UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
http://www.history.ufl.edu/oral/
Interviewer: George Njoroge
Interviewee: Professor Robert H. Zieger
February, 27 2009
George: This is an oral history interview with Dr. Robert Zieger Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Florida. We are talking at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Center. Today is February 27, 2009 and my name is George Njoroge. Welcome.
Zieger: Hello George. Nice to be here.
George: First of all, I'd like to ask about your biographical background. When and where were you born?
Zieger: I was born in Englewood, N. J., August 2, 1938.
George: How was Englewood?
Zieger: I only live there until I was two and then we moved to the town of Denville, NJ. And that is where I spent my youth and teenage years and even my college years, because I lived at home when I went to college.
George: What did your parents do?
Zieger: My father was an electronics worker at a number of places, most notably Western Electric during World War II and then with some smaller electronic firms after World War II. My mother was a housewife. She did do some childcare and looking after people's kids and worked very briefly during World War II at a handbag factory. I think they were making something for the army. But mostly she stayed at home and was a housewife.
George: And how was, in a sense, the climate--the political, social and economic climate during your formative years?
Zieger: You mean within my family? Or in New Jersey?
George: Particularly where you grew up?
Zieger: That is an interesting question. Where I grew up, Morris County , New Jersey, was staunchly Republican and our congressman’s name was Frelinghuysen. The Frelinghuysens had been prominent politicians in New Jersey going back to the 19th century and were even prominent in other ways, even before that. And the current congressman from that district I believe is also Frelinghuysen and it was very solidly Republican and New Jersey in the 1940s and early 1950s was sort of in a transition from a safe Republican state, moving towards a more balanced then somewhat Democratic [pattern]. It is a pretty solidly Democratic state today and of course, New Jersey did vote for FDR, I think, in all of his presidential elections too. Although on the state level it was pretty Republican: Republican governor, Republican legislature, Republican senators.
George: What would you attribute the difference to in terms of voting for president who was Democrat?
Zieger: Well, I've just been thinking because I've been writing an essay on American politics in the world World War II period. I think part of it is due to the great charisma of FDR. A lot of people who identified with FDR personally nonetheless fell back to their previous voting patterns on other offices. I think too political scientists have discovered that even if someone might vote for FDR in the 1930s and repudiate the Republican party of Herbert Hoover and not vote Republican on the presidential level, they had respect and regard for their local more office holders and saw no reason to get rid of them. So you had this division between on the presidential level of Democratic state and still a Republican state on the less than presidential level.
George: And during this time, whenever you were finished with high school, was college the sole imperative as it is now for high school graduates?
Zieger: Well, I was the youngest of 5 children in my family. And the youngest by 10 years. That is to say my next youngest sister is 10 yrs older than I am. And I am the first to go to college of those children. Now my sister Grace, of whom I just spoke, did go to college. Her freshman year was my senior year. She graduated from college when she was 33 or something like that. So now, it was not an imperative, but it was a possibility. That is more and more in the 1950s, when I was coming of age, college was a realistic possibility for people who were not from the elite, who were working class or lower middle class. Those possibilities were there and I guess I was the beneficiary of that kind of shift.
George: This is the reason why you decided to attend.
Zieger: Well, yeah. It wasn't that calculated. The truth of it was that the other members of the family--my brothers, brother-in-law, my father were all very skilled with their hands, with working with electronics [and doing other practical work]. My brother worked at building construction. My brother-in-law, Henry, who was a teacher, he was a teacher of industrial arts. They were all very good. And I was never very good at any of that. So the little joke in the family was always, well, you better be able to make a living with your head because you are not going to be able to make it with your hands. And I was always good at reading and writing. And I was very interested and I read a lot and so on. So from that point of view, it was a good bet that I would go on into college if we could afford, if I could afford it.
George: And once that was decided, which college did you decide to attend? Did you have many choices?
Zieger: Well, not really because we didn't have a lot of money. And there really wasn't much choice or [so] it appeared. You see, no one was very sophisticated about college. That is, to say, I didn't have older brothers or sisters, or aunts and uncles who knew about colleges. My sister, Grace, helped me find out some things about [colleges]. Well, it boiled down to the fact that if I wanted to go to college, I’d have to go to a college that was close enough for me to live a home. So I went to Montclair State. It was called Montclair State Teachers College back then. Now it is called Montclair State University. It is in Montclair, New Jersey, and it is about twenty miles from home. So I commuted to school. Drove to school and carpooled basically.
George: What did you study? What was your bachelors degree in?
Zieger: They called it in those days Social Studies because the idea was to prepare you to teach in the secondary schools and you needed a broad background in economics and political science, sociology and history. Although history was really at the core of the program and I took most of my elective courses in history. So I did really have pretty much the equivalent of a degree in history. A Bachelors of Arts degree.
George: And the history courses you took--were they specified in terms of regions?
Zieger: Mostly American and European history. I did take and was eager to take courses in Asian history and Middle Eastern history. And I will say too, although I didn't [take] any courses in African history, I was a very active member of the International Relations Club. And one year, we put on as a whole project, they had a year long program on Africa. Which was then emerging from colonialism. So I didn't take any courses, but I learned a great deal about the African countries through that medium, having guest speakers come in and so on. So the idea was to have a fairly broad background, but at the core was U.S and European history.
George: And once you completed, once you graduated, did you want to teach or you wanted to go to grad school automatically?
