoppage and a teach-in on “campus racism” to honor the memory of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. who had been tragically assassinated in Memphis. Inspired by King's work and the AFSCME sanitation workers strike that he supported, the teach-in became a series of workshops that ultimately led to the development of a “white paper” with statistical data highlighting the ways the university harbored racism in its employment practices and in its admission of undergraduate and graduate students. Among its many demands, it called for the University: “to hire black, brown and red workers until the ratio of employees from these groups equals the ratio in the population; bring minority student enrollment and employment up to population ratios . . . publish the University census report showing the percentage of black, brown, and red employees by department; and make an additional report showing the classifications and promotions of black, brown, and red people in each department.”¹

Initially, AFSCME Local 1695 members met with administrators to discuss their findings and the changes they hoped to see implemented. Two white women, union vice president Maxine Wolpinsky and executive board member Margy Wilkinson, encountered resistance and, at times, dismissiveness at these meetings. As Wilkinson said in her oral history, “At least one [administrator] suggested that ‘you girls don't know what you are talking about’ because . . . we were secretaries.” [She rolls her eyes.]² When the administration failed to adopt any of their suggestions, the Local 1695 sold copies of the “white paper” during lunch hour on Sproul Plaza as well as in bookstores along Telegraph Avenue. In reaching out to campus and community, they hoped to garner support from students, faculty, and Berkeley residents to end campus racism and embarrass the university into action.

Studies in American labor history have paid scant attention to women like Wolpinsky or Wilkinson in public university settings, let alone to the struggles they waged to make these institutions more inclusive places to work. While there have been accounts of Harvard University's successful 1988 unionization drive of clerical and technical workers, they not only focus on a different time period, but on a private institution.³ By contrast, AFSCME Local 1695's union campaigns as well as their ideas about race, gender, and labor were deeply rooted in the socially and politically turbulent 1960s. Four years before Local 1695's teach-in, the Free Speech Movement (FSM), one of the largest and most disruptive student rebellions in American history, had galvanized the campus.⁴ Activists, like Mario Savio, brought participatory democracy and nonviolent forms of protest from the civil rights movement to the struggle for free speech on campus.⁵ Many Local 1695 members were deeply influenced by this form of democracy and protest. Others were radicalized by their experiences in the civil rights movement. Some hailed from the New Left, others from the women's liberation movement, and still others from the Old Left. Some described themselves as liberal Democrats. What they shared was a democratic vision of rank-and-file control and the skills they had honed from their social movement activism. In putting their vision and skills together, Local 1695 members built their own union, one whose campaigns went beyond the business union script of “wages, benefits, and working conditions.”⁶

The union's location in a public university adds another layer of complexity to this historical time and place. Local 1695 waged their campaigns in the late ’60s and ’70s without “collective bargaining rights.” Until the early 1960s, laws across the United States prohibited public sector workers from participating in strikes, bargaining collectively, and doing arbitration in employer-employee disputes. Many courts allowed state governments to fire public workers for simply joining a union.⁷ In California, the first big change in public employee labor relations law came in 1961 with the enactment of the George Brown Act. It gave public workers the right to unionize. However, it provided for the representation of employees on a “members only basis” and required public employers only to “meet and confer” with representatives of the employee organization.⁸ What this meant is that the University of California had to recognize Local 1695 as a union but not as an “exclusive representative.” Hence, no collective bargaining. Further, the act contained no explicit authority for entering into binding agreements following the “meet and confer” process. Hence, discussions would not result in a contract. In fact, it was not until 1979, that the Berman Act, a California law, made collective bargaining legal for public university employees.⁹

Joseph Slater's history of public sector workers reveals that lacking the legal right to organize, bargain, or strike, public employees engaged in a number of political actions such as lawsuits, court challenges, electoral politics, and public relations campaigns in efforts to bring about change in their workplaces.¹⁰ His history, however, ends in 1962. In this light, AFSCME Local 1695 provides a lens on public university workers in the 1960s and 1970s, workers who could unionize but were not permitted to collectively bargain. By relying on demonstrations, picket lines, strikes, and language inspired by the 1964 Civil Rights Act such as “sex discrimination,” Black and white women in Local 1695 worked together not only to bring more women of color as secretaries into a predominantly white institution, but to upend a racist and sexist wage structure for Black female dormitory workers. In addition, they demonstrated against the Vietnam War and brought their protest to work. Further, their democratic ethos extended to alliances they formed with graduate students, campus librarians, faculty, local community members, and in a seemingly unusual partnership, the men of the building and construction trades. As these actions suggest, Local 1695's focus was much broader and more multifaceted than business unionism. Instead, it reflects what sociologist Vanessa Tait has termed “social justice unionism” that includes a rejection of routinized bureaucracy in favor of “rank and file control” and an embrace of “participatory democracy, broad alliances, innovative tactics, and a focus of far-reaching goals such as justice and equality.”¹¹

