The Rosselli-Stein War: Labor Shoots Itself in the Foot

My very first post for Fact-esque (a year ago last month on March 28, an anniversary I failed entirely to remember to acknowledge so I will now - Thanks, Rob. It's been real) reported on a fight that was developing between Andy Stein's SEIU and an affiliated West Coast Union run by Sal Rosselli called United Health Care Workers West.

SEIU's Andy Stern was reported by the SF Chronicle yesterday to be threatening to oust the leaders of the Oakland-based United Healthcare Workers West, charging its president, Sal Rosselli with "breaches of fiduciary duty, interference with collective bargaining rights, financial irregularities and unethical conduct".

Three months later in a follow-up, I wrote that Stern was indeed looking like a bit of an old-style union dictator, making contracts in which he agreed to shut his membership up. I called him "powercentric".

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?

Rosselli was far from blameless in all this and the two of them were making a spectacular for anti-unionists to salivate over. I wasn't happy.

At the time, they were in a battle over who was going to control Rosselli's union. It appears that after slightly more than a year of position-jockeying, Stern has won.

The Service Employees’ internal battle broke wide open late Tuesday when International President Andy Stern put the dissident United Healthcare Workers-West into emergency trusteeship.

Financial assets for the 150,000-member local were immediately seized, the executive board was dissolved, and full-time officers were removed from payroll. Reports circulated among workplace leaders that SEIU also dismissed UHW stewards, and that employers are holding captive-audience meetings to introduce new SEIU-appointed staff representatives.

Stern named Executive Vice Presidents Eliseo Medina and Dave Regan as trustees of UHW. Regan said rank-and-file worksite leaders remain in place.

As word of the trusteeship spread, hundreds of members and supporters rallied at the union’s Oakland headquarters, vowing to resist SEIU’s hostile takeover.

Labor Notes comcludes the article with an acknowledgment that tghis fight wasn't good for anybody and might be harmful to the effort to pass EFCA.

Labor's allies worry that the war between UHW and the International could derail labor’s efforts to secure health care reform and pass the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) early in 2009.

Hearing officer Ray Marshall concluded his report by noting that “the main beneficiaries of this conflict are anti-union employers and politicians who have geared up to use this conflict against our efforts to pass legislation to help workers, especially the Employee Free Choice Act.”

Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor scholar at the University of California Santa Barbara, shares similar concerns. “This internal fight will come back to haunt labor when EFCA gets rolling,” Lichtenstein noted. “The right wing is paying close attention, and this gives them plenty of fresh meat.”

Rosselli responded by breaking entirely away from SEIU and forming his own wildcat union.

Last week, the SEIU placed the chapter into trusteeship, ousted its president, Sal Rosselli, and 17 other elected officers and moved to seize control of the premises. A handful like Glasper refused to leave, determined to send SEIU President Andy Stern a defiant message.

The sacked officers have launched a rival union to raid the SEIU's ranks. That rare step has stoked fears that the "Battle by the Bay" could open a broader rift in labor at a time when unity promises big gains under the pro-union Obama administration.

Rosselli's new organization, the National Union of Healthcare Workers, plans to seek alliances with groups such as the California Nurses Assn., a fierce SEIU foe.

"If we have to tear everything down to build it back up again, so be it," said Mell Garcia, 51, who served on the board of the 150,000-member UHW and had been sleeping for a week amid protest signs and takeout cartons.

"This looks like the beginning of trench warfare," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a UC Santa Barbara labor historian who has followed the Stern-Rosselli feud. Lichtenstein said Stern "blundered" by imposing the trusteeship, but Rosselli was wrong to establish the breakaway union.

"I think we'll have a year or two of strife," Lichtenstein said.

A week later, Rosselli's new NUHW went directly at SEIU, in one day submitting petitions for elections in 62 facilities.

In the largest single-day filing in California healthcare history, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) petitioned for elections in 62 California hospitals and healthcare facilities today with National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) offices in Oakland and San Francisco. NUHW is a new, independent union formed by union reformers only last week.

