We Are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing

8. Communication and Clout

8 Communication and Clout I have been a labor activist for twenty years. At the same time, I come to this project with an academic background in the field of communication studies, specifically in the areas of organizational communication and rhetorical theory and criticism, and I have aimed this work to address those academic audiences as well as the activist community. Activists and scholars alike are interested in the question of how people come to a sense of their own agency—the capacity to control and transform the conditions of one’s life. Communication undoubtedly plays an enormous role in this process. The importance of communication is revealed by workers’ narratives in making sense of their experiences at work; the sharing of stories shapes their attitudes and perspectives toward both employer and union. We may describe this process in terms of the rhetorical processes of consciousness-raising, identity framing, and the recruiting and motivation of activists.1 Through what François Cooren calls the “organizing function of communication ,”2 Workers make meaning and build movements in various kinds of messages and relationships. However,communicationcannotmakeortransformtheworldofworkwithout enlisting other kinds of power. Even in unions representing workers in communication fields,3 economic clout is essential to winning wage and benefit increases, regular work hours, health care, pensions, and overtime pay. For example, a maquiladora worker cannot talk her way out of the sweatshop. Asking one’s employer politely for an end to night work is unlikely to reset one’s internal clock. But the stories we tell and the questions we ask are instrumental to the process of worker education, consciousness-raising, and mobilization. A movement of people who have recognized their common interests through conversation is in a position 176 . Chapter 8 to wield the more direct power of refusing to work. Workers today, including those at Boeing, both exist in institutions and historical situations that constrain them and possess the capacity to create and act on consciousness of themselves as constituting a class with interests divergent from those of their employers. As I have argued elsewhere, the communication field has largely neglected labor and workers’ issues and consequently overestimates the accomplishments of communication in determining workplace relationships and experience. Communication studies privilege the role of talk in creating and sustaining social reality to the extent that material exploitation and antagonism between employers and employees recede into the background.4 My work in this book is meant as something of a corrective to the absence of labor voices and organizations in the field’s literature. Linking the stories that ordinary people tell to their experience of laboring in the capitalist workplace shows us that employers cannot completely colonize the common sense of U.S. workers, whose stories are the product of intersecting narratives that make sense of labor conflicts and conflicts internal to unions. In its exploration of these narratives, this chapter first discusses the unique contributions of the present case study, unusual in its focus on labor unions as sites of activity and agency, to academic work on worker voice and democracy in workplace institutions. The gains won during contract struggles and strikes reveal how, ultimately, worker agency is a function of both communicative practice and economic clout. Second, I bring my past scholarship in rhetorical studies to bear on the union dissident activity at Boeing. This part of the chapter emphasizes the importance of a dialectical theory regarding the interaction of structure and agency. My argument is that the gaps and contradictions between lived experience of exploitation and the discourses that justify or overlook that exploitation are resources for critique and action. For both organizational communication and rhetorical studies, the present case forces the recognition that worker agency is a combination of communication and clout. Three Avenues for Worker Voice Organizational communication scholarship has extensively addressed the problem of structure and agency, or, in other words, how people get things done even in the context of powerful constraints. A number of influential scholars argue that communication provides a liberating context for workers and that managerial efforts to include their voices in joint decision-making processes allow workers to cocreate their workplace reality.5 On the other hand, some scholars regard the corporate workplace as more or less a site of total top-down manage- Communication and Clout · 177 rial control and efforts toward employee “voice” as disguises for discipline.6 Of course, there are also positions in between...