Certainly, AFSCME Local 1695 was not the only union in 1968 to embrace social justice unionism. In what Cal Winslow called the “long seventies,” the period from the mid-1960s to 1981, private sector unions drew upon a wide array of tactics from protest movements exhibiting a wave of strikes not seen since the 1930s.¹² Unlike most of the unions studied in this time period, however, Local 1695 members belonged to the public sector, created their own radically democratic union, and were overwhelmingly female.¹³ The 1960s and 1970s were an era of explosive organizing in the public sector and a time period when unions began to attract more young people, more women, and more African Americans.¹⁴ Standing at the nexus of these important transformations, AFSCME Local 1695 helps us to understand how Black and white female union activists who were intimately involved in social movements of the ’60s and ’70s drew upon them to create an antiracist and feminist public sector unionism in this time and place, a unionism that would have a lasting impact on UC Berkeley, the multicampus University of California system, and feminist organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

By focusing on Local 1695's earliest period—1966–1972—this article shows how the union came into being and how this, in turn, set the stage for their initial protests and campaigns and their subsequent organizing throughout the ’70s. It also draws upon oral histories from unionists to help us understand why participatory democracy was so important to these women and how it infused their politics surrounding racial and gender justice.¹⁵

Social Justice Origins

In late December 1966, Margy Wilkinson who worked as a receptionist for a research institute on the Berkeley campus found an ad in The Daily Californian, the student newspaper, advertising a union meeting for clerical workers at UCB. As she recalled in her oral history:

So, I go to this meeting and there's like seven or eight people. So, who are we? Well, there's me, Judy Shattuck, a couple of women who were clericals and wives of graduate students in the [graduate student] union…some wild-eyed radical and a woman who considered herself a feminist. . . . I came out of an Old Left tradition, so I hadn't even heard of feminism. . . . So, there we were and we decided we needed a union . . . ¹⁶

Judy Shattuck, another young white woman who attended that first meeting, remembered seeing a flyer that brought it to her attention. For her, the decision to unionize was strongly influenced by the tenor of the times—the civil rights movement and the FSM. Because many unionists had participated in these struggles, they were deeply influenced by the practice of participatory democracy.¹⁷ As she put it, “We were self-conscious about the need to take control of our lives and the need to extend to all union members control of their union. We were democracy mad.” (emphasis added)¹⁸ She added:

The Berkeley campus in the 60s, and our baby Local, were enriched by the presence of many members of the Communist Party, members of International Socialists, and a few SWPers [Socialist Workers’ Party]. Of course, there were a zillion other political groups, all represented now and then by a few members in our Local…While they were not crazy about each other, there was overall a loyalty to the project of building a union that was greater than a desire to have a political battle. With this remark, I am glossing over some very tough times and important battles. But the point here is that both groups brought ideas, priorities and perspectives and experiences that benefitted and strengthened our union.¹⁹

Anne Lawson, a twenty-three-year-old Black woman who first attended a larger meeting in early 1967, recalled squeezing into a room crammed with white women and a handful of Black women. She recognized Maxine Wolpinsky who had participated in the FSM as a secretary and sat next to her.²⁰ Lawson had also been involved in the civil rights movement and thought that it, along with the FSM, had a strong influence on the development of the union. “What we all shared was an egalitarian ethos. . . . Some of us got that through civil rights organizing and others learned it in the Free Speech Movement. Of course, the FSM inherited these practices from Bob Moses in SNCC [Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] who, in turn, learned them from Ella Baker. I used to say that we were all indebted to Ella Baker.”²¹ Like Shattuck, Lawson valued the union's democratic practices, but was explicit in linking those practices to the Black female civil rights activist Ella Baker. Baker, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr. who had grown critical of his hierarchical preacher-centered style of leadership, who stressed community organizing from the bottom up.²² Lawson also saw the union “as others did who participated in civil rights protests in the Bay Area, as a place to push for racial equality inside the University—more jobs for Blacks, more admission slots, more scholarships, more opportunities.”²³

Margaret Henderson, a twenty-six-year-old white woman who worked as a secretary, first got involved when a friend invited her to come to a union meeting in the late ’60s. Like many young people in the Bay Area involved in civil rights, she participated in protests that targeted local racist employers. In addition, she participated in the burgeoning women's liberation movement. “In the late 60s and early 70s, there were few real opportunities for women at the University; most of us were stuck in dead-end, low-paid clerical jobs. With the union, we could challenge that reality and imagine something different. . . . Of course, with our democratic process meetings sometimes went on forever and it was easy to get lost in the details of political disagreements between IS members and CP members. But we felt like we were making a difference.”²⁴