Zieger: Well, you are asking very good questions and I've thought about these things. Teaching was a sort of default for me. That is, what do you do, if you like to read, write, to study, you like to learn and your subject is history? Well, there is not a lot you can do with history as a vocation other than teach. So I wasn't called to teaching in a sense of saying “I must enlighten young people” and so on. But rather, well, what else could I do? I discovered once I started teaching that I think I was good at it and I enjoyed it and I [soon learned that I] would like working with young people. But that wasn't my primary motivation. In fact, I would say in those days when I was in college I was a little apprehensive. I was worried about discipline, for example. There was a movie in 1956 called The Blackboard Jungle, about how tough the schools were and so on. And I didn't want to mess with that stuff. I wanted to talk about history. So the game plan was I would go out and get a job teaching. When I was in college, I had very inspiring teachers. I'll mention their names: one was Robert Beckwith who taught American history and another was Ernest B. Fincher, who taught a general course in social sciences. And I kind of found myself saying, “Well, I really want to do what those guys are doing.” And at the time, because you have a lot of misinformation, when you are a young person. Well, what do you have to do to be able to teach at a college? You have to have a master’s degree. That is what we thought because a lot of teachers didn't have the Ph D. They just had listed after their names, M.A. What we didn't know or sort of only discovered was that in most cases they had taken a great deal of work beyond the masters degree and if fact were writing dissertations at one of the New York universities: Columbia or NYU. So, you thought, well, I can go get a masters degree and I can do what Mr. Beckwith does or what Dr. Fincher does and it is only later that you begin to realize [that] there is a lot of more involved. Sometimes ignorance is not a bad thing, until you start doing and realize, you can do it. So I decided early on that I would like to teach at the college level because then I could read and write and learn and not have to worry about keeping order and getting into fist fights. And so, that’s the way it developed from there.
George: Where did you do your graduate studies?
Zieger: I did my masters of all places at University of Wyoming, which is in Laramie, Wyoming. I ended up there because, you see again, where I went to college there wasn’t a lot of advice available. Like today, a student would come into my office and say I’d like to go to graduate school and study history and become a professor. And then I would ask a whole set of questions, [such as] what field of study are you interested in and I could give pretty good advice. Here is a good place to go, here is a good person who teaches in that field. That wasn’t available to me. It was all kind of guessing. And one day, I saw on the bulletin board, where the students gathered, brochure or poster about a program at the University of Wyoming in American Studies that combined history and literature. And since I was very interested in literature--I was English minor--I thought, “That sounds good.” They offered fellowships and I applied, and I was accepted. Before I knew it, I was headed to Laramie, Wyoming, to work on my masters degree in American Studies.
George: How did Wyoming compare to New Jersey?
Zieger: Well, in New Jersey, I was the country mouse, because I lived far from the city, out in what was thought of as the sticks. In Wyoming, I was the city slicker because I came from the East Coast. It was a different atmosphere. The biggest difference to me was, that it was, in a sense, a real university. Much more of an atmosphere of a university. They had a big time football team, the Wyoming Cowboys. A university-sized library, nothing like the UF library, but still much more extensive [than the one at Montclair]. All the teachers were Ph D’s. They published books. This was not on the whole the case [at Montclair]. I can remember, for example, I had never heard of the term “bluebook.” Are you familiar with the term?
George: Yes, I am.
Zieger: Everybody in academia is, but in my four years of college, I had never written an exam on a bluebook and when someone said, “Well, make sure you bring your bluebook,” I thought what, a blue colored book? So, it was a real university, with a university atmosphere. The people in the program I was in were very bright, very smart and came from different parts of the country. My teachers weren’t uniformly good, but they were serious academic people. It was a different level. You know, it was good, it did well by me.
George: Did they require an MA. thesis?
Zieger: Yes, I did my master’s thesis under Herbert R. Dietrich. A very nice man, who is still alive and kicking, in his mid eighties in Laramie. And I did it on the topic “American Attitudes Toward Labor, 1880-1890.”
George: Did this imply a shift from your literature background to history?
Zieger: Well, yeah. I guess, although I took literature courses too and actually my thesis did make use of literary sources. One of the chapters looked at five labors novels of the 1880s. But you are right; I was more oriented towards the history than the literature. I think I probably always was. But that sort of became confirmed.
George: Once you completed your MA what were your options?
Zieger: Again, I had a teacher at the University of Wyoming. And I’ll mention his name too because he was a very important influence on me. Lawrence Gelfand. And Larry taught a seminar in diplomatic history, and he was a very rigorous, very demanding scholar and he taught a very good seminar. Really acquainted us with primary sources and how you do research and what the profession was like. And he was an important influence not only because the way he ran his class, but he took an interest in me and he helped me through the process of going to the next level, going to a Ph D program. In fact, initially I got a number of rejection letters from programs I had applied too and I was fairly despondent, and he took me out for a beer, this was kind of an unusual experience to be seen with a Professor socially and, kind of consoled me and weighed my options. Eventually, the University of Maryland came through. It wasn’t a question of acceptance; it was a question of the money. I mean, I was accepted some places but they weren’t going to give me any money. The University of Maryland gave me a graduate assistantship and he was very knowledgeable about the various universities--who I might work with, what I might find, and so on. And so he helped to steer me towards the University of Maryland, which is where I went for my Ph D.
George: And how was the experience there compared to the two other universities, in terms of geography?
Zieger: Well, UM is in suburb Washington in Prince Georges Country. It was familiar to me because I grew up in suburban New Jersey, so I was familiar with the traffic and all that sort of thing. It wasn’t like University of Wyoming, in a small town in Wyoming. So from that point of view it was similar. We were very close to Washington, which I liked. There were a lot of things you could do in Washington. The theaters, the museums, the public buildings. And of course for a historian, it is a great place to be because of the research material available. The National Archives, the Library of Congress. And when I came to write my dissertation, and by the way the topic was suggested to me by Larry Gelfand, who came to visit Washington while I was a student at UM and I talked to him about dissertation topics and he was the one who suggested my dissertation topic, which was the labor policies of the Republican administrations of the 1920s. And that topic made Library of Congress and the National Archives a treasure trove of materials in dealing with such a topic.
