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SEIU Reform Fight Success Article

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Kelly O
Post Posted: Fri Sep 14, 2007 11:43 pm

Joined: 05 Feb 2006
Posts: 61
Location: Toronto 		Article by Earl Silbar, activist - thought it might be of interest here, sorry couldn't find a link to it on-line, only gots ent it as a word attachement - Kelly

The Service Employees International Union, SEIU, is both one of the largest and most controversial US trade unions. Its growing numbers go counter to the wider trend of declining membership and concentration of union members while its leadership, spearheaded by Pres. Andy Stern, carries out what they call a ‘win-win’ strategy relying on cooperation with corporate management.

This spring, a reform movement within the SEIU forced the national leadership to abandon one such agreement with the northern California nursing home operators on May 31st. This article seeks to examine that agreement and the push against it. Hopefully, there are useful lessons for us who face the ‘bottom line’ pressure of Corporate America on our jobs as well as in our lives outside work.

Hopefully, this reform fight and its limitations shed useful light where overly optimistic or cynical people only see one aspect- the fight itself did win. For one, it illustrates the different interests of different sections of the union hierarchy that prompted this fight. It shows how the SEIU’s collaboration with the profit-first operators hurt both the workers and the wider, working class public who live in these nursing homes. It also illuminates the need for us to develop organizations not dependent on the feuding factions of the union management structures- organizations founded on our common needs and interests as part of the working class, worldwide, faced with today’s global capitalism. To stand up to management, it’s inadequate and harmful to simply back the ‘lesser of 2 evils’. To create the networks and learn how to fight, we need a careful examination of such struggles.

The initial Union-corporate agreement lasted 4-1/2 years of its 7-year package before the national SEIU leadership was forced to end it as of May 31, 2007. The initial agreement was a tradeoff: the union agreed not to publicize or oppose any unhealthy or harmful practices, such as short staffing, to state regulators or the media, except those already mandated by law. The SEIU in CA even opposed legislation that would have forced healthcare owners to improve patient care and safety. To start the ball rolling, the union led the successful fight for higher state payments to the operators.

In exchange for all this and more, the owners/operators agreed to allow employees to join the union without opposition. These new union members, some 3,000+, were then covered by ‘template agreements’, put into the master agreement and not negotiated by the workers themselves or their chosen representatives. These template agreements gave up the right to strike as well as the right to campaign against mistreatment of the workers and the patients.

According to an internal analysis done after 4 years under this ‘win-win’ agreement by the regional SEIU branch, United Healthcare Workers – West (UHW), these deals “allowed for very little power on the shop floor with no right to strike and no clear path towards full collective bargaining rights.” (This quote and much of the information regarding the partnership and the reform effort come from “Internal Pressure Ends ‘Sweetheart’ Contract Early” by Mark Brenner-http://labornotes.org/node/989)

This agreement with the northern CA nursing home owners was also important since it also served as a template for the wider international union strategy espoused by the SEIU’s Stern but also by most national US unions- partnership with the employers. This trend is to ‘grow the union’ by such agreements while creating huge, so-called locals as big as 100,000 members. Internally, the SEIU is moving towards the corporate mirror image, internally as well in its main relationship with corporate management.

The SEIU may be the most ‘advanced’ example, but it is not alone in its practice of selling out the workers’ need for actual power in exchange for ‘peaceful relations’ with management. In fact, this has been the dominant, if contested, practice in US unions at least since the victory of the Cold War anti communism of the late 1940s. That victory was sealed at the 1949 CIO convention when those who believed in working class unity against the demands and priorities of capitalism (sometimes referred to as class-struggle unionism) were excluded from union positions and whole unions from the CIO itself. Today, Andy Stern is the most outspoken union leader espousing this ‘win-win’ collaboration (combined with judicious pressure). Thus, the agreement, its effects, and its demise have relevance greater than its impact upon those workers directly.

