INDUSTRY fi BUSINESS
Unions for scientists gain popularity Collective bargaining becomes more and more a means of gaining job security, higher salaries, and better fringe benefits Ask most any chemist or chemical engineer what unions mean to him and he'll likely reply with something about Teamsters or United Auto Workers, shake his head vigorously, and declare, "Not for me." But the image of unions as blue-collar organizations is changing, and if the recent spate of activity in organizing professional and technical employees is any indication, the image is changing rapidly. The benefits and problems of organizing scientists for collective bargaining with their employers were spotlighted at an all-day symposium on employment and professional status of scientists held during the Pacific Conference on Chemistry and Spectroscopy this month in San Francisco. The conference was sponsored jointly by the American Chemical Society and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy. "Many professionals want to do their own thing, but in a professional way," remarks Dr. William J. Schell, chairman of the symposium. This is where the question of professionalism vs. unionism becomes important to the chemist. Dr. Schell, a senior chemist at Aerojet-General Corp. in Los Angeles, believes that chemists want to be dealt with as professionals in economic and professional matters, and they may feel that unions aren't the way to achieve such gains. This may be because many professionals have an "old-fashioned" image of what a union is and does, he explains. "Yet chemists and other scientists are increasingly recognizing the need for a legal negotiating power to help them deal with their problems," he says. Dominated. Henry Dooley, vice president of the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association (MEBA), an arm of AFL-CIO that represents about 20,000 professionals, says that discussions of collective bargaining for professional employees are too often dominated by the questions of professionalism vs. unionism. Professionals, he says, can live with unions. MEBA believes that scientists and engineers should bury the "myth that bargaining is nonprofessional." He tells scientists to "renounce the proposition that as a highly educated and skilled employee you must be fully dependent on the generosity of your employer, while less educated men require the employer to 36 C&EN OCT. 19, 1970
negotiate with them on issues which vitally affect their lives." In today's job market with a large number of chemists working for a single employer, Mr. Dooley charges, chemists can no longer reasonably expect to bargain individually. "They must come together in a concerted effort to effectively participate in the making of their own destinies," he says. Mr. Dooley encourages professional groups to affiliate with larger federations, such as MEBA, and points out some of the successes that MEBA has had with affiliating other professional groups, particularly in California: • Aerospace Professional and Technical Association, which includes about 10,000 engineers at North American Rockwell, Los Angeles, Calif. • Association of Industrial Scientists, a group of chemists, chemical engineers, physicists, and mathematicians at Shell Development Co., Emeryville, Calif. • Engineers and Scientists of California, about 1800 professionals who work for Pacific Gas and Electric Co., San Francisco. • California Association of Professional Employees, some 3700 engineers at Bechtel and Parsons Engineering, Los Angeles. • Research and Engineers Professional Employees Association, which represents about 450 chemists, engineers, and other scientists at American Oil Co., Whiting, Ind. The professional affiliates retain their own identity, but they gain many advantages and greater strength in their bargaining position through their affiliation with MEBA, Mr. Dooley claims. "MEBA is a professional organization run for professionals by professionals. Thus it has the monetary and political clout to make demands and hold firm, which smaller organizations usually lack the experience and money to do." Societies. Dr. Schell agrees with Mr. Dooley that in many instances affiliation with MEBA or a similar organization is a good solution to bargaining problems for the professional. "But I personally have not given up on trying to get the same sort of thing done within today's existing chemical societies," Dr. Schell declares. ACS,
Aerojet-General's Schell Portable pension plan
he believes, could even perform the function of a nationwide collective bargaining agent for chemists and chemical engineers. In line with this, Dr. Schell recommends that ACS poll its members to determine in what directions the members want the Society to go. Dr. Schell distributed a questionnaire at the symposium in an attempt to sample its opinion on economic and professional issues. Although he acknowledges that his sample (30 questionnaires were returned) is too small to be very meaningful, he believes that the response to certain questions gives some idea of the current dissatisfaction with the way professionals are treated. For example, to the question "Do you think technical societies are doing a satisfactory job of prompting professionalism for scientists and engineers?" all 30 people polled answered no. Ten per cent felt that a technical society such as ACS could be the most effective and satisfactory agent for improving professional and economic status of scientists, 5% felt that an
