The New American Workers Movement at the Crossroads

Dan La Botz
International Viewpoint
March 2011

The new American workers movement, which has developed so rapidly in the last couple of months in the struggle against rightwing legislative proposals to abolish public employee unions, suddenly finds itself at a crossroads. Madison, Wisconsin, where rank-and-file workers, community members, and social movement activists converged to create the new movement, remains the center of the struggle. In Ohio, which faces similar legislation, unions have also gone into motion, while working people around the country have been drawn into the fight


In both states, things are coming to a head. In Wisconsin the courts have ordered the capitol building closed and the governor is threatening layoffs to begin next week. In both Wisconsin and Ohio the legislators are threatening to push the bills through one way or another. And now, in the fight to win, the movement has come to a fork in the road.

Two different tendencies in the labor movement point in two quite different directions. The top leaders of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions like SEIU have thrown their weight into the struggle in the only way that they know how. Following the model they use in political campaigns, they have reached out to established organizations to build coalitions. They have sent organizers into take charge and to reach out to communities. Their goal is to rebuild their institutional power and their relationship with the Democratic Party, hoping to turn the upsurge in support for public employees into a political victory.

The Union Leaders’ Approach
In both Wisconsin and Ohio, while not publicly giving up the fight to defeat the anti-union legislation, the top union officials quietly suggest that the bills cannot be stopped in the legislatures. So the unions in Wisconsin and Ohio indicate they will be turning respectively to efforts at recall and referendum. With their usual orientation toward political solutions, the unions’ Central Labor Councils in Ohio return to their reliance on the Democratic Party and prepare for the contest in the coming elections.

The unions’ top leaders at the national level shy away from mobilizing the social and economic power of the unions to win this thing, turning instead to their allies in the Democratic Party. It is not that the union officials don’t want to win in Wisconsin and Ohio, but their notions about how to win and what winning means represent a particular conception of the role of the labor movement. For the AFL-CIO and other major unions, winning means preserving, through political influence, the existing model of collective bargaining—even though we know that under the existing model unions have been losing for the last 40 years.

The Workers Power Tendency
There is, however, another tendency in the new workers’ movement which presents a different alternative. This alternative, which is not so easy to name but which might be called workers’ power tendency, is made up of those rank-and-file workers and their union stewards and local officials, together with the community groups and social movement activists who have rallied to the cause. This group includes the teachers who called in sick and produced a virtual shutdown of the schools in Madison and other parts of Wisconsin. It is made up of firemen, policemen and other public employees who have spent every available minute surrounding the capitol in spirited demonstrations. And it includes the union, community and student activists who have occupied the capitol building and made it the center and the symbol of the new workers’ movement.

This tendency has demonstrated—even it is has not yet worked out an elaborate position on paper or issued some sort of manifesto—that for them winning means using workers’ power to stop the anti-union bills and to stop concessions offered up by some of the union leaders. Some of these workers have been holding on to the capitol risking arrest. Others are considering some form of direct action or civil disobedience.

These are the workers and their supporters who taken seriously the call for a general strike issued by the South Central Federation of Labor. Taking seriously the idea of a general strike of Wisconsin workers doesn’t mean jumping into it. A general strike issue from the ranks isn’t simply called—as some activists have been trying to do. A general strike is mulled over, it is prepared through conversation, discussion and debate. It is organized. And finally (but soon), when the moment is right, it is begun when one crucial group of workers has the courage to make the first move drawing others into the process.

How We Win Makes all the Difference
One might argue that the anti-labor legislation might be stopped either way, either by the union officials’ program of working from the top down to build coalitions and create the alliances that will return the Democrats to power or by the workers’ use of their economic and social power. Through either course, one could argue, the anti-union legislation will be stopped, unions and collective bargaining preserved, and the movement vindicated. But the lessons of the two courses and the results would be quite different.

The lesson of a victory organized by the union officials and won by the Democratic Party in the legislatures would be that workers must rely on the Democratic Party to defend themselves, returning unions and workers to their usual dependence on a political party dominated by big business. We might remember that it was the Democratic Party’s failure in Wisconsin and nationally to defend unions and workers’ interests which has been responsible for getting us here. The result of the top union officials’ strategy would be a return to the situation we were in yesterday, where employers forced the unions into retreat and where workers were losing ground. And so, it being yesterday again, the assault on workers in both the private and the public sector would resume—in truth, it would never have ceased.

The other alternative is that workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states engaged in this battle—and almost all of them are—exert their economic and social power, through direct action, civil disobedience, and economic and political strikes, reasserting the power of workers in our society. The lesson of such an experience would be that workers do have power and that workers can lead. Such an upheaval—which would necessarily be met by the employers with resistance and repression and which would entail both defeats and successes—would necessarily lead to new tactics and strategies, to new leaders, to new organizational forms.

We would come out of the experience with a new and revitalized labor movement. Such a new workers’ movement might even create independent political campaigns, and, if it grew in breadth and depth, might even raise the question of a workers’ political party. We would through the experience of fighting and winning this thing on our own, really have a new American workers movement and we would continue the fight on new and higher ground.