For Samille Gooden, a young Black woman who had worked with unions in the federal government before she came to the university, joining Local 1695 was an extension of her previous experiences. (She became the union's first Black president in 1977.) In her view, union membership was particularly important for people from the Black community. As she said in a 1978 Pacifica radio interview with Angela Davis: “In minority communities, it is important to belong to the trade union movement because there is a ‘them’—large corporate bosses and corporations. To avoid exploitation, we have to stick together. The only way to do that is through a union. Now, I realize that unions, particularly craft unions, were very segregated, and they had problems, but times are beginning to change now. . . . To have some say and some dignity on the jobs—all minorities and women should belong to a union.”²⁵

While the union initially attracted women who worked as clericals, library assistants, and lab techs, over time it also attracted men. By 1974, its membership came to six hundred and approximately 70 percent were women.²⁶ As Shattuck explained: “It was true for almost our entire life as a union almost all of our elected office holders, and the core activists were women. Indeed, in the 70s, when other unions and organizations were forming special women's committees, we were a women's committee”²⁷ (emphasis added). Shattuck's observation is confirmed by historian Kathleen Turk who found throughout the 1970s, AFSCME locals formed “women's rights committees” to address the concerns of female unionists such as pay equity, childcare, and sexual harassment.²⁸ The demographic composition of Local 1695 made such special committees unnecessary.

Organizationally, the union's first big internal debate concerned whether to become a union or an association. As Wilkinson recalled, “There were some that thought we should be an association because we were practically professional and not workers. They didn't want to be with a union or the Teamsters. [She laughs.] As if any of us would support the Teamsters back then.”²⁹ Wilkinson, Lawson, and Shattuck all argued that a union would be much stronger than an association.³⁰ As Shattuck put it, “[T]he existing employee association [Cal State Employees Association] was a management-run association that offered good deals on auto tires, but it did not represent employees with problems.”³¹ Lawson disdained the CSEA because it had once claimed that “UC employees didn't need high salaries to achieve job satisfaction because working on the Berkeley campus was a reward in itself.” For her, “A union was the only way to seriously address workers’ issues.”³² While historians have found other women's groups in this era who formed strong worker-centered associations, Berkeley clericals elected to create a union instead because of the existing association's strong management affiliation.³³

Once that decision had been made, the fledgling organization began the process of interviewing national unions including the Office of Professional Workers (OPW), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Service Employees International (SEIU), and AFSCME. First, they went to OPW because the organization represented so many clerical workers. But OPW worried that UC was “too big and powerful” to take on and declined.³⁴ They also talked with SEIU, a union that represented dormitory workers, but “they kind of creeped us out.”³⁵ The other possibility was AFT, but as Shattuck observed: “[W]e did not want to belong to same unions as our bosses, the faculty. . . . [W]e wanted a union that clearly understood the needs of non-academics; we felt that we belonged with AFSCME's national membership.”³⁶ Under Jerry Wurf's leadership, AFSCME was becoming the most influential union in organizing public sector workers in the nation. (He became president in 1964.) Wurf opposed the business unionism of the previous president, Arnold Zander, and sought to create a more multiracial and integrated union that appealed to younger members trying to change the union's culture.³⁷ For Berkeley's clericals, this was enormously appealing.

In April 1967, AFSCME chartered Local 1695. As Shattuck recalled:

[On that evening,] we pulled out the rubber cement and pasted up our 92 proposals for changes in wages and working conditions each one of which we had debated for hours. Under the law at the time, we couldn't bargain on these demands, but we could present them to management. . . . It was up to us to make noise, have demonstrations, circulate petitions, to promote our demands. And, for the 15 years until our first contract, we made many large and small changes in management policy and practices by these means. (emphasis added).³⁸

Between 1967 and 1970, the Local 1695 worked on strategies for achieving collective bargaining status and other bread-and-butter issues such as getting a union dues checkoff in their paychecks. In this early period, they had to collect member dues by hand. Their first legislative efforts to require UC to provide a dues checkoff on paychecks were killed in Sacramento in June 1967.³⁹ In October 1967, the union held the first of many conferences to strategize about how to get collective bargaining passed in the state legislature. In November, they met to continue discussion of the multitude of changes they wanted in campus regulations and policies. These concerns would continue to preoccupy them at the same time as they worked on other issues including: the Vietnam war; sex discrimination, racism, the “maids” campaign; and the building trades strike.

