> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://herr-klamm.ghost.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Union Negotiating the Workplace
- URL: https://herr-klamm.ghost.io/union-negotiating-the-workplace/
- Published: 2026-09-07T10:45:49.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-07T11:06:44.000Z
- Author: Stephen Bender

January 19th 2005

  
Laying some Groundwork

If you work a non-union job, you grumble to your co-workers about unresolved conflicts in the workplace. But you really don’t have any institutional recourse, you must grin and bear it. Maybe, if you're lucky, you have a sympathetic supervisor. If not, you can always take it up with "human resources”—it’s funny, because it’s not true.

(How is it that the corporations haven’t yet come up with a catchy info-age euphemism for “human resources?” It’s just so 19th Century—one of the last shabbily spun remnants of today's workplace I guess.)

The stresses that you must endure cannot be remedied on an equal basis without fear of jeopardizing your hoped-for upward glide path. Or, it may be a more crucial matter of keeping your position in the first place. Don't make waves, be more flexible, and more positive say the “self-help” books sitting on the break room table; or, maybe, a friend is pushing. In other words, it’s your fault.

If you are lucky enough to have union protection, it’s obviously not a panacea. However, you do have a procedure and an organization behind you, in the common circumstance. Engaging management in a contract negotiation is, to use a term I loath, an "empowering" experience. You can exercise a little control, at least over your some of your working life.

For most of us, this kind of security has long been fleeting. The ability to have a say in how you provide for the most basic needs of life—keeping healthy, housing, feeding, and clothing yourself and loved ones with some assurance of stability—is under severe attack. So, it is more necessary than ever for us to struggle for these bedrock human rights. Yeah, the possession of “human rights” is not just a question for "banana republic" residents anymore; they’re up for grabs in this drooping democracy of ours too.

To the harried non-unionized worker, I’m no doubt putting the question too delicately. The middle class is being hollowed out in this country; it’s not a big secret. We experience it daily, even as the nightly news promotes the latest reality show trial.

But we Americans have myriad ways of getting out and getting off. Contentious reality can so easily be evaded. And after all, who wants to go out of their way to experience discomfort or pain? Not when we have access to such intensely alluring techno-distractions as: 500-channel cable television, Tivo, video games, high-speed broadband, tricked out cel phones, I-pods, and a bunch of “must haves” that I haven’t even heard of.

Or, maybe you’re rebellious; you don’t get hung up on the workplace / political BS. You don’t need to sooth your tumult through tangible products; you’re more “experiential.” You live in the moment. Maybe you get through the day by accessing licit, prescribed, and illicit palliatives. Maybe you just ignore it all and focus on your own subcultural interest. Or, maybe you seek to fuck the pain away. Hey, almost all of us get around to it now and again. But, in the end, it’s just another serpentine dodge.

But what are the personal psychological costs of this cozy evasion? What are the implications for democracy in a nation where pain is boomerang marketed—and therefore largely understood—as merely an individual, privatized question of your shortcomings?

We middle classers can yawningly avert our eyes from things we don’t want to face. The dribs and drabs of American corpses, for example, floating on a sea of Iraqi blood, is experienced by many as just one more routine—if tragic and unfortunate—media image. But in the deeper recesses, we do know that it’s real flesh and blood at stake and therefore, there’s no escape—no escape from our society.

And so, here’s a little story of the possibilities inherent in having a voice, however faint in practice, in your workplace.

Green Apple Books & the UFCW: Some History  
Human beings are social animals; they congregate for their most meaningful moments. Among them, one might count religious ceremonies, marriage rites, demonstrations, and sporting events—oh yeah, and unions too.

There is something that happens to us when we work collectively towards a perceived desirable or even socially constructive end. This gregarious impulse, this drive, can be used for good or for ill. But it is always with us. When it is experienced collectively, there wells within us a kind of exhilaration—you’re connecting with your sisters and brothers on the basis of something greater than your own agenda.

So it was with the workers of Green Apple Books in San Francisco in the summer and autumn of 2003\. It was time to negotiate a new contract. My friend Wes Swedlow and I jointly represented our bargaining unit in concert with the United Food & Commercial Workers, (UFCW) Local 101.

As to the story behind the coming of the union in the late-1980s, it is shrouded in the mists of bygone days. While accounts differ fairly widely depending on who’s doing the talking, the workers at the time saw one element or another in management as arbitrary and capricious. The fight was pretty knock down, drag ‘em out: expensive lawyers, bad feelings and all of the rest of it.

