SEIU: global union or “brand name”? Smoke without fire

Submitted by AWL on 12 February, 2009 - 7:44 Author: Adam Fischer

In May 2006, readers of Voice: AIGA Journal of Design were offered an unusual glimpse into current liberal-trade union thinking.

The online publication for “the professional association for design” finds an audience largely among American commercial artists, art-directors, and “brand consultants,” an ambitious crowd unlikely to humble itself anywhere near a picket-line (except perhaps when crossing one). It is therefore revealing that contributing writer David Barringer’s “New U? Unions have an Image Problem” — the title itself a giveaway — should figure so inconspicuously as just another case study in its parent sheet.

Here we learn that US labour’s pains stem principally not from any internal malignancy or crippling neoliberal policy, but from an inability to reinvent and market itself as “The Latest Thing”.

Barringer, it must be mentioned, is no trade union insider. He is a freelance writer and graphic designer who occasionally leases his talents in the service of trade unions. His is a professional milieu accustomed to concocting public faces, in transforming the image of businesses from profit-seeking enterprises into benevolent and highly personalized organisms. So it might be forgiven, especially considering his audience, that he overlooks the floorboards and foundation and appraises the value of Andy Stern’s Service Employees International Union (SEIU), among others, purely on the strength of its “kerb appeal.”

Indeed, few on the left would deny SEIU’s immediate allure. After all, since taking office in 1996, Stern has doubled the membership rolls, making the two million strong purple-clad outfit the fastest growing and most visible union in the United States. And he pledges to bring another half-million into the fold by 2012.

SEIU claims the most diverse rank and file in the nation, with women constituting a majority of membership, people of colour comprising 40%, and an immigrant constituency whose numbers are unsurpassed by any other union.

This is the same union, let us remember, whose Justice for Janitors campaign made fresh again the demand for bread, and roses too, in Ken Loach’s 2000 decennial commemoration of the “Battle of Century City.” It was Andrew L. Stern’s imprimatur which appeared on the US release of Bread & Roses, complete with an invocation of James Oppenheim’s plea for justice and dignity, thereby forever solidifying — at least rhetorically — a relationship between his leadership and that of the Wobbly militants who helmed the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike. Not an easy gig, really: conjuring the memory of revolutionary unionism while promising wherever possible to shed the most basic organizing traditions of the last millennium.

But against his critics — those nostalgists who insist on (say) meaningful definitions of union democracy — he can hold this portrait up as the “Latest Thing”: a maverick organiser fighting against social injustice in a “post-industrial” world, a place where many of the old rules simply don’t apply.

Among the impediments to progress and 21st century efficiency is the baggage of member-chosen local leadership. As an expedient to “Getting Things Done”, that right has now become a privilege subject to reversal by the International. This was made clear when, on 23 January, the 150,000 member United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW), SEIU’s third largest local, was given the non-choice by Stern and his allegiant executive board to either accept the involuntary transfer of 65,000 nursing home and homecare workers into a statewide, 240,000 member “local” of long-term care workers, or submit to a takeover by the Washington leadership.

The members of UHW rejected this ultimatum, thus prompting Stern to place the local under emergency trusteeship on 27 January, citing financial malfeasance as reason to uproot the popular command of Sal Roselli.

According to SEIUvoice.org, a UHW member-run website, the imposition of trusteeship “has the effect of declaring martial law against those advocating for the right to vote and other democratic principles in their own union.” Even more disquieting, the International had already gone ahead and secured for itself secret offices to prepare for the takeover before the Stern-appointed hearing officer Ray Marshall came to his decision. But then why bother with formalities?

For Stern, this singular manoeuvre helped scratch a couple of nagging itches. On the one hand, it removed from power the International’s leading oppositionist, Roselli, who, once having sat on the executive board, has since roundly condemned the supposed merits of “partnership,” the trend toward employer-sanctioned bargaining agreements.