George: When did you complete your doctorate?
Zieger: I was at UM from 1961-1964. I took a job at Stevens Point, Wisconsin, beginning in 1964 and completed my dissertation that [academic] year. And so my degree was awarded in the spring of 1965.
George: And how was your teaching experience at the University of Wisconsin?
Zieger: Well, when you say University of Wisconsin, it was then Wisconsin State University- Stevens Point. It is a college, somewhat similar to the college I had gone to in New Jersey in that it prepared people for teaching. It was like the second tier of the system and the state. And that is where I taught for my first 9 years. I should say, because I’ve mentioned people who were important to me in my other institutions, my advisor Professor H. S. Merrill and my teacher Paul Conkin were very important to me, as well as Larry Gelfand from the University of Wyoming. I wanted to mention them because they were important influences in my academic career. I began teaching at Wisconsin State University at Stevens Point in 1964, and I taught there for 9 years, until 1973. And there, it was a heavy teaching load, you taught 4 courses each semester. Usually having around 120 students and we had good department, several people, despite their heavy teaching load, were able to achieve quite distinguished records of scholarship, although the main emphasis was teaching, not scholarship. But we had a large and lively History Department and I think it was a positive experience. Sometimes you would get discouraged that you didn’t have time to develop your own work and take the next step in your research. It is where I really cut my teeth as a historian. I worked with some very fine teachers and learned from them. And tried things out and made mistakes. But I think I had a reasonably successful experience. [The students were] all undergraduate students. We had a very small graduate program. I taught only a couple of graduate courses while I was there.
George: After 9 years, your first 9 years, was there any pressure to publish?
Zieger: Well, it was mostly teaching, but I was very ambitious and very career oriented myself. And I resolved that I would be a publishing scholar and I did take my doctoral dissertation and do some additional research on it and did publish that in 1969. The title was Republicans and Labor, 1919-1929. And I did publish journal articles related on the whole to my dissertation topic, stuff that didn’t get in the dissertation, but made a good article. That sort of thing. And I began working, trying to work on a second project. I think, at least for people in History, such as yourself, this is the crucial point. The second book. The first book you can get out of your dissertation research, but the second book you’ve got to do it, in a sense, all on your own. And with a heavy teaching load, it was very difficult to do all that. But I kept on plugging away and did develop a topic. I got a small fellowship one summer [and] I got a half pay sabbatical one [semester]. And by the mid 1970’s, by the time I left Stevens Point, at least I was sort of plugged in to my next project.
George: Where did you go after Stevens Point?
Zieger: I was invited to join the faculty at Kansas State University, which is in Manhattan, Kansas. And I taught there between 1973 and 1977.
George: While you were there, did you complete your second book?
Zieger: Yes, I wrote my second book, more or less there. It wasn’t published actually until I had left in 1977. But my second book, which was a study of a local union in Madison, Wisconsin, that was published in 1977. I published a number of essays and articles. And I was actually working toward series of related publications on the labor movement in the 30s and 40s and the Great Depression and the World War II period. I worked on in a variety of ways and published in a variety of ways, a number of books and articles with one aspect of that and another between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s.
George: How come you were at Kansas State for such a short time?
Zieger: Well, again, in academia, at least as far as the historical profession is concerned, if you are invited to apply for a position that would offer more money, or more desirable circumstances, you are foolish not to explore the possibilities. Because otherwise you send out a signal [that says] don’t talk to him, he is not interested. So, I was approached by Wayne State University in Detroit. Actually at the beginning of my fourth year at KSU and [was] invited to apply for a position, basically in labor history. And Wayne State is in the middle of Detroit and Detroit is, in a sense, the center of labor history. There is a magnificent archive there, the Walter Ruther Library for Labor and Urban affairs. And, although the idea of moving to this big troubled crime ridden city--there had been major urban disturbances in 1967--the prospect of doing that and moving my family there was in some ways daunting and nervous-making. Nonetheless, you couldn’t say no, I am not interested. I was flattered that I was asked. I applied and one thing led to another. I got a very attractive offer and so, I left KSU to go to Wayne State.
George: In moving from one state to another, did your family, specifically your children, object to the relocation?
Zieger: I have one son, Robert, who was born in Stevens Point in 1964. My wife was always, in a sense, eager for new experience. And, so she was glad to experience new things. And on the whole, it worked out well for her. She got her masters at Stevens Point. She was able to teach and write for the [city] newspaper [while] at KSU. She taught at Wayne State and got some individual writing opportunities. In fact, she wrote a book from some of her contract writing at Wayne State. My son, Robert, it was a little different. It is always hard on kids. On one occasion, when we moved for just a semester down to Madison from Stevens Point, I think he had a rough time of it. On the other hand, it exposed him to what life is like in 20th and 21st century America. It was not rooted in a single community and by the time we got into Michigan, and he was then 13, when we moved to Detroit, he was an old hand at moving and flourished there and did well. So, the family was with me and wasn’t a bitter conflict.
George: And how long were you at Wayne State?
Zieger: I taught there between 1977 and 1986. I was there for nine years.
George: How was your experience at Wayne State?
Zieger: Wayne State was tough. It was very hard for me, as I say, I think for my wife and son, they did pretty well there. I mean, I did ok professionally there too. I had a sort of a hard time, I gotta confess, that in a lot of ways, I worried about authenticity. What was I doing teaching labor history in this place that was rich with labor history? People who had marched on the picket lines, been on the sit down strikes, and fought the battles. And who was I to come and write their history? And teaching was tough at Wayne State. The commute was hard. The circumstances were sometimes kind of alienating. The faculty was very fragmented. It took me a few years to really get used to it. On the other hand, it was, you can’t image a richer environment for doing the things I did with labor history. I helped to start a conference that is held there annually. And I got to meet everyone who was doing labor history, to recruit them to this conference. I got to work in one of the great archives in the country, the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State. I was surrounded, it was very challenging environment. I sometimes experienced it as a threatening environment. But on the whole, it was challenging. And Detroit is a very much a baseball town. You can go down to Tiger Stadium and watch a game. We got to enjoy Canada, Windsor, and Toronto sometimes too. Detroit is very rich culturally. It is [now] a much more devastated city than it was then. And it was good to be in an ethnically diverse neighborhood. The neighborhood we lived in was about a 1/3 African American. A suburban neighborhood in a nearby town. You know I think all of that was a good thing. Although sometimes you felt [that] there were some challenges that were hard to deal with.
