When Alec MacGillis of the Washington Post noted last Wednesday that this is “an awkward moment for the SEIU,” he alerted readers to a reality those following the labor movement have recognized for some time.
Andy Stern, President of SEIU, viewed as “a possible savior of labor” per MacGillis, has led SEIU into a pattern of activity that calls into question whether SEIU’s leaders really believe in the principles they claim to stand for.
The simplest way to understand the gap between SEIU’s words and its actions is to understand that, for Andy Stern, the consolidation of power has consistently trumped principle. While supporting Stern and SEIU once seemed like ‘one stop shopping’ for progressives looking to support workers, that support increasingly comes at the price of turning a blind eye to a troubling pattern of hypocrisy.
corporate-style layoffs
As MacGillis reports, SEIU is laying off 75 of its own organizers who are themselves members of a staff union (the Union of Union Representatives), while it hires short-term contract workers at lower pay to work on its political goals. While Stern is right to recognize the election of Barack Obama as a powerful political opportunity for workers, these lay-offs run directly counter to the goal Stern expressed when Change to Win was founded-which was to grow the labor movement by committing resources to organizing the unorganized throughout whole industries. Further, the layoffs have earned the wrath of the very organizers that Stern once praised:
…the workers union, which goes by the somewhat postmodern name of the Union of Union Representatives, has filed charges of unfair labor practices against the SEIU with the National Labor Relations Board. The workers union’s leaders say that the SEIU is engaging in the same kind of practices that some businesses use: laying off workers without proper notice, contracting out work to temporary-staffing firms, banning union activities and reclassifying workers to reduce union numbers.
“It’s completely hypocritical,” said Malcolm Harris, president of the workers union. “This is the union that’s been at the forefront of progressive issues, around ensuring that working people and working families are taken care of, but when it comes to the people that work for SEIU, they haven’t set the same standards.
In fact, blogger Adios Andy is reporting that SEIU’s staff union has also filed an Equal Opportunity complaint against SEIU “alleging both age and racial discrimination.”
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a growth strategy that only grows SEIU at the expense of other unions
While UNITE-HERE works through its own internal disagreements about what’s in the best interests of its members, and seeks to leave the Change to Win coalition it helped form, SEIU has inserted itself into that discussion by seeking to split off a substantial portion of UNITE-HERE’s membership and at the same time move SEIU into jurisdictions covered by HERE. This strategy is nothing new for Stern and SEIU, despite Stern’s long-running claim that organizing the unorganized is SEIU’s primary focus. In fact, UNITE-HERE has released a policy paper (pdf) documenting SEIU’s campaigns against other unions.
Labor writer Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News and Democracy NOW! added his perspective in this February Daily News editorial:
[Andy Stern’s] 2-million member SEIU is fast becoming the Roman Empire of the labor movement. Stern is forever on the prowl for new workers to absorb into his empire and he doesn’t much care how he does it.
“We are not shy in saying that their members would be better off if they were all in SEIU,” Stern said yesterday.
It is not an idle offer. Stern acknowledged he has assigned teams of lawyers and staff members to study legal documents and prepare proposals for such a merger.
Meanwhile, labor strategist Steve Rosenthal, Stern’s best friend and the husband of an SEIU vice president, is coordinating a campaign on behalf of Raynor to force the breakup of UNITE HERE and keep the bank away from Wilhelm.
“This is nothing less than a hostile takeover of our union by Andy Stern,” said another leader of UNITE HERE who sides with Wilhelm.
Not-always-safe-for-work anti-Stern gossip columnist Perez Stern presciently raised questions about this tactic in a post about this purple mailer sent out to union members in Pennsylvania. It is now clear that Workers United, the SEIU-affilliated union formed last weekend is growing at the direct expense of UNITE-HERE and with no indication that there was any authentic democratic process by which the members had any input in the decision to affilliate with SEIU themselves.