Antiwar Protests on Campus and at the AFSCME International Convention

Under the auspices of SDS and other student groups, the Berkeley campus was one of biggest epicenters of activism against the Vietnam War. In 1967, one of the first big week-long anti-war events was “Stop the Draft Week” that began on October 16 in cities across the United States.⁴⁰ The influence of this protest led to an internal debate about whether Local 1695 should take a position. As Shattuck recalled, “Reason prevailed and we voted to oppose the war.”⁴¹ Lawson too remembered voting to take a position against the war. Her argument centered on the ways the war perpetuated U.S. imperialism and racism. “The U.S. was sending Black men over there to do their work in the war machine. . . . Our men were just disposable bodies for their war” (emphasis in original).⁴²

During the war, Local 1695 observed the frequent protests and national moratoriums, or one-day work stoppages. In May 1970, when the United States invaded Cambodia, the union participated in what the antiwar movement called the “reconstitution” of the university. The idea was to transform the university from being part of the national war machine to becoming part of the movement for peace. In support, Local 1695 adopted this language: “We will organize not only against the war, but against the structures in society that perpetuate racism and that facilitate war. And we will organize to end our University's complicity with racism and that war.”⁴³ According to an article in the Employee Press, the union's monthly newsletter, the union's membership soared during this time.⁴⁴

Shattuck recalled this as a “wonderful time on campus” when the union participated actively with students and faculty in declaring the university be reconstituted. Wilkinson also remembered the appeal of reconstitution to other UC employees: After three years of building the union, as “an instrument of worker control,” it made sense that during the “period of reconstitution, faculty, students, and staff would all become equals.”⁴⁵ Shattuck noted that this was carried off in some departments “with great flair.”

[I]n the Math department where many faculty were relatively radical, motions were passed to reconstitute. Clericals did not seek to teach mathematics, but it was expected that faculty would take on certain clerical tasks. Participation at this level was pretty symbolic, but it was an important symbol. . . . Also, there were meetings all over campus to discuss and debate, and we left our desks to participate in any anti-war work that interested us. . . . I'll always cherish the memory of instructing my department chair how to use a stapler so that he could assemble admission application materials while I went off to a planning meeting for some protest activity. In the meantime, George Meany claimed that working people supported Nixon's invasion of Cambodia–HA!”⁴⁶

Of course, not all departments were as radical as the Math Department was in this respect. Faculty in many departments, like the rest of the nation, were deeply divided by their positions on student movements and the war.⁴⁷ The May 1970 issue of Employee Press discussed and analyzed the different levels of participation in various campus units.⁴⁸ As Wilkinson recalled, “the so-called democratization of our right to participate in anti-war work worked out for different departments in different ways. In some departments, you could do anti-war work only after you completed your regular work. So, you weren't actually freed from the war machine to do anti-war work—you had to do both”⁴⁹ (emphasis in original). Despite these obstacles, most union members found some way to participate.

The union's activism against the war stands in stark contrast to the historiography on white, male, working-class opposition to the antiwar movement. During the “hard-hat riots” in May 1970, for example, two hundred New York City construction workers mobilized by New York State AFL-CIO marched through the streets of lower Manhattan, waving American flags, loudly demonstrating their support for the Vietnam War, and beating up students who were protesting the shootings at Kent State, the invasion of Cambodia, and the Vietnam War.⁵⁰ By contrast, AFSCME Local 1695 members not only supported the antiwar movement, indeed they saw themselves as part of it, but they also imagined the peace movement as means of transforming their workplace—the university.

In May 1970, Local 1695 sent three delegates including Wilkinson to the International's Convention in Denver, Colorado, where AFSCME, under Jerry Wurf's leadership became the first national union to call formally for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. By this time, Wurf, well-known for his abrasive style, had been president for six years, had won a contract for the Memphis sanitation workers, and had ushered more public workers into AFSCME than ever before. Local 1695 delegates, however, were not pleased with the process or with the final resolution that Wurf brokered. Several antiwar resolutions were discussed by the convention's Resolution Committee and then combined. Local 1695 delegates supported the combined resolutions that argued not only for the withdrawal of American troops and opposition to the invasion of Cambodia, but also censured President Nixon for his “deception, dishonesty, and violation of the Constitution.”⁵¹ According to Shattuck, Wurf initially agreed to the combined resolution, but the next day asked “that a brand new and greatly weakened resolution be passed. He said that if the Local didn't support this weakened resolution, there would be an angry, dirty floor fight. [As a result,] the supporters of the initial resolution were forced to give up.”⁵² To make matters worse, when the three Local 1695 delegates were first introduced to Wurf, he greeted them with, “Aha, here are the ball busters from Berkeley.”⁵³

When they returned from Denver, the women delegates wrote critically about the convention scuffle with Wurf and the process that followed the work of the resolutions committee, i.e., Wurf's refusal to accept the resolution committee's decision and take it to the floor for a vote. In their view, dumping the committee's antiwar resolution and crafting his own along with his slur against the women delegates was “power-mongering, undemocratic, and sexist.”⁵⁴ Given that Wurf has been regarded as progressive labor leader who supported civil rights issues and opposed the Vietnam War, their claims may seem surprising. Certainly, his politics were more progressive than those of AFL-CIO president George Meany who had long supported the Vietnam War.⁵⁵ But, like many men of his generation, Wurf held traditional attitudes about women.⁵⁶ In addition, Wurf's dismissal of the resolution committee's work infuriated Local 1695 delegates who detested top-down, bureaucratic decision-making and valued participatory democracy. For them, a potential floor fight was an important exercise in democracy. Finally, Local 1695 delegates viewed his convention address as “pandering to liberals.”⁵⁷ Here, “liberal” was intended as an epithet, a disdain for the hypocrisy of establishment liberalism that espoused equality but practiced intolerance and discrimination. Wilkinson was incensed by Wurf's line about seeking “power within the system to make the system work for the deprived.”⁵⁸ As she remarked in her oral history, “Capitalism never works for the deprived.”⁵⁹