George: Did UF invite you in the same way that the other schools did?
Zieger: Yes, in fact I had two nibbles from UF. One of them a couple of years before I came and I guess because the way they recruit they get names from they will write to prominent scholars in the area they are interested in: “Who would you recommend?” and so on. I guess my name came up but the first time nothing happened. The second time which was in 1985-86, that year, I was invited to apply and fortunately for me two things [happened] that year: another book of mine just came out. And when I came down, I was able to bring the only copy I had down for the interview, which was nice. And also, an earlier book published two years before won a pretty prestigious prize, the Philip Taft Award for best book in labor history. [It was actually a] co-winner there was another winner [as well]. And that happened just as I was talking to the people and I guess that was good and one thing led to another. And I was offered a position here. And I was eager to come and again, my wife was all for it. New part of the country, different things. And it turned out very well for her because she was able to get fulltime work eventually, after a couple of years [teaching part-time], at Santa Fe Community College and had a very distinguished career at the community college here in Gainesville.
George: When you first arrived here, how was the History Department in terms of diversity, in terms of hierarchy?
Zieger: Well, the University of Florida in the 1980s was the place to go. They were hiring very distinguished people in the field, particularly in the field of American history. They brought down here before me Bertram Wyatt-Brown, who was one of the finest southern historians in the country; Darrett Rutman, who was an outstanding colonial historian. Kermit Hall, who was a rising star in American Constitutional and Legal history. It was a place that was building and the department, although having some very fine people in the past, had been a rather low key department that had not really made a major splash in the historical profession. And in the 80s, they were trying to build not only History, but other fields as well. For Florida to become the quality or the stature of a public university comparable to University of North Carolina or University of Virginia or University of Texas-Austin, those usually thought to be outstanding southern state universities. I am not sure if we’ve gotten there or even if we ever will. But that was the aim and we had a dean who was very creative about recruiting. So it was very exciting to come here. At Wayne, we were always under siege. In the nine years I was there, I think we hired only two people. Whereas at UF, we had two or three searches every year to bring in new historians. That is a wonderful thing. Time consuming, but we bring in all these young historians and learn all their work, and interact with them. To me that was a wonderful part of it.
George: When you first arrived here, you were a pretty distinguished professor. What were your responsibilities: teaching more or publishing only?
Zieger: In History, with only a couple of exceptions, there really aren’t very many research-only positions. It is not like the British system [where there are some] people who never really teach. We did have one or two people, Bertrand Wyatt Brown, who held the Milbauer Chair, and Murdo MacLeod, who was a graduate research professor, whose teaching responsibilities were pretty light and who focused on graduate school. But the rest of us teach and no matter what rank or level, teach essentially four courses a year. And I will say this, I am a kind of a partisan of the History Department and I think we’ve always had a strong department commitment to teaching; we’ve always won more than our share of teaching awards, and recognition for teaching. I think we have a very strong undergraduate teaching program and it was nothing about being in Florida [that would suggest a de-emphasis on teaching], although, of course they wanted you to come down here and contribute as a scholar. To bring good graduate students in and so on. There was never any sense that teaching should be made secondary. You were expected to write, work with graduate students, but you were also expected to have a high level of accomplishment in undergraduate teaching. And I was very comfortable with that.
George: When you first arrived here, did you join the faculty union right away?
Zieger: Yes.
George: And were you a member of the union at the previous universities at which you taught?
Zieger: At Stevens Point there was not a union. I was part of a small group that tried to get the ball rolling to bring a union in but it never got very far. And the same thing at Kansas State, we invited in people from the American Federation of Teachers to tell us how to go about doing, but it never got very far. At Wayne State, we did have a union and I was a member of it. I wasn’t terribly active in it. I was a member of a community labor committee that tried to develop public policies that would help the community, that sort of thing. But I wasn’t terribly active. I didn’t serve on the bargaining committee or the grievance committee, but I was of course a member. When I got to Florida, I was surprised that there was a union. Usually, the so called flagship universities, the main universities in any given state, are not unionized and Florida is one of the few that was. And in Florida, you don’t expect it, it being a southern state and a so called “right to work” state. You wouldn’t have expected, but here it was--a union. I was happy to join the union and, especially teaching labor history, it wouldn’t have been quite a statement not to have joined the union.
George: At that time, what were your colleagues’ perceptions of a union, in terms of even in the History Department, how did they perceive the union or unionism?
Zieger: There was a variety of opinions. A number of people in the History Department were strong union supporters from back before I came, had been active in starting up the union back in the 1970’s. David Chalmers, Hunt Davis. There were others as well. Most of the others I think were favorably disposed to the union; they felt that it played positive or valuable role, but were not members. And one colleague, when I approached him to join, he said that, well he was a [full] professor and had no problems with tenure and so on or anything like that. And he said, “Well, frankly, I don’t think the union really has much to offer me, personally. I think it is a good thing it is here, but for me to pay dues to the union” (which is not insubstantial, it’s about 1% of your salary, so if you making $50,000, that is 500 dollars)--he said he would consider that an act of charity. Frankly, [he said] there are other charities that are important to me. And I respected his opinion. I could see where he was coming from. Where I come from, there is a union you join in and if there isn’t one you try to join and if there isn’t one you try to start. But from where [most] academics come from, union is a kind of alien concept. Maybe not a bad idea, but not at the center of their life.