In only five days after its founding, NUHW has filed petitions to represent nearly 9,000 workers. The new union expects to file petitions for thousands more in coming days with the NLRB and with the California Public Relations Board for those workers whose employers fall under state rather than federal labor laws. "Thousands of workers are rushing to sign petitions for NUHW. I helped to signed up 106 people at my facility within hours," said Suzanne Redell, a respiratory care practitioner at Saint Louise, a Daughters of Charity hospital in Gilroy, who is organizing her co-workers into NUHW.

Rosselli's single promise if his new union is elected? "We'll be more democratic than SEIU." The ripples from this insurrection have already hit the East Coast. In February Harold Myerson reported that Unite Here was on the edge of a break-up.

In New York, meanwhile, another of the nation's leading unions, Unite Here, is engaged in all-out civil war. The union was created in 2004 through a merger of UNITE, which represented workers in the dying domestic apparel and textile industries, and HERE, which represented hotel workers. The logic behind the merger was that UNITE had limited organizing opportunities, but significant financial resources. HERE had considerable organizing opportunities but not enough money to exploit them.

What the unions also had were incompatible cultures and officers. On Jan. 22, the executive committee members from the UNITE side of the union took the executive committee members from the HERE side to court for allegedly violating the union's constitution -- the same charge that the HERE leaders level at their UNITE counterparts. Unite Here -- in hindsight, the most poorly chosen name in union history -- may well split, heightening what is already a ferocious battle over the union's resources.

The timing couldn't be worse. With a new Democratic president, a Democratic Congress, and a Democratic mandate, EFCA is virtually assured of passage absent any bad union press or palpable internecine dissension. So what happens? Horrible union press and a goddam "civil war". It has being seen by Labor's enemies as a God-send.

I'm on the mailing lists of several anti-union groups, all of whom are crowing about their chances. Labor Relations INK, an anti-union, anti-EFCA newsletter for businesses and corporate managers, specializes in spreading nuggests of anti-union news to its clients and offers - for free - a book on how to fight EFCA (.pdf file). It spent half of its latest newsletter on the bust-up and suggests that intramural strife within Labor is making it weak enough to fight EFCA successfully, Obama or no Obama.

I probably don't have to say "we don't need this shit right now". The Blue Dogs are itching for an excuse to dump EFCA. This is not the time to give them one. But that's what we're doing.

Stern's power play has potentially just blown up in his face. It may not finally be enough to sink EFCA but it isn't going to make it any easier to pass it. It almost looks as if the Democrats have passed their self-destructive, self-sabotaging genes on to Labor. Is everybody on the Left afraid of success?

Comments

[eRobin]

My god. Thanks for following this, Mick. I wouldn't know anything about it if it weren't for you.

[Nell]

Sal Roselli might not be blameless, but this is Andy Stern's mess. Period.

[mick]

Nell, what makes you so sure?

[Sharon West]

Great article but I have a bone to pick with you - You wrote that "The sacked officers have launched a rival union to raid the SEIU's ranks." What!?! As an IHSS homecare provider, I can tell you that SEIU raided OUR ranks by trying to take me out of MY union of choice. NUHW (the new union - National Union of Healthcare Workers) is *restoring* us to our original union.

When was the last time that *you* got more than 60,000 people to sign anything, let alone in 6 weeks with no paid staff!! No - this is not a raid. This is people staying with their local regardless of Boss Stern's attempts to take over our lives and sell us for his personal profit.

One more time - SEIU raided our union! NUHW is restoring our union. THANK YOU, NUHW MEMBERS AND WORKERS!!!

[mick]

You wrote that...

Actually, no, I didn't. That was a quote from a story in the LA Times. Which doesn't necessarily mean I disagree with that characterization. Or agree with it.

I understand your passion but from the outside it doesn't look anything like that clear cut.