The last round of negotiations in 2000, which I missed but friends participated in, were quite different from the ones which we would experience. Again, accounts from that time vary. In short, the union was seen as unresponsive, pushing a health care plan that wasn’t on our agenda, according to the two workers who bothered to involve themselves in the process. So, it wasn’t hard for management to turn the tables and get a status quo contract, particularly when the most frequent union interaction came in the form of threatening letters demanding the collection of dues.

By the time 2003 rolled around, the local had a new leadership team. And, by most accounts, a pretty different attitude was taken towards our comparatively rinky dink bargaining unit of 20 clerks and buyers. (Local 101 represents Macy’s & Safeway workers who are up against real corporations that systematically try to wring ever last penny and minute out of their underlings.)

The Psychology of Negotiation  
In a business as small as Green Apple, which strives for a community ethos and has managers who themselves were once clerks, there exists a different psychology from the corporation. This was reflected in the negotiations. While there are of course clear distinctions in the workplace—some people tell other people what to do—there exists also an overlapping, occasional sense of not exactly camaraderie, but something like an affinity. This reality would make for not only an interesting experience during the negotiations; it also made reaching a solution that was acceptable to both sides easier.

Across the table from us—in the stately headquarters of our Local by Union Square—sat Rich Savoy, the original owner, and Pete Mulvahill, the general manager. Rich founded Green Apple Books in 1967\. He had over the decades poured a great deal of effort into building San Francisco’s premier used book store. Pete, along with two long-time Green Apple workers, was now in the process of transitioning the store from Rich’s ownership to their troika.

On our side were three good-hearted, long-time union vets—old school folks, in the best sense of that term. Diane Holland was our bargaining unit’s sometimes representative, whose family back in the day had dinner with Harry Bridges, the legendary International Longshore & Warehouseman’s Union labor leader. Handling the negotiations most directly was Gary Feliciano, a calm and contemplative fellow who offered valuable psychological insight into the process. Finally, there was Mike, an animated guy who ably threw in his two cents, often with a hearty belly laugh. The office was covered in historic labor agitprop posters that opened to Wes and I a vista of our union’s and San Francisco’s proud labor past.

Once we settled into the conference room, things started out pretty tense. \[I should say that these are recollections buttressed by copious notes, they reflect feelings and memory, not “reality.”\] Pete was quite formal, tending to dispute each point with a certain intent precision. Rich would eschew the details at times, in favor of bitter recollections from the organizing days, as well as past heated negotiations with a bygone firebrand union rep.

We duly presented our opening proposal, which didn’t fly, to say the least. While we didn’t expect it to be adopted per se, we also didn’t expect a blanket rejection. We figured it would start a conversation, form a point of departure; it didn’t.

So, the first round ended up being pretty dispiriting. This alienation was exemplified by Rich repeatedly suggesting that we “apply to be butchers at Safeway if you want to make money.” No dis on Safeway butchers here; the point is that it was an unthinking provocation—given how moot a point it was—since no one was likely to be headed that way.

Afterwards, over drinks at the funny Gold Dust Lounge, Wes and I realized that it was necessary to try to change the tenor of the interaction, from a dry recitation of proposals and counter-proposals to something else. Since we had been meeting with our fellow employees repeatedly in the run up to the negotiations, we decided to run an idea by them. Wes would draft a piece\* (see below) which the assembled employees would sign.

The next, or it may have been the third, round was probably the most fascinating part of the entire experience. We had Gary read our heart-felt piece. In recalling that moment recently, Wes and I had oddly contrasting memories. I recalled Pete’s reaction, which was to not make eye contact with us for a remarkable period of time. Rich, too was momentarily changed; he was a little taken aback it seemed. He stammered a little in remarking how struck he was by our sense of connection to the store and what we thought it does—and could—represent. He then recalled his past as a machinist with Eastern airlines and his subsequent struggles in building Green Apple through a broken marriage.

This is not to say that conflicts did not arise afterward, but they came up in a context of a more humanized ambiance. Rich could be gruff and irascible. However, if you made a point, he’d look you in the eye and acknowledge it. It’s also not as if his curtness didn’t extend to Pete. All it took was a karate-chop-type hand gesture, and Pete would fall silent. Here it became evident that while Pete was squarely in Rich’s corner, which naturally made sense, he also had to walk something of a tightrope. On one hand, he had to demonstrate to Rich that he was sufficiently hard-headed as the head owner-to-be. On the other, he too was once a clerk and couldn't now in any event come off as obstreperous as Rich could be, or employee morale would plummet.

