A Small Revolution in the Kitchens

One day in 1938, Joseph A. Stefani made himself a T-shaped frame with two glass arms--one breakable, one unbreakable--and went down to Harvard to convince the dining hall workers to join Local 186 of the Cooks and Pastry Cooks Association, American Federation of Labor, instead of an in-house union.

At that time Harvard was, after three hundred and two years of its existence," as Stefani likes to put it not unionized at all. When Stefani went in to organize the kitchen workers the University kicked him out because he didn't work there, so he had to do his organizing in the cellar of a sympathetic bar.

Stefani had already made substantial progress by the time he made the T-frame, but it was to be his master stroke, the tactical device that would sweep in the Cooks and Pastry Cooks Union.

"I told these people a company union was no good," Stefani says. "It couldn't strike, I said we have our international. I had a mallet with me: bang, and the glass on the left went to smithereens. I said the AF of I was much stronger. I hit my mallet on the unbreakable glass and it cracked, so there's the difference. So we got in," The Cooks were the first union to organize successfully in an American university.

Now, 38 years later, Joe Stefani is going on 81 years old and is in his 39th year as business agent of Local 186. He is a thickset man with a rasping voice and a hearing aid tucked behind his ear. Things aren't going so well for Stefani these days. He has a hard time getting people to come to union meetings--they say the neighborhood of the union hall is unsafe at night--but 30 years ago the meetings were jammed, while the union was coming into its own. There were even classes for shop stewards--Stefani has faded photographs from years of annual shop steward graduation nights--but now Stefani does not even know how many shop stewards he has among his 550 members at Harvard, the biggest single bloc of his union.

At Harvard two new, militant shop stewards are trying to work substantial changes in the Harvard Cooks' relationship both to the University and to the local's central bureaucracy--especially Stefani, the man who has dominated the Cooks' relationship with Harvard since he scored his greatest triumph here in 1938.

The two stewards are young enough, respectively, to be Stefani's son and grandson; their politics and their view of the relationship between labor leadership, management and workers are substantially different from Stefani's. The relationship between Stefani and his Harvard shop stewards was a direct adversary one for a time last fall, but now they seem to have reached an uncomfortable truce. Stefani will almost certainly be involved in negotiations this spring for a new contract between Harvard and the Cooks, but he says he will not run for re-election as business agent when his present term expires in October. Still, there appears to be substantial difference of opinion as to who will run the show at the spring negotiations, Stefani or the Harvard Cooks.

The shift in the Harvard Cooks' attitude first became apparent in December, when Sherman L. Holcombe, the newly-elected shop steward at Radcliffe's dining halls, submitted a list of grievances about Harvard and Stefani to the Personnel Office. Holcombe, a 45-year-old former truck driver, complained that Harvard was not listing fully its work reflied its and joy openings, and that the union was overcharging workers on their dues. He also asked that Harvard find year-round dining room employment for union members, rather than giving them different jobs during the summer.

"Holcombe was very nasty to me," Stefani says. "In fact, I wrote him a letter. You need a lot of education, I says. When a person is ignorant they say many things they don't understand."

Holcombe has mixed feelings about Stefani. At one point in a recent interview he said he is "dissatisfied with Stefani," but a little later on he said, "Stefani has done what I asked: I presented him with grievances. He answered and has given me good advice to being a shop steward at Harvard." Holcombe now insists his gripes are with Harvard, not Stefani, but he says it is his "dream" to be in on the negotiations this spring.

For his part, Stefani sees the negotiations as basically his show. "The trouble is with the workers," he says. "They want to come in and ask up here"--he holds his hand far above his head--"and I try to get 'em down to here"--he moves his hand to eye level. "Then we sit down and bargain and bargain until the business agent decides we pushed them as far as we can push them. We don't really need a negotiating committee [of Harvard workers], but we want to show them how hard it is to get things from the employers."

