a serious look at a collective action from the tv series 'scrubs'
For a realistic show about health care workers, Scrubs takes place in a bizarrely non-union world. Other than one stray reference in a later season (regarding the Janitor, not even one of the residents or nurses), labor unions don’t seem to exist in the universe of Scrubs. However, that doesn’t mean that collective action is entirely absent.
In season two, episode thirteen (“My Philosophy”), Dr. Elliot Reed becomes increasingly agitated about a problem in the hospital: co-ed locker rooms make her feel like a piece of meat getting stared at by men as she’s changing. I’m going to look at this as though it’s a real workplace organizing campaign. As there’s no union and no attempt to win one, this is what we call an “issue campaign:” it will succeed or fail based on whether it resolves the specific issue.
The classic test of whether an issue is a good one for a campaign is in four parts:
Is the issue deeply felt? Elliot is really upset about it and is ready to throw down. We learn that every woman in the hospital (other than one joke exhibitionist character, as an excuse for the show to have partial nudity because it was television in 2002-03) really cares about this.
Is the issue widely felt? Almost by definition, this is only going to affect the women in the hospital; it’s hinted that, if anything, the leering men would prefer the issue not be fixed. However, the nursing staff that we’re shown is almost entirely women, plus some doctors like Elliot.
Is the issue winnable? All the campaign has to do is convince one decision-maker, chief of medicine Dr. Bob Kelso, to use currently-vacant space for a new locker room instead of doubling his office space. He absolutely does not want to do this, so a pressure campaign will be needed. One advantage the workers have is that the law is on their side, as gender-specific locker rooms are legally required: while not enough to sway the boss on its own, this is an advantage. (Elliot is assisted in her research by back-channeling with the hapless hospital lawyer, Ted.)
Does this build the union/organization/leadership? There’s unfortunately no attempt to capitalize on this campaign afterward, because this is a sitcom.
The campaign kicks off when Elliot tries to fix the issue by herself: she confronts Kelso in his office, backed up uselessly by Ted. The response to this is kicking her out of the office. Why didn’t this work? Because it wasn’t a collective action. Kelso sees that only one person seems to care about this, and thinks he doesn’t have to pay any attention. For this action to have had a chance of succeeding, Elliot should have recruited nurses like Carla and Laverne to compose a small delegation with her. Recruiting someone from the boys’ club of surgery would have been tougher, but would have helped, too.
The next action the workers do is excellent: Elliot and all of the nurses work not in their scrubs, but in their regular clothes. Confronted about this by Kelso, Elliot confidently explains that without a place to change into her work clothes, she’s forced to work in street clothes. We then see that other nurses, notably including Laverne, are joining this action in their respective non-work attire. Kelso furiously gives in and grants the campaign an absolute, uncompromised win.
Why was this action so successful, other than that it was near the end of the show’s 22 minutes? The workers took direct action in a way that specifically connected the action to the issue they were campaigning about. They didn’t have to confront Kelso again; it was such a visible display of solidarity that he demanded to know what was going on from them. In addition, it wasn’t just “direct action” in the sense of a visible protest at work, it was “direct action” in the sense that it (partially) solved the problem itself. They didn’t want to use the co-ed locker room, so they stopped using the co-ed locker room. Even if the boss hadn’t given in here, they would have half-won the issue just from their refusal to abide by pre-existing work policy. One could even interpret this action as “work-to-rule,” meaning malicious compliance with the law, rather than what the boss wants.
Let’s pretend this was a real campaign, or an hourlong show, and the boss still wasn’t giving in. How could the workers have escalated the campaign? In real campaigns, the best practice is for the workers to make the entire escalation plan before the first action happens, so that no one is ever confused or lost about what happens next. The actions have to continue building and escalating, rather than going backwards, or things would seem disorganized, weak, something that will go away on its own if the boss ignores it long enough.
The next step should be continuing the same action, but expanding it, to show the boss that the entire hospital, not simply a portion of it, is willing to take action over this. The workers would have to recruit key male leaders who are willing not just to join the action, but convince their bros to join, as well. In a formal union campaign, any manager is legally excluded, but in this case, even managers like Dr. Cox should participate.
After this, there are both simultaneously an infinite number of possible actions, but a limited number of effective ones that would be an escalation above everyone wearing non-work clothes in the hospital. One possibility would be, instead of simply wearing whatever clothes people want, matching T-shirts with a campaign slogan, to really drive home even to a casual observer that something is going on here.
If the boss still doesn’t respond to that, it’s time to take the action to him. One of the classic union escalation tactics is the “March on the Boss.” If you’ve ever seen a social media clip of a Starbucks barista reading their manager demands, as the other workers are standing around, that’s a MOTB. It requires one worker to be the one reading the demand to the boss, one worker documenting (maybe camcorder back in 2002-03), and one worker making sure the boss or their lackeys don’t interrupt or disrupt the worker reading the demand. Because all the workers are going to the boss at once, this is, technically, a very brief work stoppage. This could also happen at one of the hospital’s board meetings.
The final step of any escalation campaign is always the indefinite strike. The workers might have a legal case here that they are refusing to work in unsafe conditions, but that’s a stretch. Fortunately, as they’re not covered by a union contract with a “no strike” clause, they are free to walk out in protest of whatever issue moves them, and retaliation from management would be illegal. Expected, but illegal. A worker retaliated against would have to find a lawyer themselves, with no union supporting them.
But, none of those actions were needed in this case. What should have happened in future episodes to build off of this? Well, a union, of course. Escalatory actions like this are often called “structure tests:” it finds out which members of our organizing committee are truly capable of moving their coworkers. If it wasn’t obvious from every other time she’s portrayed in the show, Laverne is clearly able to get 100% participation from her fellow nurses in a collective action. She’s need to be on the Organizing Committee of any union effort, or it would fail.
It might seem absurd, a pure invention of WGA-represented sitcom writers, that non-union workers would do a collective action and win. It’s really not. Workers with no prior training in organizing invent MOTB’s and other workplace actions from first principles all the time. Sometimes, during a union campaign, I’ll find out that the most old-time and anti-union workers have, themselves, led such collective actions, and might even use that as a reason why they don’t need a union.
Most of my ideas (both in this essay and just in general) are plagiarized from Secrets of a Successful Organizer. Go read that book and take a training.