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a pattern of corruption
Equally troubling, Andy Stern has built the leadership of SEIU through a series of appointments that reveal a systemic tolerance of corruption and financial improprieties like double salaries and payments to family members and friends. A series of articles appearing in the Los Angeles Times highlighted corruption scandals with Stern’s California appointees, including Annelle Grajeda, Alejandro Stephens, Tyrone Freeman and James Bryant. Several of Stern’s appointees have resigned from office because of corruption scandals, only to be given another highly-paid job by Stern.
The most recent story reported:
The Service Employees International Union’s highest-ranking California officer has resigned that position and two other leadership posts in the wake of an internal investigation of payments to her ex-boyfriend, it was announced today. The SEIU said its inquiry found no wrongdoing by Annelle Grajeda, who was one of six executive vice presidents of the national union as well as the head of its California council and the local that represents Los Angeles County workers.
The union said Grajeda, who could not be reached for comment, had decided to become an assistant to the SEIU’s secretary-treasurer in Washington, D.C.
The best antidotes to corruption by union officials are clear policies that guarantee transparency and allow members a free and democratic process to replace officers they don’t trust. For example, the member-led executive board of SEIU-UHW, the elected board deposed by Andy Stern in his January trusteeship of SEIU-UHW, routinely reviewed and approved every single check their local wrote.
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a hypocritical scare campaign
SEIU is contradicting itself on whether workers should be able to choose their union. Rather than holding a principled position the issue, SEIU is telling healthcare workers in California they’ll lose everything if they change unions, while telling Los Angeles city government workers the opposite. SEIU calls NUHW supporters “reckless” for encouraging workers to change unions, while SEIU has an entire website to encourage city government workers to decertify their union and join SEIU.
Here’s a sample of what SEIU is telling healthcare workers (pdf), compared with what they are telling city government workers in LA:
What happens to our current contract and negotiated raises if we vote to join NUHW?
-SEIU is telling UHW members they will lose everything if they vote to join NUHW.
-SEIU is telling L.A. city professionals: “Until L.A. city professionals determine in a transparent and empowering process what a new collective bargaining agreement should include, the current contract remains in place.”
How do we know we won’t lose our current wages and benefits?
-SEIU is telling UHW members that the current contract and retirement benefits will all be lost if they vote to join NUHW.
-SEIU is telling L.A. City professionals: “The decision on whether to accept a contract belongs to the membership and members would never vote to ratify a contract that reduces benefits.”
The only consistent principle here seems to be that, in every case, Stern will say whatever it takes to consolidate power — even if it means lying to healthcare workers seeking to join NUHW. That shows a troubling lack of principle.
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a fundamental inconsistency on a worker’s right to choose
What’s even more troubling is that while the entire labor movement supports the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) so that workers can join a union by majority sign-up (by signing cards or petitions), SEIU is now actively opposing the use of majority sign-up by workers choosing to leave SEIU. In fact, SEIU is doing everything in its power to thwart and obstruct the freely-expressed desire of 91,000 California healthcare workers to build their own, member-led union in California.
When the workers at four California Nursing homes used majority sign-up-the same procedure encouraged by EFCA-to vote to join NUHW, this is what SEIU’s spokeswoman Michelle Ringuette had to say:
“This is not a done deal,” SEIU spokeswoman Michelle Ringuette said. She said the SEIU on Tuesday filed an unfair labor practices charge with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing North American Healthcare of “illegally recognizing” the National Union of Healthcare Workers.
Further, Dave Regan, SEIU-UHW trustee wrote an email addressed to SEIU members in California saying this about workers’ petitions:
We are filing a Unfair Labor Practice against the employer for illegally recognizing NUHW. If an employer chooses to collude with NUHW and base their recognition on tainted cards, it does so at its own risk and we will pursue every avenue to hold NUHW and the employer accountable and to ensure that the workers are able to make a fair, informed choice about representation.
Attacking workers who used majority sign-up to choose their union, using rhetoric that undermines the Employee Free Choice Act, further demonstrates the hypocrisy that has gripped SEIU.