On the other hand, it helped further consolidate power into a single, regional bargaining entity designed to fulfill the mantra of “one voice,” a seemingly plausible, even ostensibly radical, artifice for the creation of these gargantuan locals.

The official reason given for the transfer of 65,000 UHW members is that “in the face of the sweeping cuts Governor Schwarzeneggar has proposed, long-term care workers need to be unified now more than ever,” and that “240,000 long term care workers will stand united and stronger in one single California local union to save state home care programs and protect nursing home funding from budget cuts.”

One Big Union, yes, but not organised against capital, but with it!

Consider some of Andy Stern's oft-excerpted but worth repeating comments which appeared a few years ago in the 6 February 2006 issue of Epoch Times:

“SEIU’s goal for 2006 is to go global and to bring unions and corporations together as partners, not enemies. I think that what we’re going to see happen within ten years, if not sooner, is a convergence of a global labour movement….

“Employers need to recognise that the world has changed and there are people who would like to help them provide solutions in ways that are new, modern and that add value to companies…. A partnership between labor and corporations would be a step towards the intended goal….

“On the other side of the coin, union members have to understand that companies are not their enemy, but must think about increasing shareholder wealth…”.

What was true for 2006 remains true for 2009. When the UHW long-term care workers voted against splitting, they cast their ballot as much against the joint labour-management terms with which a Stern-loyal leadership comes saddled as they did against the power-brokering and autocracy which makes such an arrangement even possible. But rather than sit idly by while the International installs its own unelected officials, the democratically-elected representatives of UHW have opted instead to form a new union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers.

Though Stern would like very much to portray this matter as the isolated clamor of deceitful “left business unionism,” other recent events suggest otherwise.

Just last October, for example, the 42,000 members of the Puerto Rican Federation of Teachers (FMPR) voted against representation by SEIU, who, in a well-financed and well-documented campaign, was found to have colluded with the island’s governor and FMPR’s rival school association to win sole bargaining control. The teacher’s own long-standing and dynamic union was decertified months earlier for authorising an illegal strike in protest over the state’s two-year refusal to grant a contract.

Rather than mobilise auxiliary support for FMPR’s newfound legal battle, SEIU instead relished the opportunity to extend its reach, all the while assuring the local government, in no uncertain terms, of an end to the rank-and-file militancy of yore. A win-win, which, alas, was not to be.

The annals of American labour are polluted with the smoke of back-room deals and bureaucratic machinations. There is nothing novel about union-raiding or the gambits of a power-hungry officialdom. But there is something unique about the ways in which these tactics are now packaged and resold as a panacea for labour’s woes.

It is a kind of retailing which assumes a market already saturated with the obscurantism of social theorists who insist that industrialism and tidy class divisions are relics of a prehistoric past. And its hucksters are always quick to assure us that the hyper-efficiency of corporate restructuring precludes the paralysing romanticism of rank and file accountability that union democracy would otherwise demand.

Since rank-and-file self-activity can only ever unravel “partnership” arrangements, Andy Stern must increasingly turn outward for continued support. To this end, he has pursued the same course of aggressive face-painting that are his business allies’ stock in trade, blanketing a bullied membership in a precisely stitched pattern of Facts and Figures. Perhaps in this sense “brand unionism” might come to best express the practices of his SEIU.

There is, however, a neat irony to branding. It is a point usually lost on left-wing critics of consumerism (many of whom also helped deliver us into “post-industrial” society), but not on the late American dissident Ellen Willis, who long ago discovered that with each new purported nonessential comes the very real, albeit limited, satisfaction of certain human desires and the promise of a materially-rich future. The biggest threat to capital isn’t that workers should suddenly stop consuming (capital periodically takes care of that, in its own way); it is that workers should demand the conditions which might allow them to take the ad-men up on their offers of an abundant life.

Likewise, the biggest threat to SEIU’s brand of top-down unionism is that more members should follow the lead of UHW and FMPR rank and filers and insist Andy Stern’s pledge of social-justice be taken to its logical conclusion —confrontation, rather than adaptation, to the status quo.

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