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Dan La Botz is the author of several books on Mexican labor unions, social movements and politics. He also edits Mexican Labor News and Analysis, an on-line publication of the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) and the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), at: http://www.ueinternational.org/.

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INTERVIEW: SAL ROSSELLI - NUHW and the fight for union democracy

May 27, 2010
Socialist Worker

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IT'S NEARLY 18 months since NUHW was established. How would you summarize what's been accomplished so far?

WE'RE APPROACHING 5,000 workers who have voted for NUHW. There are about 14,000 who are waiting to vote, as a result of petitions filed 15 months ago. And we're getting ready to file [union election petitions] for 47,000 Kaiser workers in June. Which is obviously a big deal.

On one hand, I never imagined it would take this long for people to be able to vote. On the other hand, it's so satisfying and inspiring to me how absolutely committed folks are despite all these months.

We have, every two months, leadership meetings, one in the North and one in the South. [May 15] we had one in the North, and it was the biggest meeting yet. There were almost 300 leaders from just Northern California, who obviously come on their own time, at their own expense. They are just as enthusiastic as they were on day one, as committed as on day one.

The SEIU's activity has been beyond my imagination as we experience new levels of lies, attacks and resources spent. They will do whatever it takes to prevent workers from leaving SEIU.

I'll just give you one example of what's become normal--at the University of Southern California hospital, where we have an election May 27.

USC Hospital is a very anti-union employer, one of the worst. And SEIU determined that it couldn't win the election there against NUWH. So Bob Callahan, a top national organizing director for SEIU, had a meeting with a management team, and they brought in a union-busting consultant from Ohio. And the three organizations put together a plan to get the SEIU members to vote "no union."

Included in the plan is the disciplining and/or firing of SEIU leaders who support NUHW. In fact, they suspended three of our stewards.

On May 14, we had three staff in there, in the cafeteria, as they had been doing for the past month, hanging out and talking to people. Two SEIU organizers came in with video cameras and directed hospital security to arrest the three staff members. They then had the LAPD come in and put them in jail overnight, and took all their belongings, including charts and organizing materials.

This is becoming normal to us. SEIU's collusion with employers to prevent SEIU members from having a fair vote and leaving the union is extreme. This includes having longtime shop stewards fired from their jobs. SEIU has removed over 2,000 stewards from their elected positions since this began, but now they're getting people fired from their jobs.

DESPITE THIS onslaught, NUHW keeps racking up the wins. How?

THE WORKERS are committed to controlling their union--to doing whatever it takes to control their relationship with their employer and to reject SEIU's takeover.

SEIU is making a lot of mistakes, too, which works in our favor. They're not representing workers. That's just not on their agenda. Their agenda is all about attacking--trying to kill NUHW.

That's what the $25 million lawsuit, with its huge costs in time and dollars, was about. They didn't succeed there. It's the historic dynamic that's been repeated time and time again throughout history. People are committed to being free, to being in control of their lives.

We recently won a vote at Salinas Memorial Hospital, and I was listening to one of the chief stewards with the press. She said things that I'd forgotten--like that she's been involved in organizing the union there since the late '70s. She was on SEIU Local 250's executive board in the late '80s and was a leader in fighting the SEIU trusteeship of the local in 1988.

She wanted to retire this year, but she's not going to retire until she's sure that the union that she helped build at her hospital is a democratic union in the control of the workers.

OBVIOUSLY, THIS kind of organization didn't come about overnight. Why has this been such a threat to SEIU?

BECAUSE SEIU, led by Andy Stern and Anna Berger, and now Mary Kay Henry, believe that its vision--and its control over resources--is the best way to grow the union.

There are two big reasons why we were put in trusteeship--the top-down deals with for-profit nursing home employers and the top-down deal with Tenant Healthcare Corp., which exchanged standards and a voice for workers in California in order to get growth opportunities in other states.

In California, the gold standard for private-sector health care workers is at Kaiser, because of the organization that has been built for 20-plus years. The Kaiser "partnership"--the Kaiser contract--exists because of struggle, not because Kaiser is some benevolent employer. There were huge strikes in the late '80s and early '90s that forced Kaiser to the brink. Then, some enlightened leaders in Kaiser sat down and said, "Okay, we've got to do something different or we're going to go out of business."

That was the birth of the labor-management partnership. Then, enlightened leaders in our union understood that the only way we were going to preserve that contract relationship was to organize Kaiser's competitors and bring them up to that standard. And that's what we did through the 1990s and the early part of this century--organize 65,000 hospital workers.

Local 250 had represented three hospitals that are now part of Catholic Healthcare West (CHW) for decades. But as CHW formed in the late '80s and early '90s, those three hospitals grew to 32, with the other 29 being nonunion. These thousands of workers had multiple strikes in the '90s over leveling the playing field for nonunion workers, who were organizing the rest of the system.

