August 22nd, 2012
California labor board files complaint against SEIU in Fresno election for voter intimidation
The California Public Employment Relations Board has filed an official complaint against SEIU-UHW West for its conduct in the 2009 Fresno homecare election. Citing SEIU’s “physical and verbal threats,” “menacing and abusive behavior,” “unlawful destruction and removal” of property and a campaign of lies intended to mislead 10,000 Fresno homecare workers into voting to stay […]
August 17th, 2012
Holding Kaiser accountable
Kaiser continues to make higher profits than ever before, even while cutting workers’ benefits and skimping on patients’ needed services. And they couldn’t do it without the help of their preferred union, SEIU-UHW. Kaiser’s 2nd quarter financial report, released this week, shows that the company made $1.3 billion in profits in the first six months […]
August 10th, 2012
A New Alliance of Kaiser Unions – a Real Coalition that Fights for Patients and Workers, Not Kaiser Profits
A New Day Last January, tens of thousands of Kaiser workers – including CNA and NUHW RNs, psychologists, optical workers and healthcare professionals, stationary engineers, and scores of rank and file SEIU service and tech members – waged the largest strike in Kaiser history. Today, we are proud to announce the founding of a new […]
August 7th, 2012
The New Republic: The Inscrutable Andy Stern, In His Own Defense
By Alec MacGillis, TNR
At a time when unions hold an ever-diminishing role in American life, Andy Stern commanded a remarkably high profile. To his supporters, the longtime head of the Service Employees International Union was the savior of organized labor, who had found a way to expand the ranks of his union when almost every other one in the private sector was shrinking. To his detractors on the left, he was a self-promoter who was growing his union’s membership by cutting pro-management deals with employers or with ethically dubious elected officials such as Illinois’ Rod Blagojevich, all while waging costly internecine fights within the labor movement. To his detractors on the right, he was a dangerous radical who was paying a suspiciously high number of visits to the Obama White House.
Stern further confused the picture following his retirement from SEIU in 2010. He served on the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission, where he was putatively representing the liberal wing of the spectrum, but where he caused agita among liberal skeptics with, among other things, his talk of investing part of the Social Security trust fund in the stock market. He voted against the commission’s final recommendations, but is going to be joining up with the deficit-reduction cause again next month, taking part in a nationwide bus tour organized by the Peterson Foundation to warn Americans about the coming fiscal apocalypse. More curiously, in December 2011, Stern wrote an eye-catching op-ed in the Wall Street Journal declaring that it was time for the United States to drop free-market capitalism in exchange for China’s “superior economic model.”
Meanwhile, though, Stern has also been doing well for himself under good old American-style capitalism.
August 3rd, 2012
Working In These Times: Andy Stern Responds to Critics of His Post-SEIU Career
By Mike Elk, Working In These Times
Former Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andy Stern has long faced criticism from dissidents within his own union that he sold out workers in order to accommodate corporate America. His critics say they have been proven right by Stern’s career moves since he left SEIU in 2010. In particular, they point to Stern taking two positions associated with a private equity titan as well as joining the board of an organization that is alleged to have trained school superintendents to combat teachers’ unions.
Stern recently accepted a paid position on the board of directors of the biochemical company SIGA, owned by billionaire Ron Perelman’s private equity firm MacAndrews & Forbes. Stern also recently accepted an endowed position at Columbia University as a Ronald O. Perelman Senior Fellow at the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy. During his tenure at SEIU, Stern faced criticsim for cutting a 2006 deal with AlliedBarton, also owned by Perelman, in which SEIU agreed to abandon an organizing drive of an estimated 10,000 security guards in exchange for employer neutrality in organizing AlliedBarton security guards elsewhere.