Sherman Holcombe says he has one here--Alan Balsam, a 23-year-old, politically radical Brandeis alumnus who is shop steward of the College dining halls. Balsam, an intense man who wears rimless glasses, is a curiously complementary figure to Stefani. He got a job in the Brandeis dining halls after his graduation and organized the workers there into the Cooks and Pastry Cooks, leaving shortly thereafter for a higher-paying job here. He works in Winthrop House dining hall and is carrying on an active, secretive organizing campaign aimed at building a strong position for the negotiations.

Balsam won't say exactly what he's up to, but he sponsors occasional workers' meetings and says he is "organizing against Harvard, not Stefani" because the University's labor relations policies are "paternalistic" and the workers need better wages and benefits. He says he hops for a "substantial wage increase" this spring, but will not give any specific details about his demands or organizing strategy.

Sources close to the union say Balsam's organizing drive is just getting off the ground but that he is tentatively aiming the campaign toward a wage increase well over 10 per cent and toward disciplining of some troublesome managers. Balsam is at the moment staying with the Cooks, but within the union he could turn out to be the kind of pivotal figure that Stefani was in the thirties.

So far Balsam has stayed on good terms with University officials, but Holcombe's relationship with Harvard has been one of ever-increasing bitterness that sometimes erupts into hostile confrontation.

Holcombe was elected shop steward in December largely because, he says, of grievances he had raised the month before: he had charged in a four-page statement he circulated and gave to management that two of his supervisors "feel within their right to disregard the human rights of employees." He continued: "I have gone out of my way to be consistent, bumble and of good service to the Harvard Dining Halls. So I fail to understand why I deserve such harsh treatment."

In late December, shortly after his election, Holcombe submitted another list of grievances to William N. Mullins, manager of employee relations. Then on January 22, his supervisor, Frances E. Sweeney, charges he left the Currier kitchen for half an hour to organize an employees' meeting at North House on company time. The meeting was the latest in a string of minor battles between Holcombe, who had been registering constant complaints and papering the bulletin boards with pronunciamenti, and his superiors.

The next day, January 23, Sweeney and Holcombe had a talk. "With much difficulty," she later wrote, "I finally convinced Sherman to come to my office at 2 p.m. hoping to calm his ire and explain to him why such procedures cannot be allowed. Although, I prefer to forget all the unpleasant details of this meeting I feel obligated to report the threat Mr. Holcombe made to me. That is quote: "and you better watch out for your job."

On January 27 Sweeney wrote an angry letter to Frank J. Weissbecker, director of Food Services, outlining and complaining about Holcombe's legion grievances against Harvard. Two days later, Holcombe was called in to the dining hall manager's office, where three supervisors and one member of the Personnel Office were waiting for him.

"Vivienne Rubesky [an employee relations representative] talked to me for 20 minutes, but I wouldn't talk," Holcombe says. "So then she called Personnel and asked for him. I don't know who him is, but after talking to him she went back in the office and came out and said I was suspended." Holcombe got an unpaid suspension for the rest of that day and the following three working days--a suspension he says is a direct result of his being an active shop steward.

Earlier this month Mullins held a hearing on Holcombe's suspension. By that time Holcombe and Stefani had reached some sort of detente and Stefani and a union lawyer sat in on the hearing, which resulted in a reduction of Holcombe's unpaid suspension from three days to one. Mullins will not respond specifically to Holcombe's charges, saying only that he feels the suspension is justified and that the scheduling policies Holcombe is complaining about have been worked out between Harvard and the union.

Holcombe now says he still won't accept the suspension, and just this week filed another grievance complaining that Mullins "degraded" him and "took the Lord's name in vain" in a meeting they had on Monday. He also criticises Stefani for not being at the meeting to defend him against the questioning of six supervisors.

Like many workers grievances. Holcombe's have a specific focus but seem more important for the general malaise they portray. Harvard to him is the powerful, anonymous Him on the other end of the phone, the organization he says portrays him as "a dull witted man full of absurd notions"--while he must seem to Harvard an inexperienced troublemaker, someone who, as Stefani says, needs to "get educated" to the way labor management relations are usually conducted here Holcombe's aggressive, stream-of-grievances. Harvard-as-enemy style of shop stewardship is new to the University, and although Balsam seems to share Holcombe's attitudes he has been quieter and avoided disciplinary trouble.