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trapping workers using the “contract bar” is the opposite of free choice
The healthcare workers building NUHW are ardent supporters of EFCA. They know full well which union they’ve chosen to represent them. But their choice is being thwarted by SEIU using the exact same methods employers have used to oppose workers’ choice in the past: lawsuits, delays, intimidation, and false information. However, SEIU has an additional tool at its disposal: abuse of the “contract bar.”
SEIU’s use of the “contract bar” in its legal attacks on healthcare workers has not passed unnoticed by labor scholars. As Wesleyan sociologist Jonathan Cutler (and author of “Labor’s Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW, and the Struggle for American Unionism.”) wrote in the Hartford Courant:
Incumbent unions love the security afforded by a government policy that blocks external challengers and thwarts escape by union dissidents. It is no coincidence, then, that in late February the Service Employees International Union – one of the unions pressing most aggressively for the “easy-entry” card-check provision of the Employee Free Choice Act – invoked the “no-exit” contract-bar rule in an increasingly fierce battle with activist health care workers from its enormous 150,000-member local in California who want to dump SEIU and join a rival group, the National Union of Healthcare Workers.
Cutler further argues that energized, democratic dissidents like NUHW are, in fact, good for the labor movement.
In March 2008, one of the nation’s most prominent law firms specializing in helping employers manage labor trouble distributed a memo analyzing the growing challenge to the SEIU. The memo warned that “this struggle” would “almost certainly” result in “an energized and aggressive” union movement “in California and elsewhere.” The “debate” will force all contenders to prove that they “can bargain strong contracts and organize new members effectively.” “Employers are advised,” the memo concluded, to prepare for “more aggressive organizing and collective bargaining campaigns.” In other words, prepare for a strong labor movement. But that strong labor movement depends on real employee free choice. In the last instance, union revitalization does not await the end of the secret ballot in union elections but the end of the contract-bar doctrine and the freedom to replace ineffectual unions with nimble, hungry challengers.
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an antidote to SEIU’s failure of principle: union democracy
There is an antidote to Andy Stern’s rush to consolidate power at the expense of SEIU’s staff, its principles, its good name, the truth, and its members. That antidote is union democracy, reform, and worker self-determination. This democratic spirit is embodied in the 91,000 healthcare workers who have decided to form their own new, member-led, democratic union, in direct response to Stern’s failure to lead on principles.
The election of Barack Obama does indeed represent an opportunity for workers and their progressive allies to make advances on a wide array of crucial legislation, from EFCA to health care. However, we are stronger when we conduct ourselves by the principles we purport to stand for. There are always those who think that we might win more battles if we don’t criticize, if we brook no dissent and pursue deals with corporations and politicians at any cost. However, at some point, the broader progressive movement needs to ask Andy Stern and SEIU the hard questions about Stern’s consistent failures to live up to the principles he says he stands for.
Turning a blind eye to that lack of principle is not acceptable; in fact, it puts the labor movement at risk. Above all, workers’ right to self-determination is not something the labor movement can afford to compromise. In the case of NUHW, Andy Stern would have us turn our back on the democratic will of tens of thousands of California health care workers who’ve chosen, in the face of intimidation and a scare campaign led by SEIU, to build a new, democratic union out of the ashes of the old.
What these workers are building in the face of adversity is a member-led beacon pointing a way forward for the labor movement. It is also a powerful antidote to the lack of principle Andy Stern has exhibited in his quest to consolidate power.
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how you can help: support NUHW
JOIN our mailing list (by going to the sidebar and signing up for updates). TELL your elected representatives that you support California healthcare workers’ freedom of choice to form NUHW through fast, free and fair elections, without harassment and intimidation from their employers or from SEIU. (Enter your zip in box and hit enter.) VISIT our website and DONATE to support our movement. And, most importantly, if you have friends or family who are healthcare workers and would like to join our movement to build a vibrant, member-led National Union of Healthcare Workers, please SPREAD THE WORD.
{Paul Delehanty is an employee of the National Union of Healthcare Workers.}