George: How did recently hired faculty learn about the union?
Zieger: I don’t remember. I know later on when I became more active in the union, we would make a special effort at the new faculty orientation to set up at table and make our presence known. What I do remember is this: The faculty union . . . one of the things that is done every year is that there is a fall membership dinner, usually in October. And I do remember being invited to it or being made aware of it, and attending the very first I ever went to. But again, I would’ve been aware. With me, you wouldn’t have had to say come join the union, here are the advantages, we have collective bargaining, [but rather] “Where do I sign?” And I noticed with a number of my younger colleagues now that is the case too. Several of them say, “I am glad to be at a place where there is a union.”
George: Throughout your time here, how was the membership, what is your gauge?
Zieger: See, I have not followed those things too closely. In general, one of the things you do understand, but I’d mention that it is not the whole faculty at the University that is represented. It’s the bargaining unit, a term used in labor management. The bargaining unit is basically the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the College of Education, the Library, the College of Architecture, the College of Business, the College of Engineering, not the law school, not the medical school, not the agricultural program (IFAS). So I think it is probably only the bargaining unit is about 60% of the entire faculty on campus. So that’s an important thing to keep in mind. I don’t know what the membership . . . .there are two things, again I don’t know how much of this you want or need to know: you are a member of the bargaining unit and as a member of the bargaining unit, you have a right to vote as to whether you want union representation or not. But that doesn’t mean that you are a member. You might vote, in fact many people did vote, for union of representation, but didn’t become a member. You’d be covered under the terms of any contract that was negotiated and that was voted on, but you would not be obligated to pay dues to the union. And so for a lot of people, why not? I can’t lose anything; I have certain protection about grievance procedures and legal representation. And doesn’t cost me anything, I might as well do it. With that said, in general, I think the union has probably only had some place between 18-25% of the bargaining unit that has actually at any given time been a member of the union. Right now, I understand the membership is about 400 out of about 1800 bargaining unit members.
George: What would you attribute to this low, in terms of percentage wise?
Zieger: I think it is that for most people there are all kinds of motives. Sometimes, I get angry, and I think here are people who want something for nothing. It is called [being a] Free Rider, that is a term that is used. At other times I think, well, people are very busy with their academic careers; what’s important to them is writing their books, making tenure, teaching their courses well. There are other demands. Young people particularly have demands on their incomes. They are paying off student loans. The union is something that is kind of marginal to them. It is a nice idea, sure, [but] don’t bother me anymore. And I think that is a widespread kind of feeling. I think those who cynically say “I’ll take advantage of the benefits of the union without paying”-- I think that is relatively rare people making a specific calculation that way. Although, we do run into it in recruiting. A few years ago when we thought we had recertify the union, get people to sign cards, saying they wanted collective bargaining, particularly in the business school, more than one of them said, “Well, yeah, I am glad to have the union, but I am not paying any dues.” To me that was like [saying] “I want something for nothing” and [I] felt it would be shameful to have such an attitude, but again, that is just a judgment on my part.
George: As the union has tried to increase membership, in what ways do you appeal to other faculty, in terms of this is beneficial for them?
Zieger: I should say that for the first, at least, 12 years that I was here, between 1986 and 1998, I was not a very active member. I went to the annual dinner, I did a little bit, trying to half-heartedly recruit people. (That is a hard thing [to do, and] I don’t like doing [it]). But it wasn’t until 10 years or 12 years ago that I started really getting active. Now, to answer your specific question, the way I became active in the early years of the 21st century was as the chair of the organizing committee and the reason I became active then, [was because] one of my criticisms of the union had been all along that it wasn’t really very dynamic, it wasn’t very energetic, and that the national body with which it was affiliated, which was the National Educational Association, never put any resources into the University of Florida, never gave us the help of an organizer. It was like [they were saying] “Pay your dues and shut up.” That kind of thing. About ten or eleven years ago they sort of called my bluff. They provided us with an organizer, a very good person, Candi Churchill, who is still our organizer and representative in this area. And I can remember writing letter to national officers saying, “How come you don’t put any resources into the University of Florida?” lo and behold they started doing that and I thought “Well, I’ve been talking the talk, I better walk the walk.” And so I got sort of energized like that and I was chair of the organizing committee and became a vice president. This was all 10 years or less ago. But your question about how to appeal, I don’t know. I think it is the hardest thing in the world is to recruit [people] into something like this and I think it is almost a miracle that people will join and sacrifice what is a substantial amount of money as I say 1% of their salary for benefits that are very real, but are sometimes hard to see. And in many ways, when the union accomplishes something, everybody comes to expect it and [they say] “So what have you done for us lately?” For some people, the appeal is simply: “Well, joining the union where I work is something that I do. Now that you pointed out there is a union, where do I sign up?” You know, like that. For other people, you say, well you know the union fights grievances; we have a grievance procedure that without a union, your grievance procedure is simply appealing to an administrator to reconsider some decision and if they don’t reconsider, you have no recourse. With the union, you have a grievance procedure and if comes to that, it goes to binding arbitration. Somebody has to pay for that and they way it is paid for is through the union dues. So you try to make those appeals and [emphasize] some of the things that the union has accomplished. For example, you may or may not know this, traditionally at the University of Florida [and elsewhere] for most faculty members there are two times in which you can improve your situation particularly, when you are promoted from assistant to associate and when you are promoted from associate to full professor. There are other times where you have a major accomplishment, a book published or some major award. In the old days when you were promoted, the university would say “That’s very nice, we’d like to give you a raise, but we have to build a parking lot, we don’t have the money.” With the union contract, it is a 9% raise and the union has accomplished that. And I think that is very important. Now some people point that out and some people say that a lot. And other people would say oh well that is important to keep in place and I should pay my fair share of that process that created that.