They got it. They were protecting the standards at Kaiser, and they knew they had to organize the whole CHW system. They sacrificed wages and other things to win organizing rights. And in the late '90s, over a five-year period, we organized 27 other hospitals throughout the state. In just two contract cycles, CHW is now the second-best hospital contract in the country, right behind Kaiser's, with a master agreement for 15,000 workers.

So there's an example of workers getting the fundamental need to organize and sacrificing to accomplish it, while at the same time accomplishing standards for themselves. There's actual proof that both can be done.

Well, that wasn't fast enough for SEIU. I point to the SEIU convention in 2004, when Stern got authority to withdraw from the AFL-CIO. We were celebrating this 65,000-member unprecedented growth in hospitals. And he said, yeah it's great, it's unprecedented, but it's incremental. You have to organize 150,000 people a year, not 65,000 hospital workers over four years.

When they pulled SEIU out of the AFL-CIO, the commitment and pressure was for growth, growth, growth. At every level of the organization, down to local unions, the pressure was to grow at all costs.

That's what led to the nursing home deal with Tenet. Also, there was the attempt, with the three-year contracts with Sodexho, Compass and Aramark, to gain 20,000 new members over three years. Unionization would be chosen by the employer, not the workers, with a pre-negotiated template contract that did little more than give folks a raise to pay their dues.

The result is workers who make little more than minimum wage, with almost no benefits and certainly no representation or rights. And they're working right next to hospital workers in the same union, doing the same kind of work--service workers making $20 an hour, with full health coverage for their kids, a pension plan, etc.

THE OTHER element of Stern's plan was to create large local unions with the resources to combat employers. Were these mergers necessarily undemocratic and unaccountable?

WE WERE absolutely in favor of that--creating bigger unions with common employers to have greater strength and an economy of scale. In the year 2000, Local 399's and Local 250's executive boards voted unanimously to seek merger, since we had common employers in California, such as Kaiser, nursing homes, etc.

Stern said no. He said that there were too many unorganized hospital workers in Southern California and said, "Local 250, use your power, resources to organize those workers, and we'll talk again." So that's what we did, and SEIU helped, too, in a three-way partnership. Locals 250 and 399 and SEIU organized Tenet workers, Healthcare Corporation of America (HCA) workers and cleaned up the CHW stuff.

In 2004, both Local 399 and Local 250 boards voted unanimously again to merge, and Stern said okay. We spent all of 2004 having hundreds and hundreds of meetings, integrating the different cultures of the unions, wrote a constitution, voted on the constitution, voted on leaders. The votes were separate, because Local 399 had 20,000 members and Local 250 had 70,000 members. It was democratic, and the votes were both 90-something percent in favor, and we merged.

Stern's method of merging was quite the opposite. It was top-down. He decided that "these 10 public-sector unions in Northern California will merge, they will now be called 1021, I'll appoint the leaders, and the votes will be pooled." So 10 counties merged into one union, with sizes ranging from 1,000 workers to 30,000 workers. Some of the locals with 1,000 or 2,000 members weren't bought into it and weren't organized. It caused great resentment, and it resulted in a horribly dysfunctional union.

Stern appointed the leaders for three years. The federal government says you have to have an election after three years. Stern got around that--if his leaders couldn't win, then he'd do another merger, and buy another three years.

In this particular case, he was secure that his leadership team would win. They lost. It was stunning. This inexperienced rank-and-file movement won every seat with 7 percent of the entire union voting--which is another tragedy. People are so disgusted that they don't even want to participate. So that's the difference in merger ideology--how it's done.

SO A larger size doesn't have to mean the mergers are undemocratic?

CORRECT. IN fact, it's the opposite. We struggled all the time to increase democracy in a statewide union in the state of California, with its huge geography and 150,000 members. It's a constant struggle to figure out how to have more democracy and to empower people. How do you have a Kaiser nurse in LA relate to one up in Santa Rosa? It's tough.

HOW MUCH money do you estimate the SEIU has spent in trying to stop NUHW?

HUNDREDS OF millions. We don't even know how to estimate it. They hide money, and so many different locals are sending in staff and resources. They sent 1,000 people just for the Fresno home-care workers election and spent $10 million for 10,000 workers.

As you can imagine, they effectively killed our ability to do home-care decerts in Sacramento and San Francisco--through deals with bosses and just totally overwhelming us with resources. We can't do home care now because it's so resource-intensive. You have to do mail and house calls, because there's no worksite. SEIU spent millions of dollars preventing those workers from having a fair election.

In the hospital campaigns, such as the RN campaign in Salinas--the one we just won--they would have 10 staff to our one, and do 10 mailings to our one. It's just David and Goliath everywhere. They also okayed $2 million for one month of mailings to Kaiser workers, where they use extreme lies to try and prevent workers from signing the petition we're circulating now.

HOW DID the SEIU lawsuit against you and other NUWH officials fit into this picture?

IT WAS intended to kill NUHW. At the pretrial conference, they said they'd drop everything--$25 million dollars worth of claims--if we'd just put NUHW out of business. That's the only reason.