Sex Discrimination, Racism, and the Berkeley “Maids” Campaign, 1970–1971

In January 1970, the same month that the student newspaper reported a campus-wide women's liberation conference titled “Women to Break the Shackles,” the Employee Press published its first lead article on sex discrimination in wages at UC Berkeley.⁶⁰ The union newspaper's attention to sex discrimination continued in Local 1695's campus campaigns. One of its early battles overlapped with the women's liberation movement's critique of the notion that women were expected to dress in ways that were pleasing to men.⁶¹ Many young feminists gave up wearing make-up, high heels, and wore comfortable clothes in defiance of male-defined notions of beauty. For women in the workplace, defiance meant challenging traditional dress codes. One Local 1695 victory reported in the Employee Press came in July when women in the Department of Business Administration were allowed to wear pants to work as the result of the union's grievance work.⁶² As Margaret Henderson recalled:

The University had no formal dress code, but it did have something called “appropriate conduct . . . ” It was a vague category that could cover all kinds of things—like women not wearing pants to work. In sociology, we decided to challenge it. So, Carol [a white, union member] had this nice pant suit with a tunic top and she wore it to work. The chair told her it was not “appropriate” and said she had to go home and change. Carol didn't feel like going all the way home to change. So, she wore the thigh-high tunic top without the pants for the rest of the day. And no one said anything. So, wearing a thigh-high mini dress was “appropriate,” but wearing a pant suit was not?! [She laughs.] Anyway, we decided to try again. This time Debra who was always the best-dressed person in the department agreed to try it. She came to work in this stylish pant suit with a gorgeous blouse and no one said a word. She also happened to be Black. After that, we all started wearing pants to work . . . ⁶³

In Henderson's analysis of the outcome, the chair's fear of being perceived as a racist coupled with the clericals’ collective determination to overturn the “appropriate conduct” argument won the day for women in the sociology department. Their victory in sociology, in turn, helped pave the way for secretaries in business administration. She recalled:

When one of the women got written up in bus ad for wearing pants, she filed a grievance, and . . . someone on the grievance committee went with her to meet with the chair. Anyway, one of the things the grievance committee member mentioned was that the sociology department, which happened to be in the same building, had already agreed that women could wear pants. So, if women in sociology got to wear pants, why couldn't women in bus ad?⁶⁴

The union also continued to fight against racism by pushing the administration to hire more Black women and by supporting newly hired Black women who worked with racist bosses and coworkers. At the time, the union had a “Black and Brown Caucus” that worked closely with the grievance committee.⁶⁵ Shattuck explained: “As departments began to hire more Black staff, usually women in clerical jobs, management's difficulty in dealing with Black workers was often reflected in their claims of ‘attitude,’ ‘personality conflict,’ and ‘temperament’ . . . ”⁶⁶ Union members regarded these claims as management's “coded expressions” of racism and sexism about Black women.⁶⁷ For example, the August 1970 issue of the Employee Press reported on a grievance fought by the union for a young woman who had been fired due to “personality conflicts.” She was the only Black employee in her unit and the only one who stood up to her boss when he was verbally abusive. “She told him that he was rude when he yelled at her and that his language was offensive. They wouldn't fire a white woman who did that!” Wilkinson explained.⁶⁸ The accompanying photograph showed a long picket line of supporters for the young woman in front of the building where she worked. At the time, the union had no contract or fair grievance procedure at their disposal. According to Lawson, “What we depended on a lot was getting public support and embarrassing the department.”⁶⁹ Marshalling broad support was not only a benefit in grievance cases such as this one, but also played a significant role in the union's campaign for women who worked in the dorms.

In November 1970, dormitory workers joined Local 1695 with a list of demands dealing with “racist and sexist traditions, attitudes, and practices at U.C.”⁷⁰ At the time, the janitors who worked in the dorms were Black women with the official title “maids.” On the main campus, janitors were Black men and some white men with the title “custodian.” Though many of the women had been on the job for more than ten years they were still considered “casual labor” by the university. (They were laid off when the dorms were closed over school breaks, while the custodians were not.) They were also paid $100 a month less than the men on the main campus who did the same kind of work. Their demands included: a job reclassification; a pay equity review; and full-time permanent status.⁷¹ Inspired by the antidiscrimination provision in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the union used the language of sex discrimination to legitimize their demands.