George: In terms of your scholarship, you’ve studied labor history, is the people’s reluctance to join the people the same way, do they have the same attitudes?
Zieger: It is a good question George. I guess in a way the stuff that I’ve written dealing with the 1930s and 1940s. This is the period of great union growth in the United States. And one of the things that struck me in doing the research and I went through the records. Hundreds of records of organizers and their reports and about meetings they went to. And I guess that reinforced how difficult it was to organize, partly because of people’s fears of retribution on the part of the employer but partly because of inertia, and partly because people say, “I don’t need the people to tell me what to do, I can do this on my own,” and so on. So that even in the time of great union growth, when the great spirit of the CIO and labor organization, even then it wasn’t easy, it was a tough job. The stories of organizers and what they faced, and I have talked since then to students of mine who have gone out and taken jobs as union organizers. And how hard it is and how difficult. So I am not surprised at all. I am, I guess I am kind of surprised we’ve done as well as we have.
George: Did the demands of being a chair of the organizing committee affect your duties as a professor? And also did you hold a chair in the history department?
Zieger: I didn’t have any administrative jobs. Graduate director or chair of the department or anything like that. I never thought I was good at that. I never did that and I avoided those things. One of the reasons why I felt I could get more active in the union was that by then, and I am talking about 10 years ago and I am seventy years old [now]. By the time I was 60years old, I still had a scholarly agenda. I published a couple of books since then that have been very important to me, but I’ve learned to trust myself. I had seen over the years in academia [those] who get sidetracked, who do perfectly good things but not the things that scholarship and teaching are about. And I had always been pretty jealous about my time; that my time was committed to teaching and to scholarship and doing my share of work with my colleagues in the governance of our department and in the college. And all of that. But other things I was very parsimonious about how I would spend my time. By the time I was 60 or so, I thought well I think I can do this now. I trust myself. I am not doing this [union work; political activity] instead of that [i.e., teaching and writing]. I’ve learned how to do these things and balance all of this. But it took a long time for me to feel that way. I published my big book, the book, perhaps, I will be known for in even ten years, The CIO, 1935-1955. I published that when I was 57 in 1995. And that just was the consuming thing in my life, other than teaching.
I don’t think I ever shortchanged my students. I would fight anybody who said I did. Aside from that and my family itself, that [i.e., writing the CIO book] was the biggest thing in my life and I just wouldn’t have the time to do anything other, but once I got that book finished, I thought well, they are putting an organizer in here and of course to some extent, because of what I teach, it’s reciprocal. Experience with the union is not irrelevant to what I do as a scholar. I’ve written some op-ed pieces, I’ve done some work. I should mention too, I think this is related, another reason why I became active about 10 years ago was that in Florida . . . . See, there are two teachers unions: There is the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. And they had been over the years rivals, but there was a lot of talk of the two getting together. And the way it worked out, the two organizations have merged in a number of states, not nationally. But in a number of states [although not nationally] and Florida is one of those states. So when our union, our state union merged with the AFT, we, our union locally
became eligible to send a delegate to the central labor council. This is a body representing all the unions in a given area and it meets here in Gainesville. And then, the president of our organization, Tom Auxter, came up to me and said that, “I’d like for you to do something for the union. I know you haven’t been terribly active in the past, but I’d like you to be the delegate to the central labor council.” That to me was great; I wanted to do that because I had done a lot of volunteering work with them over the years and I knew a number of people [active in the local labor movement], and it was ideal for me plugging in into the broader labor movement and being a kind of liaison with the local and Central Labor Council, which in turn of course is affiliated with both the state and the national AFL-CIO.
George: And how was that experience?
Zieger: I am still a member, still a delegate to the Labor Council. It is one of the most important thing in my life is the work I do with them. I value very much working with them; we have plumbers, United Auto Workers, electrical workers, we have teachers, we have state and county municipal workers--a wide variety of people; and I think we play a valuable role in the community and it is something I think is very fulfilling for me to work with the labor council.
George: When you started getting more involved union, how would you characterize the University of Florida relationship with the union?
Zieger: Well, I think it has been very contentious. You know you are asking very good questions, because shortly after I began to get more active the Legislature changed the governing structure of the university. It used to be that all of the state universities, all 11, were under one board of governors or trustees. So the collective bargaining contract, the first one was in 1976, was not between UF and the Administration. It was between the state wide United Faculty of Florida and the board of trustees. And in 2001, maybe 2002, at the instigation of Governor Jeb Bush, the Legislature devolved the University so that there would be a board of trustees for every university, that raised the question “Does the collective bargaining contract which covered all the university. . . . was it still valid”? And the University said, “We don’t have that same relationship.” We said, the union said, wait a minute. “You just can’t dissolve it like that and in fact there is law that governs this [circumstance]. You just can’t say I don’t like to have a union; I am going to rename my company and get rid of the union. Because there is something called a continuing contract or continuing relationship.” But we didn’t know [which way it would turn out]. There is a public board that decides these things: The Public Employee Relations Commission (PERC). They are the ones who make decisions [on these matters]. This board has three members and the membership sort of depends on who is the governor. I mean, if you have a Republican governor, it is likely the board members are gonna be more critical of the unions. If it is a Democratic governor, it is likely the board will be more sympathetic. So the University said now that we have this new structure, new governing structure, there is no more collective bargaining contract, we can do whatever we want. And we said, “Oh no, you can’t do that.” And we filed suit and went through the board and eventually to the courts. And we were validated, finally, but not until three years later. In the meantime, we thought, we better get recertified. We better demonstrate that the faculty wants collective bargaining and file a petition with this public employee board, saying collective bargaining is desired by the UF faculty and there is a whole legal procedure [for doing this]. And the way to do this is through membership cards. You sign it and you say you favor UF as being your collective bargaining agent. It doesn’t say you are going to be a member [of the union]. It says you are going to favor collective bargaining through the auspices of UFF. So we had to, as organizing chair, we had to mobilize union activists to go out and fan out all over the campus to get their colleagues to sign these cards. And this was done in all of the campuses. And a couple of places, the administration said we are not going to recognize these cards, you are going to have an election. Two places: The University of West Florida and Florida State University elections were held in which the union was validated overwhelmingly, like 92%. In the other 9 or 10 campuses, it was done through the cards and here in 2002-2003, we went out and spent a lot of time going all over the campus—[to] the engineering school, the business school, the whole bargaining unit, and we got 72%. In theory all you need is 40% and if you have 40%, who sign a card, you can have an election. But you know 40% is not going to do it, for one thing, [40%] is not 50% and you going to need 50% to win an election]. And for another thing there will be people who--there is something wrong with their signatures; they weren’t entitled [to sign]; or they [had] left [the University], so in labor circles when you do this, you need a solid 2/3 majority to feel confident that your card signing will translate into a victory and we got 72%. We calculate that over 90% of the people who we approached signed. There were a lot of people we missed. They were on leave or here or there. So we spent the better part of the year doing this canvassing, which was a good thing so it got us back in touch with the rank and file, with the members, and it kind of helped to rejuvenate the union.