There's no corruption here, no self-dealing. This is obviously all about the movement, work carried out by selfless people. We had 150 staff resign from their well-paid jobs to volunteer for NUHW.

SEIU spent tens of millions of dollars on the lawsuit. We counted 50 lawyers involved in it. Compare that to [ousted California SEIU official] Tyrone Freeman, who stole $2 million. He's under federal investigation, but SEIU has only two junior lawyers on that. There hasn't been a legal proceeding yet because they keep postponing it. And that happened nine months before our trusteeship.

WHAT'S YOUR interpretation of the outcome of the lawsuit?

THEY FAILED. They didn't put NUHW out of business. The $25 million came down to $740,000. The jury awarded this money, because the jury believed that during the second week of January 2009, SEIU's executive board voted to move our long-term care members out of UHW, and for the next two and half weeks, we continued to oppose this because of democratic votes of our members.

We disobeyed SEIU, which had the legal right to tell us what we had to do. So we had to pay back the overhead of the union that we spent opposing that. That's what the jury's verdict was, so we're being fined. For me personally, the fine is $70,400. It was my judgment that I was carrying out the will of the members. Well, that's who I'm accountable to. I have no regrets, I'd do it again.

WHAT'S the significance of this fight for the wider labor movement?

I THINK labor's at a crossroads.

To add to the negatives, obviously public-sector budgets across the country are in crisis. In California, the governor just put forth a budget that will cut in half the home care program--and he's very serious about this. SEIU threatened 10,000 home care workers in Fresno that "the only way you're going to keep your union and your benefits and your wages is to stay inside SEIU." Because the money is being cut, the board of supervisors just announced that on July 1, these 10,000 folks are going down to $8.50 an hour.

So in fact, once dues are taken out of their check, these 10,000 SEIU members will make below minimum wage. California has 300,000 home care workers in SEIU who are like those folks. They are organized top-down--there's no movement whatsoever. So their numbers might be reduced to half, and the other half will be making minimum wage or slightly over that in some counties. That's the future of SEIU, because of the way they've been organizing.

NUWH, UNITE HERE and a few other unions are on the cutting edge, committed to a bottom-up, social unionism--a union by workers, for workers, governed by workers, versus this corporate unionism of SEIU, where all authority and decision-making and resources are concentrated among a few folks in Washington, D.C.

Frankly, it's the reason why UNITE HERE is partnering with us and we're helping each other. Because I think that we have this common belief that if we don't win, the movement's not going to survive.

Certainly, all the dreams we have of establishing a progressive majority and dealing with all the other issues besides good-paying jobs and health care--all the other issues that are important to working people--are never going to be accomplished unless there's a bottom-up movement that forces government to level the playing field, just like the civil rights movement in the '60s.

Labor put so much money into electing the Democrats and Barack Obama, and look what the result is. It was a huge opportunity, at our position of greatest strength--theoretically. And we got no labor law reform and a shitty health care plan. And now the Democrats are going to lose it all.

So that doesn't work. The only way we're going to accomplish it is by forcing elected leaders to side with working people as opposed to corporate leaders.

WHAT CAN people do, both in California and outside, to support NUHW's efforts?

OUR TWO obstacles are money and organizers. Money is a huge problem, and contributions to the Fund for Union Democracy [1] help. It's paying all our legal expenses, not NUHW or anyone else. There are other unions that can contribute directly to NUHW. It's the only reason we're surviving right now.

We currently have about 75 full-time staff. Most of them are making extremely modest salaries and getting health coverage. A sizable number are still volunteering because they can afford it.

We need more staff. We could use twice the staff on the Kaiser campaign--and that's without doing anything else, like winning elections yesterday at Salinas and next week at USC. There are going to be 70 other elections scheduled over the coming months. We're not going to be able to do them all, because we don't have enough money or enough staff.

Friends across the country are actually organizing folks to take vacations this summer to come for two weeks or three weeks or a month to help on Kaiser. We welcome experienced people to come. And once the election's scheduled, we'll need hundreds of people to come, because it's 47,000 people over 300 sites.

The Kaiser dues to SEIU are $3.5 million a month. When we win, we'll have the resources and stability to do it all and to help other people. And it'll also mean the end of SEIU Healthcare [the union's national structure for the industry].

That's the reason why UHW is so important for SEIU to control. It's their vision to be a national health care union and organize other employers across the country. But SEIU's membership base is all in California, at Kaiser, Tenet, HCA, the Catholic hospitals and dozens of national for-profit nursing home chains. So to have any leverage with these employers, they have to control UHW.

That's why the stakes are so high. Once we win Kaiser and get them out of health care in California, they won't be able to organize health care workers across the country because they won't have that base. That's what at stake here.

Transcription by Meredith Reese

[1] http://www.fundforuniondemocracy.org/

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United Healthcare Workers forms new union as SEIU moves against local

Lisbeth Latham
Months of simmering tension within the Service Employees International Union finally broke this week as the SIEU's leadership moved, on January 27, to place its third largest local the 150000 member United Healthcare Workers - West under trusteeship. The UHW-W board responded on January 28 with an announcement that they were resigning from the SEIU and would be moving to establish the National Union of Healthcare Workers.