The UHW elected leadership, staff members and local stewards began a campaign to change or scrap the operating agreement several months before the national leadership gave in and dropped it. The UHW leaders made a study of the agreement, mentioned earlier, and sent out a letter to all members which said, in part, “ Some in the national SEIU are negotiating an agreement with nursing home employers-in California and nationally- and have repeatedly excluded UHW nursing home members and elected representatives from the process.”

Of course, the newly organized members had always been excluded, from the first day of the agreement. So, what was new? Why did the local leadership only organize opposition after over 4 years? After all, this deal had excluded the workers themselves from negotiating their ‘template’ agreements which gave up the right to strike and the right to campaign for their own and patients’ safety. What was new? “Why Now?” is always a timely question.

One reason appears to have been the growing exclusion of UHW leaders from negotiating the follow-up agreements. This is part of the SEIU’s super-centralization whereby most ‘local’ unions are organized in ‘efficient’ organizations of 20,000- 200.000, often encompassing entire states or even geographical regions. This super-centralization also happens to minimize the ability of local work groups to impact their own ‘local’ union unless they develop wider networks and organizations. Thus, the growing exclusion of local leaders and workers from negotiations flows from the extreme version of collaboration and ‘corporatizing’ the union itself. This development indicates the actual necessity of developing working class, I would argue, socialist organizations based on common class needs and opposed to this widespread subordination of workers’ interests to corporate and Union management.

Instead of developing the natural affinity and unity over working and health conditions, this agreement actually pit the healthcare workers and the union against the patients and their families. It illustrates perfectly the contrast between class collaboration and class struggle unionism. This development also shows how the different and competing interests within the union structures can and did lead to greater worker involvement, opening the door to concerned workers seeing and helping develop their own collective potential to force change.

Once the UHW leaders did initiate open and internal struggle against the agreements and the negotiations that froze them out, over 20,000 UHW members signed the petition within a few weeks. This response shows some potential for a real fight, not a sham fight run by a group which itself actively pressures workers to serve profiteering management against their own and their class’s real needs. As a shop steward Brenner talked with put it, “We’ve signed up over half the members where I work. What really got people upset was this idea that guys in suits, sitting in Washington, D, C,, will bargain our contracts.
These are people who have never worked in a hospital and who don’t know anything about our jobs. Then, to top it off, we won’t even have a right to vote on the contract they negotiate.” The UHW
workers were very much against the SEIU’s extending that agreement covering new workers onto them. They showed no trust in the national leadership to ‘look out for them’. Quite the contrary. These testify to the lie that workers are passive and trust their leadership. It shows the potential for a powerful working class fight, but only if an alternative develops to challenge the strategy of ‘win-win’ collaboration.

In other words, when the SEIU leadership froze out the local leaders from negotiations, those leaders took the initiative to fight, for their own reasons. When it was ‘just the workers’ who were frozen out, they did nothing. The local leaders had their own reasons for fighting; that fight then illuminated the level of discontent of most members. It opened the door to workers’ organizing and talking amongst themselves over what this would mean. It created an opening which will need to go beyond this limited resistance if they’re to realize the potential for expanding their own networks not dependent upon the initiatives of the local leaders.

I don’t write this to denigrate those UHW leaders. Far from it: in fact, they undertook a fight, which could have put them out of a job. The SEIU, like most national unions, including my own, AFSCME, has constitutional, vague provisions allowing the national leaders to place local unions under trusteeship, wherein the national leaders take over the local and appoint officers who make decisions for the local. The fact that the UHW-W leaders started this internal fight shows how threatened they (and others in such positions) must have felt by this totally centralized, corporatized setup pushed by Stern and his allies.

