Selling union members

From its start News & Letters has identified the labor bureaucracy as the "last barrier to the full emancipation of the working class." To a Left-leaning journalist like Esther Kaplan, in "Labor's Growing Pains," (The Nation, May 29, 2008), labor's "growth" is equivalent to the labor bureaucracy signing up new members.

The two main characters in her story of organizing drives in health care are the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), headed by Andy Stern, and the California Nurses' Association (CNA), headed by Rose Ann DeMoro. Kaplan frames the story as a "turf war" over new members because "more than half a million nursing jobs will be created over the next ten years."

COLLUSION WITH BOSSES

Stern's method of union growth--enlisting more dues-paying members by colluding with management in a way that totally embraces capital's prerogatives--makes traditional corrupt "business unionism" look good. He has gone after nurses of the California Nurses Association (CNA), including a goon-like stalking of individual nurses at their homes and physically accosting nurses at a Labor Notes conference, after CNA blocked his effort to organize nurses in Ohio.

Back in the 1990s, CNA in alliance with service workers confronted Kaiser management with a series of strikes and won the first ever landmark contract with a provision for "quality of care." This win signified a new kind of labor movement where workers were reaching for ways to reclaim control and meaning of their own labor.

When CNA now insists on a separate union for nurses, it makes itself vulnerable to the criticism of being an "elite craft union" or, as Kaplan puts it, "unwilling to leverage the relative privilege of RNs for the good of the entire healthcare workforce."

Stern, leader of the "Change to Win" coalition that broke away from the AFL-CIO, is now embroiled in a full-throttle factional fight with one of his own largest locals, "United Healthcare Workers West," led by Sal Rosselli. Rosselli, who pushed a sellout Labor-Management Partnership on us when Stern dictated it, now is rightly challenging Stern's top down undemocratic methods.

But Stern is undemocratic because he believes there is no alternative to capitalism's despotic rule in the workplace. For him, union growth only follows capital's growth, much like a flock of seagulls following a fishing trawler, with the captain of the boat constantly throwing overboard scraps for the gulls to feed on. That in a nutshell is Stern's worldview.

That's why at every significant turning point for labor, he has been found on the wrong side. He not only instituted our Labor-Management Partnership at Kaiser, breaking the solidarity between unions in the fight for quality care, he has signed scores of "template" sweetheart deals with HMOs and nursing home chains. His tactics harm not just workers but patients as well.

CROSSING PICKET LINES

He has no qualms about crossing picket lines, going over the heads of workers to craft fraudulent health plans with the CEO of Wal-Mart or California Gov. Schwarzenegger, behind closed doors. In Puerto Rico, police attacked members of the teachers' union after they called for a strike in response to SEIU's sell-out deal with the Governor.

Stern is even willing to cross his own picket line in the midst of organizing drives. For example, at the University of North Carolina, where food service workers were organizing, he abandoned his own organizers, going behind their backs to craft a sweetheart deal, leaving both organizers and workers high and dry. Make no mistake. Stern and his kind are enemies of workers.

'WHY JOIN UNION IF YOU CAN'T STRIKE?'

Kaplan should have paid more attention to the view she cited from a radiology tech being "organized" by Stern at an Ohio HMO: "Frankly I don't think there's much concern for the members' lives in this rush to enlarge SEIU. Why join a union that's going to agree to subcontract your job? Why join a union if you can't strike for ten years? Where's the benefit then?"

Those of us who have been working under Stern's company unionism for the last decade share that sentiment. As one SEIU rank-and-filer said, "In a real union, the bosses don't have to tell you when it's time to organize."

Stern prides himself on his master plan to organize the "90% of workers without a union." His organizing principle sacrifices us to the needs of capital, even as it reduces us to just hands while he does the thinking for us. Our organizing principle is to overcome the separation between thinking and doing in our working lives. This principle transcends all factions and particular unions and speaks to all workers.

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