April 25, 2002
Grounds chief reflects on important time of change for wome
| Steve Hill |
| University Week |
There was virtually nothing controversial about Bonnie Taylor’s first two jobs at the UW.
Now the grounds manager, Taylor began her career on campus in the 1970s as an office assistant. She left that position to become a custodian, which at that time paid better than her clerical job.
“I liked it a lot,” she said recently while reflecting on the custodial work. “There was autonomy. I wasn’t sitting at a desk trying to look busy when I really wasn’t. You had your own responsibilities and, similar to gardening, when you were through working you had a product that looked good. I liked custodial work, but I would notice people mowing lawns and I thought that looked like fun.”
For the most part, it was.
Taylor gambled by quitting her full-time custodian position to take temporary work as a gardener. After proving herself as a competent and hard worker, she quickly landed a full-time job. Though she had showed little interest in gardening prior to the job, the work proved to be a good fit.
“I thought ‘Well, I really like this. I like horticulture. I like the people and being outside.’ ” Because the work took her to out of the way places on the grounds, she gained a new appreciation for the beauty on campus. But trouble started when she and others on staff began to notice a pattern that had white males in the division enjoying more power, prestige and opportunity.
“It was an incredibly diverse group of people,” she said. “The demographics had changed, but the culture hadn’t come around.”
The women and minorities on staff were often paired together on large-scale jobs. A sense of camaraderie began to take shape.
“We’d get a chance to compare stories and bond. It started to become clear that we were doing the more mundane, repetitive tasks. White males had the more plum jobs like landscaping, using equipment, driving the tractors. We were raking, weeding and cleaning up garbage. I don’t think it was intentional. It was just habit and how people saw the world at that time.”
The only training in those days was informal and intimidating. A lead gardener, for example, might set a chainsaw down in front of a large group of employees and then ask who would like to try it. Whether or not they had ever used one, she said, the men on staff would say yes. They would then get the opportunity to advance.
Without a formal training program Taylor and others on staff knew they stood little chance of growing and learning new skills, not to mention advancing to better, higher-paying jobs. So a group of women, including Taylor, began pushing the idea of a training program. It caught on and soon everyone on staff — men and women — was getting involved, she said.
“Everyone in the shop got into it because it was a way to become more professional,” Taylor said. “It was supposed to level the playing field.”
It did, eventually. But there were growing pains and more often than she would have liked, they affected Taylor.
She applied for a promotion — a gardener II job. Taylor, another woman and another man were supposedly finalists for the position. But then they noticed other people from outside the University interviewing for the job. The foreman doing the hiring had determined, without interviewing Taylor and the others, that none of the three was qualified because they didn’t know how to operate a large mower.
“Well that really made me mad,” Taylor said. “I had a driver’s license. Basically, I knew that all you had to do was push a pedal down to go forward.”
After Taylor raised concerns, the three employees were interviewed and she was hired. But even then, she wasn’t put on the large mower.
“I guess women were thought to be genetically incapable of operating anything with an engine.”
In fact, once women started learning to use the equipment new rules were put in place forbidding employees from doing any maintenance on the machinery. When damage to a mower was noted, women, Taylor said, were immediately guilty until proven innocent. “That was the kind of mentality back then.”
After she was named union shop steward, Taylor decided to document the history of complaints raised by employees in the shop. That process only affirmed what she’d been hearing for years in conversations with other women and minorities.
“As I started collecting these stories, I began to realize that almost every one was something that had happened to a woman or a minority. It had never really clicked before then. And like I said, I don’t think it was conscious. People had biases.”
Taylor applied for a gardener lead job and although she had the most experience and most seniority, she didn’t get it. She filed a grievance with the union and a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That led to an investigation by what was then called the Staff Human Rights office that backed up Taylor’s claims. She ended up getting the job and back pay.
Then in 1986, with several years of service under her belt, Taylor applied for a supervisor’s position and didn’t get it. Someone from the outside was hired and Taylor didn’t complain when she was told the person had more experience. But it wasn’t long before she and others on staff began to notice serious lapses in the new supervisor’s qualifications. It became obvious that he wasn’t qualified for the job.
“I thought, ‘Oh no. I’m going to have to file another grievance.’ ”
She did and it led to another investigation, this time by the Washington Human Rights Commission. Those findings supported Taylor. She ended up winning an increase in pay, but not the job. She hasn’t filed charges since.
The atmosphere, she says, has improved greatly. But she doesn’t want people to forget the struggle. Taylor has been on the job for 29 years now and will likely retire soon. So she told her story at a recent conference sponsored by the President’s Advisory Committee on Women.
“I think that story is important. That period of time is important. It’s real easy to just forget. I’m not going to be here that much longer, so this was a chance to sort of re-create that time.”
It was a time when women had to support one another. Taylor said there were too many women to name them all, but Helen Remick, Jerri McCray and Anne Guthrie are some of the longtime employees who supported Taylor during her struggles.
“That’s one of the reasons I stayed, I think. When you were really down, someone would always come along and kind of buck you up.”
Know somone who belongs in the UWeek spotlight? We are always interested in talking to faculty or staff who do interesting things, either on the job or off. Give us your ideas via e-mail at uweek@u.washington.edu