You might recall the original “Justice for Janitors” campaign in Los Angeles back in the early ‘90s. There was even a movie based upon it. The national SEIU paid local activists to organize mostly Central American and Mexican immigrant communities for militant confrontations and mass marches in solidarity with the union organizing drive for downtown janitors. After the workers and SEIU forced the corporate employers to sign a decent contract, the militant activists formed a slate and won local union election. To show that they didn’t mean to threaten the union establishment, this solidarity slate chose not to run a candidate for president. The SEIU leadership responded quickly; they took over that local, dissolved it into a statewide SEIU ‘local’ and bought off one or two of the original local leaders. Who were the chief SEIU officers at he time? John Sweeney, current AFL-CIO president, was then the SEIU president while Andy Stern was his loyal VP. It took courage and shrewd judgement for those UHW leaders to make this fight; make no mistake. But it’s also important not to lionize them and their initiative.

In fact, like most unions committed to such ‘junior partnerships’, the UHW-W has consistently promoted corporate interests over workers’ for many years. A recent article by Charles Andrews, “Who’s Right about Kaiser—Michael Moore or SEIU?” gives us several examples and insights based on their, SEIU’s, junior partnership with Kaiser Permanente. (http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/andrews050907.html)

While Moore’s recent movie SiCKO refers to Kaiser as an example of profiteering health exploiters. It ran tape where Nixon approves the Kaiser practice of using healthcare premiums as their money, essentially for profits and not to provide healthcare. In fact, Kaiser was the poster child for the HMO Act of 1973. As Andrews puts it, “ Erlichman assured Nixon that the incentives at Kaiser run toward less medical are. The less care provided to members paying a flat premium, the more money Kaiser makes.”

A document supplied by Kaiser, responding to SiCKO, was a Feb. 6, 1971 letter from chairman Edgar Kaiser to Erlichman in which “ Mr. Kaiser explained that Kaiser physicians, organized as the Permanente Group, receive both a salary and a share in any surplus left over from the contractual payments by the Kaiser Heath Plan to the Permanente Group.” According to Andrews, “The incentive is to minimize the number of physicians in ratio to Kaiser members.” In other words, these doctors got a piece of the pie in exchange for short-changing patients, for increasing the ration of patients to doctors.

That’s not all. According to Andrews’ report, UHW-W actively helped Kaiser Permanente train and “… award bonuses to call-center clerks who spent the least amount of time on the phone with each patient and limited the number of doctors’ appointments.” ( Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2002) As Andrews puts it, “UHW-W officials served as straw bosses, working with Kaiser bosses urging clerks to get with the program.” This gives workers a small payoff for helping management screw over and exploit everyone else. This is poison to the solidarity of workers with those we impact or serve. It pits some against all. That’s what this ‘win-win’ junior partnership means, in daily life.
How did the UHW-W leaders respond to Moore’s charges and Kaiser’s defense? Andrews puts it this way: “UHW-W attacked Michael Moore for ‘smearing the reputation of one of our nation’s most progressive, reform-minded, pro-worker health-care organizations: American’s premier not-for-profit, pre-paid, integrated health-care delivery system, Kaiser Permanente.’ ”

Is this just a war of words or part of a war against the working class, playing divide and rule with payoffs for those who collaborate and hard time for those who don’t?

From what I can see, they only stepped up after the national leadership was freezing them out and marking them as expendable. The UHW-W leadership’s letter and petition was coupled with an intense internal SEIU fight. It apparently caused the end of the northern CA agreement within days of the petition. That internal union fight is not over, altho this particular battle is. One thing is clear: contradictions exist between the national leadership and local leaders. The strategy to centralize everything has and will create more such. So far, this internal fight appears to be between two wings that essentially agree on the overall jr. partnership relationship with capitalist management and priorities.