"Employees here haven't looked into what the University could do for them." Holcombe says. "They're afraid of losing their jobs. I know employees at Harvard are dissatisfied, but under fear of suspension they won't speak out. To the people in my shop I'm a hero. I'm brave. I don't care about losing my job. You can go in any dining hall and all you hear is gripes--but they won't go in with those gripes."

"I've united my dining halls," he says. "They don't like people wearing union buttons. They don't mind people paying dues, but when they start acting like they're in the union they don't like it."

* * * * *

The union hall of Local 186 of the Cooks and Pastry Cooks Association, AFL-CIO, is on Berkeley St. near Boston's South End, on the second floor of a crumbling brick building. It's an old office, dim with scuffed linoleum floors and paraphernalia all over the walls. Most of the space in the office is taken up by a large room filed with folding chairs that face a podium.

On either side of the podium are portraits, one of George Washington and the other of Jesus Christ, and two flags, one American and the other the Cooks' special flag, which has crossed knives and forks on a white background. There are commemorative pictures covering the walls, all of them old and chronicling various union events through the years, and photographs of all the U.S. presidents since the local started, except Richard Nixon. There are two photographs Stefani takes special care to point out to a visitor: one of his son posing with a cake that won a culinary arts contest, and the other of the original members of the local, all but two of whom are dead. The air is heavy and dark and preservative.

Stefani, who works in the Cooks' only private office and has pictures of St. Francis Assissi and Pope John XXIII on his wall, joined the Cooks in 1928. He had come to America from England in 1928, and he worked as a chief in restaurants around Boston, staying at the Copley Plaza Hotel's restaurant for most of his career.

"In 1928 a guy--he's dead now, used to cook at the Copley--came up to me and said, 'Joe, why don't you join the union?'" Stefani says. "I said, 'What's the union?' He said it was better wages. I said 'OK, let me go upstairs to my locker and get my three dollars. So I got my three dollars and I was in the union."

Shortly after he joined Stefani had his first round of important negotiations, with the Copley Plaza management. Although wages then were low--averaging less than $20 a week, an amount a Cooks member now earns in about half a day--Stefani decided to focus the negotiations on getting a regular day off.

"Mr. Rice, the owner of the Copley, said to me, 'You crazy Englishman, why do you want a steady day off?'" he says. "I says, Mr. Rice, I came to America and I'm a little disappointed. I don't have any family here. Mr. Rice, I like women. I can't even make an appointment with a prostitute because I don't have a steady day off.' And we got that day off."

But during the depression the union fell apart; nobody but Stefani paid dues and management kept cutting wages. He left Local 186 for a few years to join Local 34, but in 1937 he decided to revitalize 186. He called a meeting: nobody came. He called a second meeting and eight people showed up, a third to which 25 people came, and so on. At one point in the drive Local 186 had 15 cents in its treasury. The local got its charter and Stefani took over as business agent on February 11, 1937, but kept working at the Copley until 1963. Only once, in 1941, did someone run against him for business agent, but Stefani swamped him.

Lately Stefani and his wife have taken to buying Princess Ortega heavy pan sets before union meetings, to use them as door prizes to entice people to come. If 50 people show up for a meeting, one of them gets the Princess Ortega; if less people come Stefani keeps it until the next meeting.

Stefani likes to show the latest Princess Ortega heavy pan set to visitors, along with all the old photographs of union meetings, to show them what things have come to. The pans are new, shiny; they stand out against the heavy, scuffed atmosphere of the Local 186 office.

"Look," Stefani says. "Look what we bring to entice them to come to the meeting to get educated. Sure the meetings are dull. But hell, it's business."

Sherman Holcombe: "I know employees at Harvard are dissatisfied, but under fear of suspension they won't speak out. To the people in my shop I'm a hero. I'm brave. I don't care about losing my job. You can go in any dining hall and all you hear is gripes--but they won't go in with those gripes."