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NEWS & LETTERS, June -July 2007WorkShop TalksWhich side is your union on?by Htun Lin In May it was reported that the California Nurses Association has finally decided to join the AFL-CIO, mainly because they got the AFL-CIO to agree to fight along with the CNA on their cardinal issue, single payer health care. CNA sees this as an extension of their struggle to curb corporate abuse in health care. On the other hand, other union leaders have aligned themselves with corporate abuse. In April, the Change To Win Coalition, a break-off from the AFL-CIO led by SEIU President Andy Stern, announced an impending renewal of their template agreements, which give sweetheart deals to the owners of major nursing home chains. These contract deals are similar to the Labor-Management Partnership that has been practiced in my shop for many years. Over ten years ago, Stern engineered the Labor-Management Partnership between AFL-CIO President Sweeney and Kaiser HMO. That was a betrayal of the then ongoing struggle for quality care led by the nurses of the CNA--it undercut support for the nurses’ roving one-day strikes. In the workplace nurses are still fighting those battles. Stern’s new sweetheart deals take Labor-Management Partnerships to a new low. In exchange for allowing nursing home owners to have the complete say in working conditions, including denying workers the right to pursue quality care issues, the companies would guarantee SEIU the right to organize the shop. The only residue of unionism in Stern’s organizing drive is getting his hands on more checked off dues. No wonder the deals were relayed to the owners in a secret memo pledging that none of the contents of their agreement would be revealed. One dedicated SEIU activist said he was in the same room with Stern when the new Change To Win Coalition was formed, but there was "no mention of this kind of sellout deal." In my own shop, we recently had to take an impromptu vote to decide whether to accept a contract that had absolutely not been discussed outside of insider circles. They told us while we were at our workstations that we had only until the end of the shift to accept the offer. If we did not choose to accept, our local president warned, we would "risk losing" the back wages owed to us. LOSING JOB RIGHTS This offer, presented as a fait accompli, included losing fundamental rights like the right to bid on jobs according to seniority. They didn’t even pretend that our input mattered when it came to our future in the workplace. Do these events augur total capitulation to management as the future of unions? This must be stopped. Workers originally created unions out of concrete concerns in their workplaces. Those concerns were not just about wages and benefits but mainly about the meaning of work. Democracy is not about a simple yes or no on a contract vote. Workplace democracy demands an ongoing discussion about our own activity on the shop floor. Right now our work is alienating. Every day, as we enter the shop, we enter into a de facto partnership not of our own making. This arises from the fact that we workers have no choice but to sell our labor power in order to make a living. We enter into that deal to earn a paycheck. It is a partnership in which our labor is no longer our own because, once sold to the employer, we have fundamentally relinquished control of it--even though in health care we know how important that labor is to the patients we are serving. This inherent partnership with management is nothing to celebrate. It’s like an albatross around our necks from which we’re trying to free ourselves. But many of our union bureaucrats have gone over to the other side. Stern’s latest deals with corrupt nursing home owners is nothing less than a deliberate attempt by pro-capitalist labor leaders to hijack the labor movement into a complete surrender to the dictates of capital. CHAINED FOR LIFE At least our partnership at Kaiser is up for renewal every three years. Stern hopes to sign a contract with one of the nursing home chains that will be in effect for 50 years! Stern supports capitalists who outsource our jobs, seeing in globalization opportunities for his kind of union movement--for instance, aligning himself with Wal-Mart’s vision of "universal health care." Capital’s vision of global wage slavery is compatible with company unions. Whether in Beijing or at Wal-Mart, Stern thinks the future of workers resides in partnering with corporate abuse. Workers in China are not taking the abuse sitting down. We don’t hear much about their labor activities, but last year alone there were no less than 60,000 work actions, what government officials call "civil disturbances." We are searching for our own answers just when our labor leaders surrendered to the idea that there is no alternative to globalized capitalism. |
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