In their oral histories, union members described how the intersections of race, gender, and class constructed the dormitory workers’ occupation.⁷² Lawson said: “There was no question these jobs played into stereotypes about Black women . . . that Black women were somehow naturally suited to be maids. You could see clearly how sexism and racism impacted the women. They were doing essentially the same work as the men, but their pay was significantly lower.”⁷³ Henderson said: “Here it wasn't just racism, but sexism that made the women's pay so low. And the fact that they could be considered “casual labor,” and fired and rehired every year as if Black women didn't really need stable, permanent jobs” (emphasis in original).⁷⁴ In a noon-time rally for the campaign, Wolpinsky indicted the entire university in her critique calling it an “academic plantation” where Black employees did the dirty work for faculty and graduate students.⁷⁵

The union's campaign drew a lot of attention and support on campus and in the broader community. There were noon-time rallies day after day on Sproul Plaza that filled the space. Placards and flyers pronounced “equal pay for equal work” for maids.⁷⁶ Student groups, neighborhood groups, unions, religious leaders, and faculty supported the campaign. (The January 1971 issue of the Employee Press listed sixteen organizations.) Berkeley City Councilman Ron Dellums and later the Reverend Jesse Jackson numbered among the campaign's supporters.⁷⁷ The League of Academic Women, a feminist graduate student and faculty activist group, supported the union as did the librarians Local AFT 1795.⁷⁸ There were front-page articles in The Daily Californian, the student newspaper, as well as letters to the editor in support of the campaign.⁷⁹ Meanwhile, Shattuck recalled, “the university presented 102 reasons why this was a fair pattern and angry economists paid for full page ads to dispute our claims.”⁸⁰

The university's answer to the campaign's demands came on January 26, 1971. It claimed that the work the custodians performed was “more varied and more taxing” than that of the maids thereby justifying pay disparities.⁸¹ Local 1695 continued to argue that the reasons for pay and work schedule differences were due to the fact that the maids were Black women. Despite their lack of bargaining rights, the union then asked for and received a strike sanction from the Alameda County Labor Council and workers across campus from other unions promised to honor it. In February, the union also decided to file charges of sex discrimination with the state's Fair Employment Practices Committee.⁸² Meanwhile, the university threatened layoffs in the dorms. As Lawson recalled, “Once we got strike sanctions and came close enough to a strike, we really scared the University. Plus, we had all this support on campus and in the community.”⁸³

Ultimately, the university agreed to the demands, and in May 1971, Local 1695 signed an agreement with the university that offered substantial pay raises, an end to seasonal layoffs, and a grievance procedure with faculty serving as arbiters.⁸⁴ According to Shattuck who was union president at the time,

The university was finally able to see its way to grant retroactive wage increases of fifteen percent and end seasonal layoffs. . . . One of the effects of the pay raises was to reduce the numbers of women working in the dorms, and we demanded the university take some extraordinary steps to find jobs for these women. . . . No one lost employment, and in fact, some women took jobs as main campus custodians, breaking through the university's long history of referring only men to those jobs.⁸⁵

In the campaign surrounding the Berkeley maids, AFSCME Local 1695 challenged and ultimately changed the racist and sexist pay structure for custodians in the dormitories. The union also broke through a “glass ceiling” of sorts by compelling the university to hire some of the dormitory workers on the main campus, thereby ending complete sex segregation in that job. In doing so, they brought together civil rights and feminist concerns—“equal pay for equal work”—to make sense of the dormitory workers’ plight and grant legitimacy to their claims.

The campaign was also an important example of what could be accomplished in the absence of collective bargaining rights. Because Local 1695 rendered the pay of women dormitory workers public and created broad alliances for their campaign, the university had to respond not only to the union and their demands, but to the wider public that supported them. Raising the issue in terms of fairness to Black women and “equal pay for equal work,” only a few years after the Memphis sanitation workers strike, served to remind those sympathetic to the civil rights movement that much work remained undone. (Indeed, many older Blacks and liberal whites in the Bay Area supported the civil rights movement.⁸⁶) It also appealed to the burgeoning women's movement in the local community as well as women faculty, librarians, and graduate students. Further, the influence of the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area and fact that Oakland and Berkeley were cities with Black populations exceeding 34 and 20 percent respectively, surely reminded the university of possible community backlash.⁸⁷ Finally, lack of a contract meant that the right to strike had not been relinquished. (Contracts sometimes carry “no strike” provisions.) In this campaign, the strike sanction likely reminded the administration how much more negative publicity for UC Berkeley could get. As Chancellor Albert Bowker once remarked about his relationship with the press, “I tried to keep Berkeley out the papers; the less said about us in the press, the better . . . ”⁸⁸