The SEIU had given UHW-W two ultimatums on January 23, demanding that the Local accept transfer of 65,000 nursing home and homecare workers out of UHW against their will, or face an immediate takeover and the expulsion of more than 70 healthcare workers who were elected to lead the local union.

The UHW-W executive board replied to the SEIU stating "given the enormity of this decision and its vast implications for UHW members," the executive board wrote, "such a decision should be enacted by a fair membership vote on a local-by-local basis, not by executive fiat." Their letter called for a democratic voting process that is "consistent with the SEIU Constitution and follows the model of the merger between Local 250 and Local 399 that led to the creation of UHW in 2005, and the various mergers, including most recently of 1199NJ, and other local unions into 1199UHE." The SEIU had held a non-binding advisory vote in November and December, however only 8% of affected members voted and the UHW-W had run a boycott campaign against aspects of the ballot it argued were undemocratic.


Following the UHW-W refusal to meet the SEIU's demands, SEIU International President Andy Stern moved to place UHW-W in trusteeship. Under the trusteeship the Local's assets were frozen, dissolved the UHW-W executive board and removed from the payroll all full-time staff. The SEIU sent employers a memo saying that the SEIU was now in charge, that UHW staff no longer had any authority and that employers should report any contact by UHW staff.

UHW-W president Sal Rosselli told the January 29 LA Times that following the trusteeship employers had broken off negotiations and informed some of the union's stewards that they would no longer recognise their authority. SEIU executive vice-president Dave Regan, one of the co-trustees appointed by SEIU, said shop stewards and other rank-and-file representatives have not been stripped of their positions and are trying to ensure that all bargaining goes forward without delay.

The SEIU's move to place UHW-W under trusteeship follows the recommendations of trusteeship hearings held over November and December. These hearings were initiated to instigate financial irregularities with-in the UHW-W. Ray Marshal, Labor Secretary during the Carter administration, who was hired by the SEIU to conduct the hearings, found that the UHW-W had established a not for profit entity with the intention of funding confrontation with the SEIU's leadership. Marshal found that this was insufficient to warrant trusteeship, but recommended that the union be place in trusteeship if it continued to oppose the SEIU's previous decision to shift 65000 members from the UHW-W to a single local representing workers in long-term-care.

UHW-W leaders said it is unprecedented to have a trusteeship request denied, and argued that Marshall linked two unrelated disputes by tying his recommendations to the fate of UHW-W's long-term care members.

Rosselli told Labor Notes "We suspect that the hearing report from Secretary Marshall got amended by SEIU lawyers to get their desired outcome," UHW-W's former head Sal Rosselli said. "Frankly we don't have a lot of respect for it being some independent report or process."

Prior to the publication of Marshal's recommendations, the SEIU had already moved to establish a offices in Oakland and Los Angels from which to impose the trusteeship with staff from across the country being flown into California to help take over the UHW-W.

According to Labor Notes, although many staffers were initially told that UHW-related assignments would be voluntary, the International informed organisers that failure to travel to California will be "considered a resignation."

New Union Launched - National Union of Health Workers
Following the announcement of the trusteeship, thousands of UHW-W members rallied at UHW-W offices across California to express their anger at the trusteeship. Hundreds of members occupied UHW-W offices on January 27 and 28.

On January 28, the UHW-W executive board announced that they had formed the National Union of Healthcare Workers and would begin to collect union cards as a first step towards winning recognition in their workplaces.

Announcing the creating of the union, Rosselli said "As a healthcare workers union, NUHW is committed to continuing the tradition of a member-led, democratically controlled union. There are lot of things that we still have to figure out, but we know NUHW will be all about accountability to the members, democratic-decision-making, organizing the unorganized and winning improvements for healthcare workers and the patients and residents we serve."

The UHW-W had little choice but to establish a new union, the original push to conduct a disaffiliation ballot had little chance of success even prior to the trusteeship. The SEIU constitution makes it almost impossible to win such a ballot, not only are union staff not allowed to support such a campaign, if just seven members support a local remaining affiliated to the SEIU then disaffiliation is not possible.

Constructing a new union will also be exceeding difficult. It is not sufficient for members of the UHW-W to decide they wish to be members of the NUHW for the new union to get bargaining rights. The workers would first need to be in a workplace which is in an "open period" prior to contract expiration and then file for an election and then attempt to defeat the might of the SEIU. However the UHW-W renegotiated 100 contracts in 2008 so the process will take many years.

Despite these difficulties UHW-W members who want a democratic union have little choice but to form a new union. "For decades, healthcare workers in California have wanted to be part of a democratic, progressive movement that would raise standards for caregivers and the patients and residents we serve. Events over the last several days have proven that's not possible in SEIU," said Angela Glasper, a 20-year optical services clerk from Kaiser Permanente. "Healthcare workers deserve to be part of a union that healthcare workers control democratically, not one that is led by a handful of outsiders from Washington D.C.".

