Labor's Split -- An Inside Look (part two)

[DaveT]

This is the continuation of an essay posted in General Discussion at:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4185521



You have probably read that the "reforms" advocated by SEIU’s Andy Stern and his allies who have bolted the AFL-CIO convention are designed to require unions to devote more resources to organizing. Part One of this essay addressed what this means in practical terms to the 13 million men and women who are paying billions of dollars per year in dues to support the structure of organized labor.

Neither Stern nor any of the other International Presidents joining him in the split contend that there is a push from their rank and file memberships to lay off their staff representatives so that more organizers can be hired. These men are frank enough to acknowledge that their program is an institutional necessity that might be unpopular in the short run, but that it will produce tangible results that members will come to appreciate as the results of organizing success becomes manifest.

In the meantime, unfortunately, this means that Sternism requires that union democracy be de-emphasized for the long term good of the membership.

The mechanism for fending off a member backlash to the end of service unionism is the second plank of the Stern reform package:

(2) Smaller labor organizations should be obliged to merge into larger ones.


This proposition must be somewhat puzzling to people unfamiliar with the inner workings of the labor movement. It is usually couched in rather vague, shallow and disingenuous terms such as, "In order to counter the concentrated power of great corporations, we need to consolidate our structure." Another misleading slogan I've heard suggests that "Smaller unions do not have the clout to deal with great corporations."

These bromides ignore the fact that giant unions do not have any more real “clout” in the current environment than the tiniest ones. In organized labor's most humiliating defeat of the new century, the UFCW got its head handed to it by Kroger, Safeway and Albertson's in the disastrous Los Angeles area grocery strike of 2003-4.

With excellent consumer support and the full institutional weight and money of the AFL-CIO behind it, the UFCW squandered somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million trying to win a strike confined to the LA area. The grocery employers simply absorbed heavy losses in Southern California while keeping the "investment community" happy with continued profits from other markets all over the country. Size and money without a coherent economic strategy meant nothing in that strike when all was said and done.



This idea of forced mergers is, in a word, absurd. In the first place, each of these small unions that would be subject to forced mergers under the proposed “reforms” could just as easily withdraw from the AFL-CIO as the SEIU is now withdrawing. There is no way of enforcing that concept within the Federation other than blowing up the Federation.

Any International President, no matter how small and doomed the position of his union may seem, has a powerful personal incentive to avoid being swallowed up by huge structures like SEIU, the UFCW or the Teamsters – he will lose all power and privilege. By paying dues to the AFL-CIO each of these minor chieftains secures protection from a hostile takeover. If the Big Three (plus the smaller UNITE-HERE) had prevailed in imposing their demands on the AFL-CIO convention this year, there would have been a mass exodus of the independent unions from the Federation to avoid their own extinction.

Furthermore, if Stern and his friends believed that size was all that mattered, they would not be splitting up the AFL-CIO. By demanding the power and claiming the moral right to force mergers of smaller unions, Stern and Company have declared war on the rest of organized labor. There was no chance that this “reform” would ever have been adopted by the Convention.


Strategic Organizing

I have read a more plausible and sophisticated rationale for Stern's demand for the merging of smaller unions in the lefty press – it is part of a bigger idea called "strategic organizing." Instead of a bunch of little unions sending out small organizing probes in search of random targets, they want to combine the "resources" of all the unionized workers in an industry into a massive fund for going after entire industries.

By forcing the smaller unions to merge into larger ones, it will be easier to set up these "strategic" campaigns.

I have no real argument against the premise of "strategic organizing." But it is not necessary to merge the little unions out of existence in order to do it. You must simply persuade the leadership of them to co-operate with the larger unions. In fact, it is the traditional role of the AFL-CIO to broker such combined efforts.

But there is the rub. Andy Stern complains that the small International President's won't go along with his leadership and vision for conducting the "strategic organizing campaign." Since he can't get them to follow his lead through persuasion, he demanded that the AFL-CIO order them to get under his wing. And as noted above, there was never any chance that these smaller unions would agree to commit organizational suicide.


Here is where the news does not tell you the most important part of the story. By withdrawing from the AFL-CIO, by far the most significant change is that the newly independent unions are no longer bound by the no-raid agreement, Article XX of the AFL-CIO constitution. This means that Stern, with his 1.8 million SEIU member base and his organizing budget already aligned according to his no-service scheme, can deploy hundreds of full time organizers to "raid" any AFL-CIO shop in the country.