The Recession and the Building Trades Walk-Out, 1971–1972

As Local 1695 completed the maids campaign, between 1971 and 1972 the national economic recession began to pummel the UC system. When Ronald Reagan began his second term as governor in 1971, the California budget was in dire straits. A California legislative analyst reported: “For the first time since the 1930s, the state in September 1971 will not have sufficient cash to meet its obligations.”⁸⁹ In response, Reagan unveiled an austerity budget. Among other cuts, his budget for UC included no increases, even though enrollment was expected to grow, no funds for capital outlay, and no salary increases. In response, UC President Hitch instituted a hiring “freeze” and proposed layoffs.⁹⁰ On April 15, 1971, public workers from seven UC campuses demonstrated to register their outrage about the way the university was handling the financial crisis. At UC Berkeley on that day, over 250 members of several campus unions including janitors (AFSCME Local 371), teaching assistants (AFT 1570), and librarians (AFT 1795) picketed along with Local 1695 during the noon hour in front of University Hall. As one demonstrator bitterly remarked, “The cost-of-living keeps going up and there's no cost-of-living wage increase this year: So, where does that leave us?”⁹¹ Demonstrators and Local 1695 President Wilkinson saw the April 15 protest as only the beginning of their fight against cutbacks. On May 15, Local 1695 along with other UC campus locals went to the state legislature to participate in a “March on Sacramento” to address “adequate financing for education through realistic budgets and tax reforms and collective bargaining for all employees.”⁹²

Local 1695 continued to organize protests and one-day work stoppages against proposed budget cuts. On October 28, 1971, along with other campus unions, they participated in a work stoppage to protest UC budget cuts, to restore cost-of living increases, to end speed up, and to restore cut services. The work stoppage was a success; many departments were shut down for the day and others shut down ranging from 25 to 75 percent capacity. UC administration threatened to refuse to pay workers who didn't show up for work—even if they had received permission from their supervisors.⁹³ By December, AFSCME lobbyists from different campuses demanded that UC meet to negotiate on major employment issues. In response to AFSCME's pressure, the State Assembly Committee on Employment and Public Employees held hearings on UC's layoff policies and practices.⁹⁴

Meanwhile, Governor Ronald Reagan who had vowed when elected in 1966 to “clean up the mess at Berkeley” continued to put financial pressure on the UC system.⁹⁵ In October 1971, he threatened to cease prevailing wage agreements to one thousand union workers in the building and trades and some who were represented by other unions (e.g., cooks, teamsters, printing trades) who were doing work for UC.⁹⁶ Over the next several months tensions escalated as the push for prevailing wages continued.⁹⁷ On April 17, 1972, the Building and Construction Trades Council of Alameda County (AFL-CIO) called for a walk-out.⁹⁸

AFSCME 1695 and AFT 1795 Local members who were angry about Reagan's latest threat were also experiencing financial stress and decided to join the walk-out. Their demands included agreement on a grievance procedure culminating in binding outside arbitration and salary and benefit increases.⁹⁹ Members from both unions served on picket lines or special strike committees. There were several skirmishes with the police on the picket line; two librarians were maced and one electrician was pushed through a glass door and nearly died.¹⁰⁰ In June, sixteen union leaders were arrested for sitting in at UC President Hitch's office—seven of whom were AFSCME Local 1695 members. As Shattuck remembered, the sit-in “ended surrealistically, when someone, perhaps a disgruntled electrician, killed all the lights in University Hall where we were [later] booked and fingerprinted.”¹⁰¹ At the time, the only settlement offer on the table was a 5 percent increase on wages beginning July 1, but only to those who formerly had prevailing wage agreements. It also offered nothing to clerical and service workers. All unions voted to reject the interim offer.¹⁰²

For the duration of the strike—almost ten weeks—Local 1695 members not only picketed, but also devised a number of creative ways to help out. As Shattuck recalled:

Carpenters crafted perfect dowels, leaving it to our expertise to put them in just the right toilets all over campus. Since the Mulford Act allowed individuals to be banned from campus, and the cops came to know us by sight, we had to wear disguises to even get the dowels in the toilets. A more imaginative committee placed frozen fish behind the painting that hung in Sproul Hall and in the upholstered chairs in the President's office, then in University Hall. The fish thawed slowly.¹⁰³

On June 22, 1972, the Building Trade Strike settled.¹⁰⁴ Final negotiations were conducted for the unions by an ad hoc committee including representatives from the International Longshoreman, the Teamsters, Contra Costa Central Labor Council, the Machinists; and the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific. The final agreement gave the building tradesmen some, though not all, of what they wanted by way of wages. In addition, UC recognized the existence of librarian pay inequity and agreed to negotiate with AFT 1795 for a pay adjustment.¹⁰⁵ Further, AFSCME 1695 and AFT 1795 won use of outside arbiters for their grievance procedures, which until that time had deployed UC professors as hearing officers.¹⁰⁶