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United Healthcare Workers-West to consider disaffiliation as the SEIU moves to carve Local up

Lisbeth Latham

On January 9, the International Executive Board of the Service Employees International Union voted to begin a process of breaking up its third-largest local, the 150,000-member United Healthcare Workers-West. The move follows months of hostility between the leaderships of the SEIU and UHW over the direction of the union, particularly how to build the union and achieve the best outcomes for workers. Part of the hostility has surrounded ongoing threats that the UHW-W would be put into trusteeship by the SEIU. The UHW-W has responded to the International Executive Board’s decision by requesting that the IEB initiate a ballot on disaffiliating from the SEIU.


The IEB decision means that 65,000 UHW-W members in long-term care will be moved into a new union local which will also include members from two other Californian SEIU Locals 6365 and 521.

The UHW-W has opposed the removal of 42 per cent of its membership on three levels. The SEIU has pushed to form state-wide mega-locals with memberships clearly defined along industrial lines, giving the union increased clout with both employers and politicians. The UHW-W, which organises across the healthcare workers, has argued that its structure is consistent with this logic.

SEIU’s President Andy Stern has argued that unions need to build “a ‘working relationship’ that can add value to the business and help improve performance [that] will result in workers sharing fairly in their employers’ success”. The UHW-W has argued that this results in the conditions of existing members being undermined. It also believes its more militant mobilisation of members against employers has not only delivered better outcomes for members in long-term care but has facilitated the organising of new workplaces. Finally the UHW-W’s leadership argues that any decision regarding how members are moved between locals should be made by the members affected rather than by the International’s leadership.

Ballot on the future of the Californian long-term care workers
The IEB’s decision to restructure long-term care has been justified on the outcome of a ballot of Californian SEIU members in November and December 2008. In the poll 21,008 members voted in favour of forming a new California-wide long-term care local. At the time of the ballot the UHW-W raised concerns over the democracy of the ballot, including:
• The ballot was only advisory, so its outcome could be ignored by the SEIU if it wished;
• The ballot was a pooled vote rather than a ballot by local, so all votes were included together, reducing the ability of the wishes of the members of individual locals to be taken into account;
• The vote did not give members a true choice as they were only offered a choice of forming a new long-term care local or a new combined healthcare local; there was no option to maintain the existing local structure;
• The leaderships of the affected locals were not informed at the same time, with the leaderships of both Locals 6365 and 521 being informed of the ballot in advance of the papers being sent to members, while the leadership of UHW-W was only informed of the ballot after the papers were sent to members.

In response the UHW-W called on members to boycott the poll and initiated a petition campaign where SEIU members in long-term care were encouraged to fill out cards protesting the ballot. This campaign was successful: just 24,366 votes were received out of 309,000 eligible voters (an 8 per cent return) and the UHW-W collected cards from 40,000 members including 1,000 members of Local 6365. In addition the UHW-W collected the signatures of 85,000 members on a petition against the ballot.

Disaffiliation
On January 11, the leadership of UHW-W sent the IEB a request that it initiate a ballot of UHW-W members to formally disaffiliate from the SEIU. The request follows the UHW-W’s executive board receiving letters and petitions from members across California requesting that UHW-W disaffiliate from SEIU. According to the UHW-W the requests for disaffiliation have cited three concerns as motivating the requests:
• The forced removal of 65,000 long-term care members from UHW;
• The stifling of union members’ free speech rights;
• Widespread corruption by Stern-appointed union leaders (the president of Local 6365 is one a number of SEIU senior officials to have been stood down in 2008 for the misuse of hundreds of thousands of dollars of members’ money).

Despite requesting that a ballot on disaffiliation be held, the executive board of the UHW-W has indicated that it will not be taking a position in support of disaffiliation. This is due to the changes in the SEIU’s constitution that were made at the SEIU convention in July 2008, which state that “no officer or local union or affiliated body shall support or assist any efforts to dissolve, secede or disaffiliate from the SEIU”.

It is unclear how the SEIU will respond to the UHW-W’s request for a ballot or what the UHW-W will do in the event the SEIU refuses to allow a ballot. The IEB’s decision to re-organise the Californian locals will not be implemented until at least February 9, while a disaffiliation vote takes at least 60 days to be scheduled, making it likely that the conflict between the SEIU’s IEB and the UHW-W will intensify.

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Struggle for union democracy as SEIU dissidents attacked

Lisbeth Latham

On November 17, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) announced that it would be holding an advisory ballot of members in California to determine the future of the United Healthcare Workers–West (UHW-W), which with 150,000 members is the SEIU’s third largest local.


The leadership of UHW-W, particularly its president Sal Rosselli, has been at the forefront of a campaign within the SEIU against the increasing centralisation of power within the union — a process which it argues will rob rank-and-file members of a say in the contracts that govern their employment.

The announcement of the ballot followed six days of hearings to determine if there was grounds for the SEIU to place the UHW-W in trusteeship, thus allowing the SEIU to replace the UHW-W’s leadership with one loyal to the SEIU’s tops.