Within the culture of organized labor, the decertification of a sister union -- the raid -- is considered a horrible crime against nature, a fratricidal madness and the last resort of a desperate union. It is also the easiest thing on earth to rationalize once you decide to do it.

I do not believe that Stern will start a raiding spree as his first move after leaving the AFL-CIO. But I know first hand that one of his most serious grudges is against unions such as the Steelworkers who have organized shops in what he regards as the SEIU's proper jurisdiction, health care.

The most common way that raid wars have gotten started throughout labor history is when some other union "started it.”

Even if this new coalition of unions that have walked out of the AFL-CIO had the purest of intentions, their size and position within service industries that generally cannot be shipped overseas make them extremely formidable threats to overwhelm the smaller unions that remain within the Federation. As the jockeying for position and internal power continues in this new divided era for organized labor, this unspoken threat of a massive raid will be a huge bargaining advantage for Stern and the other big unions.

The implicit threat behind the explicit demand for the small unions to be swallowed up by the big ones is to swallow them up through raids. This will be the elephant in the living room as these bolting unions propose “friendly” mergers to the independents over the next few years. Instead of the AFL-CIO mandating the end of an International President’s job – and instead of seeing his union destroyed by trying to defend against a hostile takeover by the giant unions – the minor chieftain will be able to negotiate himself a nice “buyout” which protects his lifestyle and self-respect, while turning his membership over to the New Paradigm of organizing rather than service.

Please do not misunderstand this point. I shed no crocodile tears for these minor chieftains. In any given case a small or intermediate sized union’s top officer may be a great unionist or a common crook. It varies.

I do not question the logic of Stern that a consolidated structure for labor can provide a more rational deployment of “resources.” He is simply following the well worn trail originally blazed by John D. Rockefeller and the other original monopolists.


The Rubber Meeting the Road

It is fair to say also that most of the memberships of those smaller unions do not want to lose their respective union's identity and most assuredly they want no part of Stern's idea of "actions not grievances." Of course, no one has asked them, and no one is likely to ask them -- which is the real problem for organized labor in the 21st Century.

Stern proposes that the labor movement cannot survive unless the smaller unions are forced out of existence so that their dues revenue can be diverted into organizing and strategic campaigns. The hole in the donut of Sternism is that the members paying the freight for his grand vision do not now support the idea – and are always unlikely to support the idea.

Which leads us to the real reason for making union structures large and monolithic.

Stern has already imposed this theory of structural consolidation on his own union. In the 2000 SEIU Convention in Pittsburg, the Union adopted the “New Strength Unity” program which mandated the merger of local unions within SEIU into the biggest units possible. I worked briefly for what was then called Local 250 in San Francisco, which at the time had health care jurisdiction for northern California. Since 2000 it has morphed into a multi-state organization called “United Health Care Workers – West” – a “local” union with 130,000 members.

Meanwhile, all over the country local SEIU structures are being sliced and diced by top-down fiat into industry-specific mega-locals, with no upper limit to the number of members in the local. The most obvious consequence of this process is to make individual challenges to local administrations just as impossible as challenges to the International.

Andy Stern has countered attacks on the undemocratic features of his program by asserting that union consolidation under centralized control will give workers more power. By letting rank and file prejudice, ignorance, nostalgia and unfocused energy continue to be a drag on his vision for a stronger labor movement, Stern claims that the current labor movement will crash upon the rocks of history.

That really is the challenge he poses – one similar to the problem addressed by Plato, Lenin and Leo Strauss in different ways: democracy can produce unwise policies.


Personally, I think Stern is the worst threat to the working people in American history. His arrogant “vision” for One Big Union is hardly unique or profound. His biggest folly is his conception of the labor movement as a sluice for money – an aggregate of “resources” that should be deployed according to rational, top-down theories of control.

Why would any member want to “belong” to an organization that takes her dues and gives nothing but didactic instructions and the ineffable promise of “power” in return?

Here even my friends Bruce Raynor (UNITE-HERE) and Joe Hansen (UFCW) have their heads in the sand. Organizing is not a function of how much money you spend on it. In Part One I mentioned that when the labor movement was still growing 40 years ago, it was easy to attract new members because the benefits of union membership were so obvious. Yes, times have changed, and we have to have a new strategy – but what kind of strategy is it to offer prospective new members the abstract promise of “power” without any tangible evidence of what that power is going to accomplish?