MEBA's Dooley Bury the myth C&EN:
Madeleine Polinger
Shell's Dugre Unproductive negotiations
organization like the American Institute of Chemists would be the best means, and 85% said that a professional society registered as a legal bargaining agent with membership in a national union such as MEBA would be the most effective agent. To the question "In your opinion, will a large number of technical personnel be organized in the future?" 87.5% responded yes, 4.8% said no, and the remainder was undecided. This, Dr. Schell believes, indicates a trend toward unionization. Pensions. On the issue of portable pension plans, Dr. Schell says, more than half of those responding believe that a portable pension plan, such as the one ACS is currently trying to formulate, where employers would not be obligated to participate, will probably not be subscribed to by enough corporations to benefit the majority of scientists. Speaking on this issue, Eugene Miller, a law partner in the Los Angeles law firm of Brundage, Neyhart, Miller,
Ross, and Reich, which represents blue-collar labor unions, says that "If plumbers can have a portable pension plan, so can chemists." The ACS plan, he notes, is a small step in the right direction, but the major problem is that participation in the plan by the employer is strictly voluntary. Mr. Miller recommends a portable pension plan based on the same idea as the one that the plumbers of southern California currently have—all employers of plumbers are legally obligated to pay into that plan. Mr. Miller recognizes a promotion problem facing chemists and other scientists. "Chemists want status and recognition as professionals, but often they cannot increase their salaries without moving into administrative work," he says. A union could act to get them the monetary advancement they deserve without causing them to change their job status, he says. Transition. Meanwhile, more and more scientists across the country are getting their first taste of union representation. The transition to unionization isn't always smooth, however. An example of the complexities that can arise when professional employees are engaged in union activity is the situation at Shell Development in Emeryville, Calif. Since 1947 the sole legal bargaining agent recognized by the National Labor Relations Board for professional personnel at Emeryville has been the Association of Industrial Scientists (AIS). During the past few years, many AIS members began to feel that negotiations with management concerning salaries and fringe benefits, to name a few negotiable areas, had been unproductive, remarks Dr. Donald Dugre, a chemist at Shell and a past AIS chairman. "We were professional scientists, but amateur labor negotiators," asserts Dr. Eugene Magoon, also a Shell chemist and a past AIS chairman. "We lacked the economic and professional clout to get things done. The Marine Engineers Beneficial Association offered us that muscle." In April AIS held an affiliation election among its members. Of 225 AIS members, 206 voted for affiliation with MEBA, 14 against (C&EN, May 4, page 12). AIS then informed Shell management that it had affiliated with MEBA. A regular meeting between AIS-MEBA and management was held on April 30. "But after our initial meeting with management, whenever we requested a meeting we were put off," claims the present AIS chairman, Dr. Leon Hunter. Not so, says Shell. "There was doubt in our minds whether AIS continued to exist as the collective bargaining agent. In addition, there was doubt whether the 206 who
voted for affiliation really represented the professionals at Shell, since there was a total of 470 professionals at that time," says Frank Douma, manager of employee relations at Shell. "To resolve these doubts, we simply suggested that AIS join with us and go to NLRB and ask for a federally supervised election," he says. Unfair. AIS did indeed go to NLRB, but not to request an election. Instead, AIS filed an unfair labor practice petition charging that Shell management refused to bargain with AIS-MEBA. To further complicate an already sticky situation (although both Shell and AIS quickly agree that there was no bitterness involved), a group of professionals at Shell, some of which were AIS members, formed another bargaining group—the Association of Professional Scientists (APS). "We felt that we didn't want to follow the traditional labor union route offered to us by MEBA and AFL-CIO," states APS chairman James Hayden. APS, Dr. Hayden says, is similar to AIS before it affiliated with MEBA. APS doesn't have a membership count as does AIS because it is relatively new and its constitution was just disclosed last week. APS has a nine-man executive committee which has also filed with NLRB a petition that Dr. Hayden claims contains some 210 signatures. The petition asks that APS, not AIS-MEBA, be recognized as the sole bargaining agent for the professionals at Shell. Dr. Hayden points out that their 210 signatures represent more professionals than voted for the MEBA affiliation. Shell management has also filed a petition with NLRB asking for an election. As of press time, the AIS-MEBAAPS-Shell conflict was by no means