In the meantime these court cases were going along, hearings and so on, and eventually again, the Public Employee Relations Board [actually, Commission] and eventually the courts decided, no you didn’t have to do that, this collective bargaining contract remains in force until a new one is negotiated or until the faculty votes do decertify the union, which they weren’t going to do. So that is actually where stand now because alone among the 11 universities, our administration has really not been very, in my view, has not been very straightforward, not been very cooperative. We still don’t have a contract, although I guess we are very close to having a new contract. We are very close to it now, but it has gone on and on. But in the meantime, the old contract remains in force. So the grievance procedure remains in force, pay provisions remain in force, and so on.
George: Were Jeb Bush’s plans novel or could you find them in other states?
Zieger: I think every state, and I have taught at five public universities in different states, every one is different. I know at Michigan, I think they have four separate boards. One governing the University of Michigan, one Michigan State, one Wayne State, and one the other State Universities. And Wisconsin, from when I was there, they moved from a dual system, to a unified system. So I don’t know the ins and outs, actually our administration . . . .There was some support for this in the union, it is a good thing that it is devolved because now we can gear our collective bargaining contract to the specific mission and circumstances of the University of Florida. We are a research-oriented institution, we should have a different pattern of how we think about benefits and salaries and other things, than perhaps more undergraduate-oriented places.
George: How has Florida as a “right to work” state affected the bargaining power of the union? Also, how come most of them are red states or you’d say Republican states?
Zieger: Well, the two things are related aren’t they? I mean it is pretty clear that it is one of these chicken and egg things. More conservative areas are more prone to pass so called “right to work” legislation or amendments. Do “right to work” amendments and legislation help create a conservative climate? And I think it works both ways. It does make it more difficult to organize. We do know that the higher the proportion of union membership in a given state, the more liberal its politics will be; for those who are opposed to liberal politics, it makes sense, I guess, to try and restrict the activities or the appeal or the efforts of unions. Florida, I should add, was the very first state to adopt a so called “right to work” provision. In fact, in Florida it is a constitutional provision. You simply couldn’t pass a law saying well we are not going to have a “right to work” anymore. You would have to change the constitution in Florida. In 1944, it adopted, it and Arkansas, adopted its “right to work” provisions. How it would affect our union? I don’t really know because in some ways we might find [that] if we were to negotiate a contract with the administration, one whose stipulations was that everyone covered by the contract had to belong to the union or pay in equivalent fee for collective bargaining. That might lose us a lot of support. So I don’t know. In general, a “right to work” state does discourage union membership, because you are likely, many people are likely to say, “Well, I think union is a good idea, but I am not going to pay dues when the other people don’t.” It sends a signal that we are hostile to unions and these are all red states. There is a high correlation between union membership--the proportion of union membership--and the degree of blue-statedness.
George: Why would the faculty need a union when they operate under a system of meritocracy?
Zieger: Well, most of us buy into it. Most of us would like to be judged by our accomplishment and achievements. I have been very well rewarded for my achievements such as they are. Where the union comes into this, [and] I think it is often misunderstood, our union would like to do right now is, in a sense, codify, regularize the merit potion of it. So that, for example, right now, if you accomplish something, if you publish a book, you may or may not get rewarded for it. If the union contract were the way I or many others would like to have it, you would have no choice as an administrator, you would have to say, “Hey, George published a book with a reputable publisher, it has gotten good reviews, he is entitled to an x % raise.” We want to encourage George to publish that book and he should be rewarded in a regular, coherent way that he can depend on and if he is not rewarded he can bring it to a grievance as recourse. So I don’t think they are incompatible at all.
The other thing is the union does [is] bring a grievance procedure and eventually legal representations. You are never safe from the possibilities, we live in a very litigious society. I have had some places where I could see [that] a student might say and I would think, “You know this student wrongly might think that they have some kind of legal grievance against me and I wouldn’t rely on the administration to back me up for a minute, but my union will.” I don’t think that the administration likes to talk about [these matters. Administrators say], “Well, we don’t need the union because we have shared governance.” I don’t know if you’ve heard that phrase and that is really the faculty senate. Union members are very active in the faculty senate and from the union point of view the faculty senate should be the deciding body and so forth as far as things like academic schedule and academic content and what courses and what degrees. We don’t want anything to do as a union with that stuff. When it comes to working conditions, when it comes to discipline, when it comes to how salary determinations are made and so on, that is why you need a union. And so you need both shared governance, but you also need the support that a union can give you.
