Word: delft
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Employees of other - Paperback Booksmiths in the Boston area crossed the picket lines. Peter Van Delft, vice-president of District 65, yesterday cited a recent Supreme Court decision banning picketing in privately-owned malls as largely responsible for the lack of support in the other stores...
...Delft knows his pitch well and delivers it smoothly, just as he has before at Columbia, Barnard, Princeton, MIT, Harvard Medical School and all the other places he has been since he and District 65 several years ago got the idea of organizing clerical workers in universities. Every organizing meeting is different, of course--the secretaries here are older than their Cambridge counterparts, have been working for Harvard longer and are more suspicious about the idea of joining a union. When Schroder says, in her mild German accent, that District 65 is "the first union that has really looked...
Still, Van Delft is on the case. A woman named Linda Brown introduces him--"We most of all want to feel that at the richest university in the world we should have a voice," she says--and Van Delft starts to speak in booming, reassuring tones, the unlit cigarette jouncing up and down in his mouth...
...secretaries look skeptical and start peppering Van Delft with questions--Do you have a closed shop? How much are union dues?--but Van Delft handles them well, explaining that District 65 has a union shop and low dues. This meeting, in fact, seems better than most. When Van Delft has had business elsewhere and couldn't make it, things seemed unfocused and less authoritative. Shroder, meanwhile, counterbalances Van Delft; she is funny where he is serious, impulsive where he is knowledgeable, Harvard-connected where he is alien...
...haven't talked about this enough. Nobody's really said why we want a union. There's even some people who aren't here." The speech is hardly a brilliant stroke of organizing strategy; these meetings are supposed to be anything but long self-explanatory sessions. Schroder and Van Delft start to whisper and shuffle papers and the secretaries, their lunch hours almost over, shift in their seats and begin to get up to leave. The young man gives imploring gazes around the room as the secretaries file out, off to an afternoon back at their offices typing and answering...