Wes and I faced roughly similar problems. As the negotiations dragged on into the third month, it became evident that we would do better than what had been the status quo for over a decade. This was good. It also dawned on us that developing a fall back position—considered by some in the bargaining unit as almost capitulatory—would be the only way to avert a strike. We walked our own tightrope.

And yet, in spite of all of the ups and downs, we came to feel an uncanny exuberance come over us after each successive meeting. While a little discouraged at what we sometimes perceived as intransigence, we had gone through the process of meeting with the owner and general manager on an equal basis. They said their piece; we said ours, and the chips fell.

Adding to the pathos was the psychological change which Wes and I witnessed in some of our co-workers. One young woman, who was a very conscientious worker, related that she had been frightened at the prospect of being yelled at for accidentally being in the break room a few minutes too long. Another endearing young woman teared up when I related some of the more heated back and forth.

Among some of the longer-term workers, there was also a somewhat more surprising shift. Two gents, who initially seemed somewhat ambivalent at coming to our meetings, found their voices as the process continued, thereby adding legitimacy and power to Wes and my efforts. There was real emotional power in this surfacing of repressed / blown off grievances—it built a potent cohesion and solidarity.

As the negotiations headed towards a close, we had won a 50% increase in beginning wages beyond the status quo, which sounds pretty impressive until one considers that a ballot initiative was about to raise San Francisco’s minimum wage to $8.50, the past contract’s starting point. We also managed to keep the status quo on our good health care plan, which in the present climate of rising costs across the board, was a solid accomplishment. Finally, we also managed to get special bonus dispensations for certain workers who perform more onerous tasks, as well as the ability to roll over sick days into the following year.

However, Wes and I wanted to reach the mid-point between our opening wage offer and the long-prevailing contract arrangements. In seeking to accomplish this, we initiated the intercession of a federal mediator. We all met at the UFCW’s Novato office one afternoon to hash things out once and for all. Presiding was a queen pin by the name of R.

She had for decades worked on many union negotiations from labor’s side, and was now retired from that work. She was scrupulously even-handed and tough on both sides; she certainly cajoled and prodded when necessary. Eventually, she recessed with Rich and Pete and hammered out the final agreement. It provided for a 72% increase in starting wages over the life of the contract above and beyond past agreements, but the raises were staggered to lessen the upfront impact.

A few days after the negotiations closed, Pete approached me and complemented me on “keeping my cool” during the more tense moments. I thanked him for being a formidable and fair “adversary.” So, after we dusted ourselves off, and with the passage of a year, we can look back and be proud. That’s not to say that it isn’t still tough to eke out an existence in imperial San Francisco. But, we did break precedent on wages, kept our health care as was and got a few more bucks for specialized co-workers. This made it worth it, to Wes and me anyway.

A month or so later, our co-workers presented us with a gift certificate to the regal old-style San Francisco steak house Alfred’s. We swapped union war stories and made merry late into the night. Ending up at the cavernous Li Po bar in Chinatown, a power outage plunged the eerily abandoned district into pitch black. As little lamps flickered across the bar, to further illuminate our post-negotiation glow, I mused that for once there was a little light in the darkness.

Our Accidental Approach: Good & Bad Cop  
Wes and my personal approaches to the negotiations happily matched our personalities, which ended up complementing one another, rather than conflicting unduly. Wes was quicker to anger, readier to confront issues head on; I was more circumspect, more inclined to try and demonstrate our position in the context of a possibly mutually beneficial outcome. Towards the end, we began joking that it was almost a subconscious good cop-bad cop routine.

Added to this ability to express ourselves in the modes that were most comfortable, Wes and I both had a similar realization. While I had been active in some of the “anti-globalization” demos, among other affinity group actions, Wes, an academic, had confined most of his politics to the realm of “theory.” In the two years leading up to the negotiations, I too had drifted into the more passive and solitary activity of writing for my website, to the gradual diminution of activism.

