I really really hate to say this (sorry, Steve H) but as more information develops in the battle between Sal Rosselli and SEIU's Andy Stern, Stern's actions look less and less justifiable. In These Times' David Moberg digs more deeply than either of our national papers and reports exactly what the argument is about.
The fight has deep roots. In 1988, Rosselli, a former nursing home worker, won an insurgent campaign to lead what was then Local 250 in the Bay Area. He rebuilt the union by emphasizing democratic decision-making and worker militancy.
In 1996, Rosselli supported Stern’s candidacy for SEIU president and his plan to strengthen local and national organizing. Rosselli implemented a highly successful organizing drive that used strikes and negotiations with employers to secure the right for workers to organize with little interference. He also cooperated with other locals and the international to win neutrality from hospitals, especially the big Catholic Health Care West chain. The local also organized nursing homes, and was the country’s first union to organize homecare workers, which is now the main area of SEIU growth nationally.
In 2005, Local 250 merged with southern California healthcare workers (Local 399) to form UHW. From 2001 to 2006, UHW added 65,000 members — more than any other SEIU local — although recent gains have slowed as UHW builds several long-term hospital organizing campaigns. UHW also supplied organizers and funds to help hospital workers organize around the country.
Organizing nursing homes proved more difficult. In 2003, Local 250 and another local of long-term care workers signed on to an experimental organizing agreement that SEIU International had negotiated with the Nursing Home Alliance, a group of nursing home operators. Alliance companies agreed that if SEIU successfully lobbied for higher state reimbursements to operators, they would be neutral when the union organized selected facilities.
But in 2007, when the agreement came up for renewal, UHW criticized many of its components. The deal had pushed for “template” contracts that barred strikes and limited collective bargaining rights. The pact also gave Alliance operators control over which facilities could be organized, limited economic gains to a fixed share of what the union won politically, prohibited employee criticisms of nursing home operations (except when they were legally obliged) and required the union to back the industry’s plan for tort reform — thus going against the union’s community and patients’ rights allies.
(emphasis added)
In the old days what Moberg is describing (the bolded graf) would be perilously close to what used to be called a "sweetheart contract" - one between management and union leaders that sold out the membership's interests in exchange for goodies for the leaders. No wonder Rosselli rebelled. Stern has been selling his own damn members down the river in exchange for...what? a reputation for SEIU as a growing union? as a "realistic" union you can bargain with? What possible excuse could he have for curtailing collective bargaining, the very heart of a union's purpose and power? Or for joining the company in a ban on whistle-blowing?
When Stern got chummy with Wal-mart's Lee Scott, I got nervous but I made the excuse - the hope, really - that it was Stern's way of manipulating a health care program out of a notoriously anti-worker CEO. Now it's looking blacker than that. Though I'll wait until WM announces the details of its plan before I decide how I feel, I have to admit that it's starting to look as if Stern is going down a different version of the same road that Reuther traveled before him, getting his power from the owners rather than the membership and running the union as his personal fief.
Like I figured, I hated writing that. I hated it even more as I did it than I thought I would. Andy Stern represented something fresh, unique, honest, and tough in the modern union movement and I had high hopes that a new era was beginning. Now it seems as if the same old game is on but, you know, the uniforms are a brighter color and the coach is very personable.
That's not to say Rosselli is blameless. The SEIU's rap on him is that he cares more about his own local than the union as a whole, and given the kind of compromises he offered to make, it sure sounds that way.
Rosselli supported consolidation on the condition that each local voted individually (as in UHW’s merger), rather than in a pooled vote proposed by Stern, which privileged big locals merging with smaller ones. Rosselli also supported the idea of one statewide healthcare local covering hospital, nursing home and home care workers, as SEIU is organized in several states. The international, on the other hand, favored putting all nursing home and home care workers in Tyrone Freeman’s local.
Maybe he was just trying to cut the only deal he could. Or maybe he just has a different idea from what Stern's concept of unionizing is.
Rosselli charges that Stern has pursued growth in numbers by centralizing power and resources, and by granting concessions to corporations. SEIU’s growth, he claims, has come at the expense of workers’ power. Rosselli believes the union needs to rely more on comprehensive pressure campaigns involving workers to neutralize employer opposition to unionization.
“I want a movement of workers governed by workers for workers,” who are fully empowered, Rosselli says, “to be in control of their relationship with their employer, to be in control of the political direction of their union.”
But SEIU international leaders say Rosselli is unwilling to support national union strategies because he is narrowly focused on the interests of his local. They maintain that the union needs more national coordination of resources and activity to better confront national and, increasingly, global employers.
Or maybe he's as local-centric as Stern seems to be powercentric. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that Stern seems to be willing to weaken his membership's rights and bargaining position for reasons of his own. He also appears to be willing to undercut one of a union's core duties when he asks it to keep its mouth shut about the way management is running the company. It's as if Stern wants his members to sign the union cards and then melt quietly away into the darkness. Dissent will not be tolerated either in the SEIU (Roselli) or in unionized companies, is that it?
Do we really want our unions to give away stuff like that? I don't, and it's dismaying. Those rights were won by people who died for them, people who were maimed for them, people who lost their homes and families for them. To see Stern handing them off during negotiations as if they were no more important than an extra sick day is turning my stomach. Lord knows I think unions need to change (and here are two new books with good ideas how they should and what dcirections would be positive and forward-looking) but not like this, not growing numbers at the expense of hard-won rights.
The Democrats tried that kind of "compromise" with Republicans during the Bush Years. Do I have to remind you how that turned out?
It seems the Obamaniacs aren't the only lefties destined to be disappointed.
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