My friend and mentor, Bill Pastreich, died recently (I say “died” because Bill hated euphemisms).  Bill had a long career as a community and union organizer, but he made his biggest impact leading a small local union based in southeastern Massachusetts for twenty-five years.  I was fortunate to work there for a year before going to law school, and I saw how, in addition to raising wages and benefits across-the-board, a union can negotiate contract language to maximize opportunities for career advancement.

Many employers talk about creating “career ladders” for workers, but at Cape Cod Hospital, Bill prodded management to commit to a series of measures that gave workers a real opportunity to move up through the ranks from the lowest entry-level positions to jobs that required greater knowledge and paid significantly higher wages.  The career ladder program that Bill built had several components that worked in tandem to make it effective.

First, Bill insisted upon negotiating over the qualifications for each job.  This is something unions rarely do.  There is a tendency to defer to management’s judgment about what qualifications are necessary for each position.  But, Bill noticed that managers tended to include educational requirements for jobs, insisting upon an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree, without fully considering the connection between the degree and the job duties.  And these degree requirements served as an obstacle to workers advancing to more rewarding jobs.  Bill would press managers to list the actual qualifications they needed — instead of a degree program, was there a particular class the worker would need, or maybe the worker just needed to know basic medical terminology.  

The next element, which was both the hardest to negotiate, and the most important in the success of the program, was to get management to agree to give any open position to the worker with the most seniority at the hospital who met the qualifications for the position.  It’s extremely hard to win this type of contract language because management tends to fiercely resist giving up its prerogative to pick the candidate of its choice.  But, this was truly the key to making the career ladder program a success.  Our society tends to overvalue credentials.  And many people believe the adage that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”  This meant that managers had a tendency to favor young people who were right out of school over older workers who had spent years working in lower skilled positions.  While managers would insist that they wanted the discretion to choose the “best” candidate for the job, deciding who is “best” is inherently subjective.  One reason why it can be hard for unions to obtain this kind of contract language is that the union negotiator also has to convince workers that it’s worth holding up a contract settlement to get it.  Bill’s success was in getting workers to understand the value of guaranteeing that seniority would prevail for promotions.  Winning this language made it worthwhile for workers to invest their time in taking classes because they knew that if they met the qualifications for a job, they would be given an opportunity to prove themselves.  Bill also got both workers and management to agree that the only seniority that should matter in the hospital was length of time at the hospital, rather than length of time in a particular department or classification. So, with each move up the ranks workers did not have to start over to build seniority.  Workers are less likely to try to move up the ladder if accepting a new position means giving up their seniority rights.

There were other elements of the career ladder program that made it effective.  Once the union negotiated the qualifications for various jobs, it made those requirements available to workers so they could see which classes they would need to work their way up.  When a job was awarded, the hospital was required to post the name and seniority date of the successful applicant so others could see why they didn’t get the job.  The union also negotiated for tuition reimbursement for classes.  To make taking a new job less of a gamble, the union arranged for a two-day trial period for each new position where the worker could shadow someone else, and then decide whether to accept the new job or return to their old position.

With these elements in place, the career ladder program became a huge success.  The union and the hospital put out a joint booklet highlighting workers who had moved up the ranks inside the hospital.  The hospital benefitted from the program because it reduced turnover.  If a worker didn’t like her supervisor, instead of looking elsewhere for a new job, the worker could find another job she was qualified for at the hospital.  The career ladder program also bred loyalty to the union because workers understood that their union contract is what gave them the opportunity to move up the ladder.

The Cape Cod Hospital career ladder program should have been a model for hospitals across the country, but without a union it’s inconceivable that managers would give up their discretion to choose their preferred candidate for each job.  People have a tendency to overestimate their ability to pick winners.  This is true in the stock market, in sports betting, and, in my experience, in hiring as well.  Strangely, the same people who tout their skill in evaluating talent seem to lack any confidence in their ability to help staff they did not choose grow and develop.

At their best, unions make employers do a better job of managing staff.  There’s a reason why the term “nepo baby” has caught on — without a union, or some other check on managers’ discretion, too often jobs are awarded to friends and family.  And when there’s a need to reduce staff, the people who are let go are rarely the ones who have lunch with the boss.  When left to their own devices, employers tend to manage in ways that pit workers against each other, with each worker trying to show how they are “the best.”  But, organizations tend to work best when the culture encourages staff to share their knowledge with each other, and to make each other succeed.  Every workplace should be a place where workers keep learning, move up the ranks to more challenging positions, and turn their jobs into careers.  Bill Pastreich showed how unions can help create workplaces where that happens, and that is a legacy worth celebrating.