By participating in the walk-out and strike, AFSCME Local 1695 not only managed to gain some concessions for themselves, but they also built strong relationships with other unions. The librarians thought the strike had led to greater camaraderie with support staff from AFSCME, which proved to be important in their future campaign together.¹⁰⁷ Surprisingly, the union also developed good relations with the building and construction trade men—a union with a reputation for its opposition to antiwar activists and less than enlightened attitudes about women. In fact, over the course of the strike, the Building Trades union members came to respect and admire the women of Local 1965. Shattuck recalled:

Initially, the “boys”—that is just about all of the building trades people—treated us like the “girls” they considered us to be. After weeks of turning up on the picket lines, doing good work with the carpenters on special toilet plugging duties, hosting a huge dinner for all the strikers and their families, we seemed to be getting some respect. Perhaps, partly as a result of our not being considered to be “real workers” by the men, they seemed to be astonished to see so many of us turn up day after day for picketing duty. . . . But, by the end—especially after one popular electrician was nearly killed by a cop the day that the glass doors to University Hall were smashed into a billion pieces—a genuine understanding was formed between us—the girls—and the building trades (emphasis in original).¹⁰⁸

Although the national economic recession would continue to have an enormous impact on UC at Berkeley throughout the 1970s, the relationships Local 1695 created during the strike and their activism would continue. Along with AFT 1795, they would produce an affirmative action plan identifying pay differentials between “women's” and “men's” campus jobs that culminated in a mass grievance against the university for sex discrimination.¹⁰⁹ When the grievance went to arbitration in 1974, other campus unions rallied in their support.¹¹⁰

Conclusion

In 1973, AFSCME Local 1695 member Maxine Wolpinsky gave a speech at the California State Federation of Labor Women's Conference titled “Organizing the Unorganized” that spoke back to labor leaders who maintained that white women and people of color were unorganizable.¹¹¹ Her experience as one of the organizers for the Berkeley maids campaign demonstrated not only that Black women were eager to join Local 1695, but also that a union can serve as a vehicle for fair wages and respect. Local 1695's focus on race and gender wage equity continued throughout the 70s.¹¹² They worked with the librarian's Local to write a campus report about pay differentials in “men's” and “women's” jobs and later filed a mass sex discrimination grievance against UC Berkeley. They also continued to support Black workers who faced racism from their managers, defended affirmative action, and highlighted a “new” women's workplace issue by the end of the ’70s: sexual harassment. They were part of a nationwide movement of young people, people of color, and white women who poured into unions in the ’70s following advances achieved by the civil rights movement and the women's movement.

Local 1695's success also led to the development of other clerical, technical, and professional unions in the UC system. UC Davis, UC San Francisco, and UCLA were quick to follow in their footsteps. By 1973, seven UC campuses had AFSCME locals and in 1983, after the state legislature granted collective bargaining rights to public university employees, nearly thirty thousand UC clerical, service, and technical employees voted for and won AFSCME representation.¹¹³ In the early ’70s, organizing clerical workers at universities was identified as a “major trend.”¹¹⁴ The growth of unions on public university campuses was, in turn, part of larger trend in public sector employee unionization in the United States. In contrast to the decline private industrial unions faced in the ’60s and ’70s, public sector unions more than doubled in this era. By 1975, more than four million workers belonged to unions in the public sector.¹¹⁵

Local 1695 also contributed to a wave of feminist organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1971, Wolpinksy joined Union W.A.G.E. (Women's Alliance to Gain Equality), a socialist-feminist group that aimed to help women navigate the terrain of male-dominated unions.¹¹⁶ It was enormously successful in its advocacy for women, especially those outside the boundaries of traditional unions. Following her success with pay inequity campaigns at Berkeley, Jenkins (nee Wolpinsky) went on to become a trailblazer in the comparable worth movement. In the mid-’70s, she worked as an organizer for SEIU Local 101 to defeat San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Dianne Feinstein's first package of legislation outlawing collective bargaining for city workers which Jenkins defined as an attack on working women because it would obstruct comparable worth reforms. Then, in 1977, Jenkins went on to organize for AFSCME Local 101 in San Jose where the nation's first successful comparable worth campaign was waged in 1978.¹¹⁷

AFSCME 1695's campaigns and their membership also upset many of the assumptions and preconceptions that guide the labor history narrative of the private industrial sector.¹¹⁸ Their membership was predominantly female, often with white women or Black women in leadership positions. The issues their campaigns brought to attention were not solely focused on wages, benefits, and working conditions, but oriented toward broader social justice objectives such as racial and gender equality. By linking their campaigns to these and to other struggles—the antiwar movement and the building trades strike—Local 1695 built important alliances with students, faculty, the local community, and workers in other unions. Finally, they completely rejected the rigid, top-down structure of traditional unions for rank-and-file participatory democracy. They were, as Judy Shattuck fondly recalled, “democracy mad.” Their social justice unionism stands as an important example of what a more inclusive, democratic, and powerful labor movement can accomplish.