07:11:28:04:08 Page 153 Page 153 CHAPTER 9 The Promise of Service Worker Unionism Dorothy Sue Cobble and Michael Merrill Despite C. Wright Mills’ pioneering efforts in White Collar (1951) to draw attention to the “giant salesroom” of employee-customer exchange or Daniel Bell’s riveting descriptions of “people work” in his 1973 classic The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, labor and industrial relations scholars paid little attention to the service economy until recently. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, they rarely strayed far from the factory floor; and when they did, service workers were more often than not understood through manufacturing metaphors like “sweatshop,” “speed-up,” “white- collar proletariat,” and the “office assembly line.” There were exceptions, of course. Flight attendants, department store clerks, waitresses, and fast food workers, for example, were all subjects of revealing studies by the early 1990s (Hochschild, 1983; Benson, 1988; Cobble, 1991a; Leidner, 1993). But the theoretical frameworks governing studies of workers and work processes in the social sciences as a whole continued, for the most part, to be drawn from an imaginary 1 populated by industrial wage- earners (male) and white-collar salaried managers (male). The knowledge and efforts of the predominantly female service workforce remained largely unacknowledged and unexplored. Now, writing in 2008, “managing service encounters,” “empowering front-line service workers,” and piercing the mysteries of the Wal-Mart service economy have taken center stage as topics of academic inquiry and business concern. And despite grousing from some labor leaders that 153