George: How would you estimate a union could build power? Is it simply by membership?
Zieger: I don’t think there is any substitute for membership. I think you can even see that here in Florida. Typically at Florida International University, their membership has gotten close to 50% and they have a much stronger presence on the campus than our union does. They are listened to more carefully. They are more able to fight grievances more effectively. There is no substitute for bigger membership.
George: Can you say, if a school is perceived to be a flagship, the less faculty are interested in the union?
Zieger: That tends to be the case, I think. You attract to a place like the University of Florida people who are very ambitious personally and individually. I mean all are, I am, I mean you should be, you should have high expectations of yourself. Perhaps you may be more prone to think of yourself as someone apart from the ordinary or the average, or something like that. That has been the case that typically, the flagship universities have been less friendly to labor organizations. Now, what we say to the administration, when they say see there is a body, the Association of American Universities, which is the elite 50 universities and we are in it, and the administration says, “None of the other universities has a union,” we tell them, “See, we helped you get there.”
George: During your time as an active union, what were some of the differences between your colleagues, in terms of some decisions? What were some of discrepancies in terms of direction?
Zieger: I don’t think a lot in that way. I think in general that we felt on the whole our job was so challenging to recruit members and preserve the union and the collective bargaining contract. Again, I speak here individually not as official person, but my perception was that the administration was really so hostile and so dismissive that really there weren’t divisions amongst the people, we felt ourselves I think, not to be too melodramatic, as a kind of band of brothers and sisters. If we were in this together, we were holding it together for our colleagues. Maybe I am not the most perceptive person in the world and there may be powerful currents of hostility and arguments, but not in my experience.
George: What are some areas you think the union can improve, save for increasing membership?
Zieger: Membership, membership, membership! Gosh, I sound like one of these old labor guys who I would read about and my research. The old timers would always say, “You know, these young people today are not as interested, they don’t come to meetings” and so forth. And I wouldn’t say that with regard to age, but the union is going to have to find ways to get a broader sampling of people active. There are only really ten or twelve who do all of the work for the union now. We have 400 members, but there are just a handful of people who actually do the work. And I’ve got to say, I mean our bargaining committee is nearing the end of its labor for three years the amount of time and energy these people, who have full scholarly careers that they have to deal with themselves, that they do get some load relief. And it is part of the contract that they get it. On the other hand, load relief for me was never attractive. I wanted to teach. Which of my courses should I not teach, so that I can do union stuff? It is going to be a real issue to get the next bargaining team, people who will be interested and come in, and think this is a good thing to do with my time. And it is a sacrifice, it is a real sacrifice for people. It takes a lot of their time. And it is very hard to recruit people into doing this. My department, we have good membership, we have about 50% membership, but I really can’t get them to do much of anything. They feel that “I paid my dues, I’ve got classes to teach, I’ve got books to write.” I understand. I was very much that way myself, until not too long ago, so I can’t get on my high horse.
George: Now that you’ve retired from the university, what is your involvement with the union?
Zieger: Well, I am a retiree. You can be a retiree [member], so I am part of a retiree chapter, a statewide retiree chapter. It is just a paper organization, it is just status that you have. The union leadership, the current organizing chair, did ask me to continue to be the representative for the History Department. Each unit or department has a liaison, if there are problems or whatever and I have done that. And the president of the union asked me and another retiree, just last month, to be chair of the nominating committee for the new slate of officers. We did that and I continue to be the union representative on the labor council, the North Central Florida Central Labor Council. Actually, I’ve been more active than I would have thought I would have been, and I would like someone in my department to take over the role. Because I can’t really speak, as you know there are a lot of issues with budget cuts and should there be a furlough [program to prevent layoffs], and on the one hand, I feel like I have to present the union position or present my colleagues’ position to the union leadership. And I am not really involved in this anymore and I feel a little awkward about being part of the process, as opposed to being a sympathetic outsider.
George: Do you still have to pay membership?
Zieger: It is nominal. Your membership when you are in the union is 1% of your salary. By the time I retired, that was a lot of time every year, but for retiree it is only $81 a year. Or you can pay $400 for a lifetime membership.
George: How does your teaching career compare with your union membership, in terms of what has been more rewarding?
Zieger: I’ve gotten some real rewards from my activities in the union, but it can’t compare with the importance and the satisfaction I have gotten from my teaching career. I am very proud of my teaching career in that I taught for 44 years and I never got jaded. I never got rested on my laurels such as they were. I was always engaged. My very last class in my view was one of the best I taught and students were most responsive. Books that I’ve written, the teaching that I’ve done, that has been at the center. The union has been very secondary to those things, but important in its own right. I put it more in terms of, you write, you teach, you help your colleagues, serve on committees, and then there is your civic life. What you do in terms of political participation or charitable work you might do. And that’s not charitable, but the political part is where I’d put my union activities. And it is important there, but the main part of my life, along with my family, is itself over here and with the different parts [i.e., in teaching and writing].
George: How do you think the union will be organized, in let’s say 25 years?
Zieger: Wow. . . .gosh . . . that is so hard to say. I’ll be very evasive and say, it does depend on the ability to recruit and energize people willing to devote part of their time and energy to carrying forth the union activity. I wouldn’t bet one way or the other. I am not a good prognosticator. I can always retreat and say, “Hey, I am a historian, I know about the past not the future.” But it does depend on a new cadre of people being willing to take on these responsibilities.
George: Well, Dr. Zieger it has been wonderful talking to you. Thank you again.
Zieger: Well, thank you for excellent questions. I enjoyed it.
George: Would you like to add anything else?
Zieger: No, I think we covered it all pretty well.
George: Thank you again.