Free Intimate Wars by Merle Hoffman

quite satisfied, my employees began expecting more and more from me on a personal level. I felt guilty when I could not grant a specific request, and this general empathizing led to my feeling more and more responsible for their happiness.
    Worse, this method of apologetic supervision put a damper on my ability to make across-the-board management decisions. When I had to give unpopular directives, I was met with passive-aggressive attempts to undermine my position of power. I would walk through the hallways and hear whispers in my wake. One day at lunch, I found a dirty speculum in my soup. I’d gotten caught up in the tension between wanting to be liked and needing to be respected, and the situation was beginning to snowball out of my control.
    The HIP group with whom Flushing Women’s shared space was unionized by 1199, an extremely powerful institution
whose representatives sat on the board of HIP. Mingling with the HIP employees, my staff decided they wanted to unionize, too. My office manager, a middle-aged woman who had particular difficulty with my authority, contacted 1199 as a self-appointed leader of eight people, and I soon received official notification that Flushing Women’s was in the process of being unionized. Within days of the announcement, a union meeting was held at the clinic in the room where both the patients’ beds and my desk were located.
    With that, my attitude toward my employees changed. I experienced their alliance with the union leaders as a direct invasion of hostile forces. Who were these people interfering with my staff? Why was I now being censored in my interactions? How dare they interfere with the way I ran my clinic? I felt a diminution in my power, and it frustrated and enraged me. Since I was not allowed to attend the meeting, I stood outside of the room like a kid at her parents’ bedroom door and listened to the rhetoric. The leader used fiery, fighting words:
    â€œIf she does not want to give you these benefits, then we will close this place down! If you don’t like what she is doing, we will take care of it!”
    It sounded like a street rally against an oppressive ruler. Regardless of my emotional reaction, it soon became clear that there was only one thing I could do to survive this challenge: submit to the process.
    The union was voted in, and I was now in a position to negotiate an employment contract with union representatives. I came face to face with the philosophy of unionization and the way it was practiced at 1199. They used a boilerplate contract developed to suit a large insurance company with thousands of employees instead of one designed for a small business like ours. When Ed Bragg, the representative from
1199, advised me to terminate someone so that he could drive the salaries of others higher, I realized that the union’s philosophies did not necessarily translate into better conditions for the workers. Merit? There was no real way to address it, because all raises were built into the contract language. But this was what my staff wanted, and we all had to bear the consequences.
    The workplace atmosphere became stilted and tense. These people were no longer my coworkers, but my adversaries. We had to function as a team together to deliver an extremely sensitive service to patients, yet we had no camaraderie. And because I was aware that I could be charged with union busting if I so much as discussed the unionization issues with my staff, I was relegated to dealing with them through the intermediary of a union delegate.
    I developed a new strategy: I worked by the book. There were no more decisions to make concerning staff’s sick days and personal days and emotional troubles; almost every potential situation was spelled out by contract. No longer could someone appeal to my sensitivity or “feminism,” a word employees used as a tool against me when they didn’t agree with my final decisions. Staff began to feel that I