June 3rd, 2009
Z Magazine: A Battle for Labor’s Future
At the 1935 AFL convention, John L. Lewis of the Miners punched Big Bill Hutcheson of the Carpenters, a fight that marked the formation of the CIO and its split from the AFL. Today a similar fight is going on within the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), perhaps the premier labor union of our time. It’s a fight that may have consequences as dramatic for labor as that 1935 battle, but a fight that (so far) is being followed mostly by labor insiders.
SEIU, headed by Andy Stern, is the nation’s fastest growing, most visible, most politically potent labor union. Almost every story about SEIU is about some new way that it is on the offensive, launching one or another surprising new initiative, demonstrating its power and creativity. But this is a story about how SEIU is on the receiving end, seemingly outflanked by a new breakaway union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), which appears to be winning unprecedented support from workers and leaving SEIU flat-footed—although SEIU’s power and resources may yet enable it to win.
June 2nd, 2009
Fresno Business Journal: Home care workers to vote in union election
Ballots were mailed out today in a hotly contested election that pits unions National Union of Healthcare Workers and Service Employees International Union against each other.
Home care workers will be voting on whether to remain members of SEIU or to join NUHW.
According to union organizers, the ballots should start arriving today, and need to be filled out and returned via mail to the State Mediation and Conciliation Service by June 15. The results will be tabulated and issued by June 19.
In May, a similar vote held by workers at Doctor’s Medical Center in San Pablo was overwhelmingly won by NUHW, with the majority of workers there wanting to join the union.
May 31st, 2009
John Wilhelm: SEIU represents “the suicide of the labor movement”
It’s the whole question of whether the labor movement is a handful of very smart people in Washington and New York driving the train and figuring out what’s best for the mass of workers, or whether it’s the kind of union you see in the Culinary in Las Vegas, which certainly has very strong leaders but also enormous rank-and-file activity, ownership and empowerment.
Andy Stern believes the former. He says that contract standards don’t matter, that it’s a workable approach for unions to say to corporate leaders, “Give us card-check agreement, don’t fight unionization and we’ll give you a substandard contact in return.” That will never work.
There’s a big brawl within SEIU about this very issue. Tens of thousands of health care workers left SEIU in California to form a competing union. Stern came into that state and removed popular, elected leaders from a strong local. The rank and file was outraged. He also signed a secret deal with nursing home operators in exchange for card check. The standards were unconscionable.
This represents a race to the bottom that will destroy the labor movement.
May 31st, 2009
Fresno Bee: Fresno County vote key for 2 unions
Two unions are battling for votes in Fresno County in an election that labor experts say could affect the unionization of health-care workers nationwide.
The local election to win the allegiance — and paying dues — of 10,000 in-home health-care workers is the largest thus far in a bitter fight between an established union and an upstart launched earlier this year.
May 30th, 2009
Fresno Bee: Homecare workers take back their union
The thing that made me most proud of the union we built was that it was based on a fundamental value we learned from our friends in the disability rights movement: “Make no decision about us without us.” In our union, we elected our own representatives from neighborhoods all over Fresno County, and we made the decisions about our own futures. The era of dignity and respect for home-care workers had begun. We won our current wage of $10.25 an hour and lifted thousands out of poverty.
But by 2009, some of our union’s Washington, D.C., leaders had lost their way. The leaders of the SEIU, our parent union, came to believe that they were smarter than their own members, and that only they should have the right to make decisions for us.