The UHW-W and other critics of the SEIU argue that the latter is determined to silence its critics by any means, and is simply seeking to legitimise the removal of the UHW-W leadership.

The UHW-W has responded with ongoing mobilisations by members in defence of union democracy.

The UHW-W’s opposition to the direction of the SEIU emerged from a range of differences over how best to organise workers, moves to break up the UHW-W and changes in the SEIU rules that the UHW-W argue would result in a significant concentration of power in the hands of the SEIU leadership.

In 2007, the UHW-W accused the SEIU leadership, which has intervened into UHW-W-run bargaining, of taking too many concessions in its effort to win agreement from employers to agree to neutrality in union recognition ballots in currently unorganised sites.

This reflects SEIU President Andy Stern’s view that central to successful union organising is to demonstrate that unions can “add value” to an employer.

In his 2006 book, A Country that Works: Getting America Back on Track, Stern argued that a “class-struggle mentality was a vestige of an earlier, rough era of industrial union[ism]”, and that the new labour movement should strive for “a ‘working relationship’ that can add value to the business and help improve performance [that] will result in workers sharing fairly in their employers’ success”.

A central part of the current round of union restructuring has included the transfer of 45,000 of UHW-W’s members working in home-care to Local 6345 (United Long Term Care) in California.

While members will get to vote on this transfer, the decision is to be taken as an aggregate of the
affected members of both locals, rather than of each separately. With Local 6345 having more members in this sector, they have the capacity to over-ride the decision of UHW-W members.

In the newly formed locals the leadership, at least initially, would be appointed by the SEIU international leadership.

In the lead up to the SEIU’s convention, the international leadership proposed a series of changes in SEIU policy under the title of “Justice for All”, which was passed overwhelmingly at the convention. The changes substantially increased the powers of the national union over its locals.

The UHW-W argued that the changes would reduce the input that rank-and-file members could have in collective bargaining, particularly the final wording of contracts, and shift the handling of grievances from local stewards and onto centralised call centres.

In response, the UHW-W issued a “Platform for Change” at the convention, that called for allowing rank and file members to elect representatives to the bargaining committees, and to vote on contract proposals and “any agreement” that affects working conditions.

The proposals also sought to limit forced mergers of locals as well as change elections for international officers by convention delegates to direct election by the membership.

Allegations against UHW-W
On August 25, Stern announced that a trusteeship hearing would be held into the UHW-W. The key allegation has been that the leadership of UHW-W had misappropriated union funds by using US$3 million of the locals fund to create a non-profit Patient Education Fund (PEF), in May 2007 to fund public education campaigns.

The SEIU leadership alleges that the fund was established to assist the UHW-W leadership to resist attempts to put it into trusteeship. On April 24, the UHW-W voted to close down the PEF.
On March 24, Stern had written to all 150,000 UHW-W members about a series of allegations. The letter was widely seen as the beginnings of a move to put the UHW-W into receivership.

On May 1, 101 pro-union writers, authors, and educators signed an open letter to Stern that was published as a half-page ad in the New York Times, expressing “deep concern” over the threat of placing UHW-W into trusteeship.

The letter stated such a move “would send a very troubling message and be viewed, by many, as a sign that internal democracy is not valued or tolerated within SEIU”. Stern and other local and international leaders of the SEIU have argued that there was no intention to put UHW-W into receivership.

On June 5, SEIU leader Bill Ragen sent an email to other officials that discussed possible options to intervene into the UHW-W. The email raised the possibility of trusteeship, but suggested such a move was problematic — “like Iraq, easy to get in and then a slog” .

The preferred option outlined in the email would be the local’s implosion, via the stripping away of members, luring away of senior staff, legal suits around the PEF and encouraging dissatisfaction among the UHW-W membership.

The charges against the UHW-W’s leadership mirror those in a court case that was brought against the UHW-W by the SEIU on June 20. In the case, the SEIU argued that 10 members of the UHW-W’s executive had, in establishing the PEF, breached their duty to use the union’s funds for the interests of the union and had breached the SEIU’s constitution and bylaws.

The SEIU’s case was subsequently dismissed on July 22 without a formal hearing.

Corruption in the SEIU
In August, a growing corruption scandal erupted surrounding three of Stern’s hand-picked officials within SEIU locals in California and Michigan.

In a series of articles, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Stern-appointed presidents of three SEIU locals, including the president of Local 6345 where 45,000 UHW-W members were to be transferred, and an executive vice-president of the SEIU, are accused of misspending hundreds of thousands of dollars of members money to enrich themselves and their families.

All three have been stood down from their positions.

In response to the scandal, Stern announced on September 3 the creation of an ethics commission and the establishment of an ethics code for the union.

Stern also announced that the board would be asked to examine the actions of the leadership of UHW-W.

The leadership of the UHW-W argued that the pursuit of the local reflects both an attempt to shift attention away from the corruption of SEIU officials close to Stern and to advance his goal of breaking up the UHW-W.

