NEWS & LETTERS, June - July 2009
Workshop Talks
When unions think like capitalists
by Htun Lin
Worker actions in France have exploded since the economic meltdown. One of the latest was a protest of health workers against President Sarkozy's health "reform" law that will let managers put a cap on the level of care given to patients. Nurses demonstrating in Montparnasse on May 14 were livid.
A Black nurse, Rachida Ahloulay, told Andrew Hussey of New Statesman: "We are sick of being told we have no control over our own lives. It's not just that the government is giving managers the power over medical staff, but it means that we are degraded as citizens. And that is why France is on the edge of a serious rebellion. Anger is everywhere!"
This outrage is taking place in a country known for having affordable, universal heath care that far surpasses the quality of care in the U.S. Yet workers' struggles to control their own work are the same everywhere. For capital, "reform" always means interfering with health care delivery by diminishing resources to accommodate capital's need to accumulate.
Ahloulay's lament reminds me of our own ongoing struggle to provide quality care. Many look to labor unions for answers, but often unions too become sucked into capitalist thinking and become nothing more than the first barrier to workers' emancipation. There is no resolution to this crisis outside of workers overcoming alienation from their own labor.
Recently, we heard that the California Nurses' Association (CNA) has entered into an agreement to divvy up territory with Andy Stern, the notorious SEIU head whose idea of growth is raiding other unions' membership while being a champion for capital. Andy Stern has long been a blatant sellout bureaucrat who has signed up new members in HMOs and nursing homes by making back-room sweetheart deals with management, undercutting workers' as well as patients' interests.
UNION TURF BATTLES
CNA, on the other hand, has a clear and strong track record representing healthcare workers' fundamental interests, as well as advocacy for patients' interest in quality care. The Faustian bargain with labor's enemy reveals how much a top-down attitude has also infected CNA leadership. This bureaucratic mentality sees membership as something to be managed from above. Often it's all about dues. Membership drives become nothing more than turf battles with competing unions fighting over revenue from dues check-off administered by management.
Meanwhile, Sal Rosselli of United Healthcare West (UHW) initiated a drive to "decertify" SEIU from his local, which was recently put under trusteeship, in a hostile takeover engineered by Andy Stern. They act as if we have no ability to think for ourselves, as if they own our members.
Instead of decertifying SEIU from our local, we should not even allow Stern to have any locals under his control. The question is not just what is to become of UHW, but what is to become of all our brothers and sisters under the domination of that international. That is why it is so disturbing that CNA would voluntarily cede territory and thereby condemn a whole segment of healthcare workers to Stern's dictatorial control.
Labor bureaucrats bargain over membership drives as if they were capitalists competing for market share. They buy into that role because the struggle against alienation in our workplace is not even on their map.
TEAM PLAYERS?
Where I work, local union leaders meet with members, only to admonish us to be team players in management's plan. They even lecture us to be glad just to have a job and to help the company thrive in the global market. They act as if there is no alternative, and that workers' welfare is secondary to corporate welfare.
We need to return to nurse Ahloulay's concern about having "no control over our lives." We should not focus on what happens to a particular faction among the labor bureaucracy when the real issue is ceding the power to limit healthcare.
Ahloulay's lament is a stark reminder to us all that in spite of all the highfalutin' rhetoric over universal healthcare, nothing will change the current hegemony of capital over our work lives unless we deal directly with the problem of alienation in the workplace.
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