Brenner illustrates this with the case of Jerome Brown, former president of SEIU’s massive 1199 New England health care regional union. According to Brenner, Brown exemplifies a dissenting voice within the national SEIU, one who recognizes that “only after a period of open conflict can ‘strong unions and engaged members enter into mature, cooperative relationships’ with their employers.” In other words, Brown is all for these ‘cooperative relationships’, but only after establishing and then taming an ‘engaged’ membership. Same goals, different tactics. Still, here’s yet another example of contradictions within the same structures, more conflicts that can and do open more doors to similar developments. You can see the contradictions when Brown wrote, in a review of Andy Stern’s latest book, “A Country That Works” (which I plan to review here soon),

“We have to ask ourselves if these methods (referring to practices like the northern CA nursing home agreement) can produce a real, democratic workers’ organization or if it is more likely that they will produce a ‘membership’ that sees itself, correctly, as a third party in a relationship with union brokers and employers—the very antithesis of true rank-and-file unionism.” We might also ask, “how does pursing ‘mature’ collaboration of once-militant unions help workers? Should we take a close look at how this has played out in the airlines, in steel, or in auto where pay, conditions, pensions and healthcare are all being sacrificed on the same alter?

Still, that process of inner-union conflicts opens the door to a deeper development- one where the active workers can break free to pursue their own interests as workers, unlimited by what’s acceptable to various layers of union officials who are ‘on board’ for the collaboration strategy embodied by Andy Stern and the current SEIU national leadership.

For the recently- activated northern CA healthcare workers in UHW, this means more a chance to develop local and regional networks and groups to discuss and possibly fight for their own working conditions. This then means they can take up the direct and public fight for better healthcare conditions for the patients and through them with the wider working class. This would no longer depend upon the local leaders, altho it doesn’t have to be against them where they’re willing to support and help lead such a fight. The parallel with education and other public sector workers seems clear: we are the largest unionized sector of the workforce. Our working conditions are usually other people’s care or ‘service’. For teachers, our working conditions are students’ learning conditions.

And that can encourage those who are also discontented with their/our own union leaders, most of whom practice the same ‘win-win’ partnership as the SEIU, even if not always taken to Stern’s extreme. Clearly, the growing pressures of corporate capitalism are tilling and preparing the ground for resistance. The question then is, “What kind of resistance?” We can sit back and feel good about this victory in CA, or we can take heart and use it to build on, towards a working class movement that organizes around our common good and living links, rejecting the ‘win-win’ collaboration strategy which is really a ‘lose-lose’ for us. In my experience, those who reject capitalist priorities and work for a different society have special contributions to make.

To fight effectively, the internal opponents, like in UHW-W, must sometimes mobilize and try to steer the workers affected. This opens the door to workers to fight for things like good staffing, providing quality healthcare, defending pensions, et.al. To fight within such a context, it is necessary to reject the ideas that guide collaboration and have ideas and goals- like providing quality health care for all by building worker-patient or teacher-student-family unity. Ideas and strategy/tactics, which make sense and can inspire others to stand up and face attacks. Since most unions oppose this outlook, in daily life, we must develop organizations working towards working class solidarity, of one-for-all-and-all-for-one, and against this dog-eat-dog, illustrated by even the ‘reform’ leaders of UHW-W in this case.

The deepest expression of and the goal of creating solidarity requires overturning the capitalist system and creating a socialism that Marx saw as inherent in our struggle with the domination of capital. He saw and worked for a world free of class or other forms of oppression. For those of us who’re either convinced of Marx’s analysis or just engaging his ideas, this successful fight inside the SEIU points towards the living class struggle as the organic, natural grounds for developing class awareness, independent organization, and greater understanding of how the system works and how we can all ‘work it’ for our common good and future.


Earl Silbar is a lifelong socialist activist who has been a Teamster, a member of Laborer’s International, the IBEW, part of an in-plant IAM organizing committee, and a founding member, activist and citywide elected officer, delegate to state and national AFSCME conventions, Local 3506 delegate to the Chicago Fed. of Labor, and as chief steward of AFSCME 3506. He recently retired after teaching GED for 27 years in Chicago’s City Colleges. Red1pearl@aol.com

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"If I can not air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest." Audre Lorde
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