On September 10, Herman Benson, founder of the Association for Union Democracy, pointed out on his Union Democracy blog that,“unlike Stern’s own appointees, Rosselli has never been charged with trying to enrich himself or friends. The attack on Rosselli derives from his political opposition to Stern.”

A witch-hunt
The launching of the trusteeship process has to be taken in the context of the corruption crisis. The crisis makes it unlikely that the SEIU will be able to successfully transfer members from the UHW-W to local 6345.

The hearing process itself has been constructed to help give further cover to the SEIU.

Throughout the attacks on the local, the UHW-W has sought to mobilise its members to win new agreements and organise workplaces, as well as fight against the trusteeship process.

UHW-W members have mobilised in their thousands across California, including at the trusteeship hearings.

More than 5000 UHW-W members participated in rallies outside of the hearings on September 26 and 27. During the second series of trusteeship hearings held on November 12 and 13, UHW-W held “Keeping it Real” rallies both outside trusteeship hearing in San Jose, as well as outside of SEIU offices in Los Angeles and Oakland.

At the latter protests, they attempted to deliver a petition signed by 80,000 members calling on the SEIU to end the trusteeship hearings and enter into mediation with the UHW-W.

In Sacramento members protested outside the headquarters of Sutter Health, which has been delaying negotiating with UHW-W, to demand the company immediately negotiate with the local.

However, their efforts have been made difficult as companies seek to delay bargaining in the hope that the UHW-W will be put under trusteeship and the company will be able to bargain with a more pliant SIEU-controlled union.

Despite the SEIU’s control of the hearing process, it was unable to prove the allegations of misconduct against the UHW-W. Faced with the UHW-W memberships’ determination to maintain control of their union, the SEIU has established a new voting process that could be used to legitimise action against the local.

The ballot, which will close on December 11, asks all SEIU members in California whether the 65,000 homecare and nursing home workers wish to join a statewide long-term care union with leaders appointed by Stern, or whether the UHW-W should be dissolved and a new statewide healthcare workers union created with leaders appointed by Stern.

The UHW-W have raised a number of concerns with the ballot process.

Firstly, the vote is only advisory, so the SEIU can ignore the result if they wish. Secondly, as it is a ballot of all SEIU members in California, the votes of UHW-W members may be blunted if their vote is swamped by the remainder of SEIU members in the state. Thirdly, UHW-W were only informed of the ballot when it was mailed to members, while other Californian locals were informed prior to its mailing so they could begin campaigning support of the proposals.

As such, the UHW-W has decided to boycott the vote, encouraging members to instead send postcards protesting the ballot.

[For more information on the UHW-W and the campaign against it, visit http://www.seiuvoice.org/.]

Originally published in Green Left Weekly #777

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Left-wing labour conference attacked

Lisbeth Latham

Union members and labour activists attending the Labor Notes Conference dinner on April 12 were attacked by bus loads of staff and members of the Service Employees Industrial Union (SEIU) — wearing purple SEIU t-shirts — who forced their way into the conference venue in Dearborn, Michigan. In the ensuing melee a number of people were injured.


Labor Notes is a labour movement magazine that seeks to build union militancy, rank-and-file solidarity and has acted as a networking tool between reform groups in the US union movement. Since 1981, bi-annual conferences have been held to bring union activists together.

The 2008 conference, aimed at examining approaches to “Rebuild Labor’s Power”, attracted more than 1000 people from 21 countries, the largest conference since 1997.

The SEIU’s attack is a consequence of the growing bitter dispute between the SEIU and the California Nurses Association (CNA), and its affiliate the National Nurses Organising Committee, over the organisation of nurses in Catholic Healthcare Partners (CHP) in Ohio.

The SEIU had negotiated for the CHP to approach the National Labor Relations Board to hold a union recognition ballot for registered nurses at nine of its hospitals in March. The SEIU was to be the only choice on the ballot.

Such a ballot would ordinarily be precipitated by a union membership card check to indicate that the union had support among the workforce. Such a check did not occurr. In response the CNA, which has also sought to organise nurses at the CHP, launched a campaign for nurses to be given a genuine choice in the union they join.

On March 12, days before the scheduled ballot, the SEIU announced that the ballot had been cancelled and launched a public attack on the CNA, accusing it of union-busting.

The attack on the Labor Notes Conference was aimed at disrupting the speech by CNA director Rose Anne DeMoro during the conference dinner. As there had been rumours of an attack on the conference, DeMoro cancelled her speech.

DeMoro had been invited to speak on CNA’s work to achieve the establishment of single-payer health insurance (where the government or a separate sub-contracting agency provides a universal system of health insurance) and successful campaign to win improved nurse-patient staffing ratios in California, which are the best in the US.

Mark Brenner, director of Labor Notes said “Labor Notes has always been a space for open debate, but when a union decides to engage in violence against their brothers and sisters, we draw a line. Violence within the labour movement is unacceptable and we call on the national leadership of SEIU, including President Andy Stern, to repudiate it.”

[For information on Labor Notes and the conference visit http://labornotes.org.]

Originally published in Green Left Weekly #747

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