The labor movement was not built with money. It cannot be rebuilt with money. For it to be a movement, it has to move people toward a common vision shared by huge numbers of people – not the esoteric theory of a professional money manager.

Stern and his supporters would dismiss this call for “inspiration” as being unrealistic. I respond by saying that Stern is the one who is dreaming.




Post script:

Here are a couple of thoughts from within SEIU


This is an interview with John Templeton, a long time SEIU activist from Massachusetts whose local introduced some resolutions at the last International Convention in 2004.

http://www.labornotes.org/archives/2005/01/articles/e.html

We introduced four amendments and a couple of resolutions. The first amendment was to have direct member election of all international officers. We really think that would be good because, in order for any officer in the international to get elected, there would have to be intense membership contact. We don’t have that now with our president, Andy Stern, being elected by the executive board.

Another amendment was that a person, in order to become a local officer, would have to be a member of the local. Because SEIU, when they trustee a local, they’ll appoint a president and often times that person will run for the presidency. As far as I’m concerned, there’s a disconnect there. Not just as far as I’m concerned—these amendments were submitted by our executive board to the convention.

The third amendment was that you can only trustee a local for corruption, financial malfeasance, or to restore democratic procedures within the local. The way I understand it now, the international’s talking about locals that aren’t spending 20 percent on organizing can be trusteed, and I just think that’s the wrong way of going about that.

/snip/

The fourth amendment was that locals that have the right to directly elect their officers should not be moved to locals that do not have direct elections. That last one was basically attempting to prevent the International from arbitrarily merging 509 into the National Association of Government Employees (SEIU Local 5000) which is a nationwide local of 33,000 people.

This is from Bruce Boccardy, also an SEIU dissident from Massachusetts:

http://www.labornotes.org/archives/2005/06/articles/e.shtml

We were first introduced to the New Strength Unity program in 2000. There was little organized debate in the chapters around the adoption of the program. I attended one meeting addressed by our Local 285 Treasurer. The NSU was presented as a dynamic panacea to what ailed SEIU.

Re-organizing by work classification and/or employer was a superb idea and promised to strengthen all the locals. No challenges were offered for debate. I had been an activist in Local 285 for 12 years. Our leaders' dedication had inspired more than a modicum of trust and respect. We had no reason to question Local 285 leadership's support of the NSU. The vote for the NSU passed almost unanimously and in August 2003, some units of SEIU 285, together with units from several other SEIU locals, joined together in a new local, SEIU 888.

/Snip/

FUTURE OF SEIU

SEIU Local 888 has lost its historical union compass. Denying democratic processes will undoubtedly further alienate already organized members and dissipate the motivation of others to join SEIU 888. Democratic structures and processes must be implemented that reflect principles of industrial unionism.

The policies of the NSU disempower members. They emphasize allocating resources to organize the unorganized. Certainly, working people should and must be organized. However, when that organizing effort sacrifices the interests of previously organized members and their daily issues, the union is diminished.

The question for SEIU 888 is whether members can reclaim the union and integrate it into a larger progressive labor movement.

[kevsand]

1. You have dramatically underscored the point that I

have been trying to make to folks here at DU all week: labor can not reinvigorate itself from the top down. Unions can only be successfully reinvented from the ground up. If the rank and file don't buy into it, it'll just be the same old product in a different package.

We shouldn't have to choose between organizing and political work. They should complement each other in a mutually reinforcing synergy. We shouldn't have to choose between growth and service. Service is what members expect when they ask what they're getting in return for their dues.

And we should never, ever, adopt a model that diminishes the democratic nature of unions. When the workers don't have a voice in their own union, they have no voice at all.

[Robbien]

2. From the Boccardy link

It is even worse than what was discussed yesterday where Union members are paying dues but have to assume all Union arbitration/administrative work themselves. Boccardy's post paints a story of not only do they have to do the work themselves, union officials actively prevent members from doing the work, so no union work gets done.

And all members have no idea what the officials are doing.


Jeeze.

What are the odds the members will be able to reclaim their union?

[DaveT]

3. What are the odds the members will be able to reclaim their union?

I've been struggling with this question for 22 years.