And then the negotiating experience forced us to put our respective “theory” and “journalistic ideals,” or shut up. It had a liberating, if somewhat fleeting, impact. In the months following the completion of the contract, the busy holiday season got underway. And while we lodged some grievances with the union, our ideas about trying to alter the culture of the workplace foundered on (my, in particular) inertia. So, the spirit was not sustained. To some degree, this would have been difficult under the best of circumstances. Every day life has a way of lulling you to sleep if you’re not careful—you might even be tempted to just pull the covers up over your head and sleep, rather than engage the world.

In the end, we didn’t have the insight or perhaps the charisma to carry it through. Wilhelm Reich, the brilliant if later errant psychoanalyst put it succinctly. “Your socialism, your Christianity, your American democracy is what you do every day.”

Lessons and the Matter of Reform  
A few lessons from our highly specific case can be distilled for a larger audience. First off, there was the key matter of transparency. Under current labor law, privately held firms are under no obligation to share with their employees the details of the company's financial health, unless they are asking for concessions. This put us at an obvious disadvantage when management emphasized the difficulties, of which there clearly are many, inherent in running an independent used book store.

So, this reality left us flying blind. Unionists are forced to imply that management is gilding the financial lily, without hard numbers to back it up. We tried hard to overcome this obstacle by doing outside research, but it was still a matter of relating anecdotes and impressions rather than cold numbers.

Based on our experience, every workplace in the United States should be organized in one way or another. Non-supervisory workers all across the land come in each day and work eight, nine, ten hours; they have a fundamental right to have some say in how business is conducted--as an unambiguous issue of basic fairness. Coming from a conscious bargaining unit, affiliated with a union representing service workers, we see American deindustrialization feeding the surging growth of the “service sector”—WalMart being the most poisonous example—and agonize over the exploitation that is seeping across the fruited plain. In the end, there’s only one option: don’t whine, organize!

\*To the Owners of Green Apple Books:  
We, the booksellers, book-buyers, and music-buyers of Green Apple Books, many of whom have worked with you for years, want you to know that we too have a love and respect for this bookstore, a San Francisco institution with its own declared day. Just like our customers, we love these dusty stairs and aisles that we walk most every day, these books and CD’s that we shelve, return, sell, and in many cases buy ourselves (well, maybe we don’t love all of them…).

More importantly we love working with one another and feel that we have helped to make this place what it is. We all, to varying degrees, enthusiastically write talkers about our favorite books and music, and our discs in the listening stations often end up as top sellers. We give our input on what we think would be useful, helpful, and even necessary additions to what is already an expansive collection. We give to the store and each other our knowledge and creativity, and we see them realized not simply in sales, but satisfied customers who find a book or CD they didn’t even know they were looking for. We truly and sincerely feel that we are an integral part of Green Apple and for us that means we have a loyalty to making this an always better bookstore. As we read in our handouts when we were hired, we’re not just hired labor:

“To maintain our reputation and customer base, it is very important that when customers come into the store, they are helped by a staff of friendly, knowledgeable booksellers, not just clerks.”

We take that to heart—we are not just clerks. We understand that times are economically out of sorts and that no one suffers in such an economy more than the independents. The last thing we would want is to send Green Apple to the vast graveyard of independent bookstores upon which the likes of Borders and Barnes and Noble have built themselves.

But Green Apple, to our eyes, appears to be doing quite well—it is often crowded, packed to its un-breathing gills on a number of days in any given month. We hear the registers ringing, watch the credit card machines sputtering at a steady clip, and see the large register totals at the end of the day. Our own warehouse inventory is linked not only to Borders and Barnes and Noble, but Amazon.com as well. In other words, we see up close a successful, very popular bookstore. As David Grogan’s paraphrase of an interview earlier this year with Pete states: “Fortunately, Green Apple Books is doing very well….”

Because of all of this, because we feel that we are a part of this place, because you have expressed concerns that a raise above 50 cents would close the store down, and because we want to avoid any such thing, we request that you open the books to us so that we can accurately understand the extent and ramifications of what we are asking for and what can be offered. Should it be the case that the books show the store to be doing well and not in jeopardy, then we feel our proposal is more than fair based on our skill levels, experience, information, and importance to Green Apple Books.

Sincerely,

Your coworkers at Green Apple

Marc Horton  
David Krah  
Brian Quinn  
John Peebles  
Myleen Hollero  
Wesley Swedlow  
Scott Boutin  
John Hallquist  
Stephen Bender  
Tien Le  
Alison Davis  
Ed Shurna  
Kevin Davis  
Mike Papuga  
Spiros Hinze