settled. However, on Oct. 6 NLRB issued a letter suggesting a settlement, including the possibility of dismissing petitions filed by both Shell management and APS. Neither the question of settlement nor of the petitions has yet been resolved, but both issues will likely be settled by the end of this week. Dr. Hayden says that APS will refile its petition until NLRB calls for a new election to see who should represent the collective bargaining rights of the Shell professionals. Others. AIS, which was almost unique at the time of its formation among NLRB certified groups as an agent representing professionals exclusively, has been joined by many other professional associations or unions. One such association that has followed a route similar to that of AIS is a group at American Oil Co/s Whiting, Ind., research facilities. There the Research and Engineers Professional OCT. 19, 1970 C&EN
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Employees Association (REPEA) was certified by NLRB in 1940, and this past June affiliated with MEBA. E. Harold Sawyer, a mechanical engineer at the Whiting laboratory and spokesman for REPEA, says his union has negotiated several advantages for the 450 technical employees it represents. Some of these advantages, Mr. Sawyer points out, are compensation for scheduled overtime, extended hospitalization benefits, educational benefits, patent compensation, and a salary compression plan to help keep salaries of long-term employees on a par with increasing starting salaries. More signs of a quickening pace in organizing professional technical personnel come from two other rapidly growing alliances formed within the past three years to strengthen the bargaining positions of their individual member unions. The Council of AFLCIO Unions for Scientific, Professional, and Cultural Employees (SPACE), created in 1967, now represents 18 unions which bargain in behalf of about 5 million people. Of these, a SPACE spokesman estimates about 1 million are professionals and about 100,000 are technical or scientific professionals. The Council of Engineers and Scientists Organizations (CESO), formed last year, represents about 125,000 industrially employed engineers. Insecurity. Jack Golodner, executive secretary of SPACE, explains that some of the reasons for increased professional union activity include job insecurity among scientists because of increasing layoffs, a growing dissatisfaction with some companies' pension plans, and the long-term feeling of many scientific employees that they are losing ground economically. Harold Ammond, spokesman for CESO and executive secretary of the Association of Scientists and Professional Engineering Personnel at RCA, Camden, N.J., confirms that there is currently an awakening among engineers and other scientists to the need of collective bargaining. He, too, cites companies' staff reductions and a slowdown in wage increases as important reasons behind accelerating interest in professional unions. If one thing is clear from all this, it's that the traditional images of labor unions among chemists, engineers, and other scientists are indeed changing. And one sign that professional unions are likely here to stay comes from Amoco management spokesman Robert A. Steel, laboratory manager at Whiting, Ind., who indicates a restrained tolerance on the part of management for REPEA, regarding the union as "a fact of life." "We're legally required to live with it," Mr. Steel says with a sigh. 38
C&EN OCT. 19, 1970
Composite spinnaker pole on the famed yacht Intrepid uses Carbide's graphite yarn
Graphite fibers attract surfeit of producers The technology is exciting, the market potentially large, the price about $300 a pound—yet the graphite fibers business can only be called frustrating. Some of the top companies in the chemical industry here and abroad are scrambling for a niche in graphite fiber production. These include Celanese, Great Lakes Carbon, Hercules, Monsanto, and Union Carbide in the U.S., Courtaulds in the U.K., France's Rhône-Poulenc, and Japan's Kureha Chemicals Industry Co. and Toray Industries. The trouble is that too many producers—there are at least 15 to date—are vying for a limited amount of business. Some 3000 pounds of graphite fibers were sold in the U.S. last year. 1970's output is anybody's guess as a C&EN survey of producers finds estimates ranging from "no change from 1969" to up to the 20,000-pound mark. Advanced management techniques,
forceful research and development programs, and no holds barred selling programs won't keep the number of firms producing the fibers intact for much longer. Practically every producer expects a shakeout—and every producer expects to be left when the dust of the shakeout settles. Various avenues. Companies have entered the graphite fiber business several different ways. Monsanto, latest entrant in the field, points out that its graphite fibers products business is part of the firm's New Enterprise division. Celanese formed a newventure group earlier this year to enter the business, but in a work force reduction involving 2000 people throughout the firm this month (C&EN, Oct. 12, page 7 ) , the Celanese advanced engineering composites venture will be combined with the graphite research group at Summit, N.J. Ferro Corp., which doesn't produce the fiber but prepares the fiber