The problem is that the "choices" that get put in front of union members are always controlled like different brands of beer or different channels on cable TV.

Most anti-administration activism within unions is led by people even more ludicrous than Sweeny or Stern -- far left wing ideologues who are preposterously easy for the Administration to marginalize, trivialize and ignore.

My grandfather didn't have any "choices" when he formed a union in 1935 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The owners of the Morrell packing plant where he worked announced that they were going to lay off 40% of the work force -- in an era when there was no unemployment compensation or any other social safety net. My grandfather and his friends formed a committee to ask the boss to cut back to a 28 hour work week instead, allowing all the workers to be able to feed their families. When the boss threw them out of his office, they formed a union.

They went on strike and two years later after occupying the plant, facing armored cars and the national guard, street fighting and many hospitalizations and a consumer boycott of Morrell products they finally got a union contract.

So long as we look at the world through the eyes of a "consumer" who buys things, unions have no real hope coming back.

Only when people make up their minds that they want to take some kind of real action on their own behalf will we reestablish the labor movement.


It is the same as with the vote count in national elections. So long as people look at the Diebold and Trident companies as characters in a drama that we watch on television, there will be no way to ensure a fair vote count.


We live in a passive age, a passivity that I think is engendered by television, which has been putting most of us to sleep since we were babies in the crib.


As the logic of corporate power continues its assent, the powerlessness of the individual countinues to spiral downward. Stern's corporate theory of unionism tricked up with leftist window dressing will only be stopped when union members do the same kind of thing my grandfather did in 1935 -- we have to take things into our own hands.

We have a long way to go before people are ready for that -- but I still have hopes.

In the meantime, I also hope that the internet can serve the same function that mimeograph machines provided during the waning years of the Soviet Empire.

When the Official Lies become too laughable to maintain, the old structure falls overnight.

[davsand]

4. Unless rank and file stands up they are screwed.

If rank and file wants to stand up and take control you may be seeing the "birth pains" of a new labor movement. If rank and file chooses to sit on their hands and wail you are watching the death of one of the most significant social movements of all time. It is THAT simple.

I can't count the number of times I have heard union members say they have no idea what they pay dues for beyond a lousy T shirt from the BA once a year (or a turkey at Thanksgiving or a Christmas party at the local.) Rank and file seems to have little to NO idea of the history of the labor movement or even the needs that drove the formation of labor unions in the first place. I can only hope they realize what they need now and can organize enough to get it.


Laura

[nolabels]

5. In ways the fractures could be a good thing

Large organizations often have dead wood all through them. This kind of move leaves large troff's for specialized unions to identify and organize workers who were never thought of. The cynical move of a while back to decertify peoples union activity now employed by the blanket of the Homeland Security Department shows the actual power Unions have. Like isn't that Arm of the government supposed to be the most fearless, well organized and above reproach of them all. Unions have done way more for most workers well being than any rotten to core government ever did.

Most parts of the government has been captured by business just like in the gilded age. The long sixty or seventy year history from that age to Unions gaining massive powers was fraught with business and government trying to compromise every part of any workers movement.

Breakups often benefit the people being screwed the most

[Robbien]

6. What is this Airline Union of Electrical Workers all about?

Is this an instance where the workers are taking back their union or just another power play between union management?

Turbulent aircraft industry shaking up unions
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/business/12227376.htm

<snip>

The latest volley comes from technical workers at Spirit Aerosystems who are working to decertify SPEEA, their second such vote in the past 17 months. That vote is scheduled for Aug. 17.

Heidi Foltz, a leader in the decertification effort, said SPEEA creates a divisiveness that hurts morale and runs counter to working with management. Union opponents said they can get a better deal - such as performance bonuses - similar to that of non-represented employees.

"We also have a strong, strong group - they want their own voices back," said Foltz, who works as a project management specialist at Onex. "We don't want one or two people speaking on behalf of all of us. We want to be in control of our own destiny."

SPEEA represents 1,800 technical workers - more than 30 percent of which signed the petition to get the National Labor Relations Board to put the issue up for a decertification vote.

SPEEA - which narrowly survived the last attempt to end its representation in February 2004 - is taking this latest threat very seriously, Brewer said.

"I am actually very confused and concerned," he said.

SPEEA has been the only union so far to actually win wage increases rather that accept wage cuts from Onex, but the union lost ground on other benefits.

<snip>