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SEIU takedown

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on Thu, 06/14/2012 - 7:54pm

Thanks to Montana Maven for turning me on to Left Business Observer:

In other countries, unions are about more than contracts, and have done a lot better job fighting for broad public benefits, like pensions and health care. Our unions look too much like they’re fighting to defend their own private welfare states and not fighting to expand the public ones. They look like that because they all too often are. There’s no more disgraceful instance of this than the behavior of the Service Employees International Union around health care. SEIU’s former president, Andy Stern, dismissed single-payer as a Canadian import—while making common cause with then-Walmart CEO Lee Scott to try to craft a more distinctively “American” scheme. As one SEIU staffer told Liza Featherstone (“Labor Head Andy Stern Has Some Unusual Corporate Bedfellows”) [disclosure alert: she’s my wife], Stern “doesn’t hold social democracy in high regard.” Also, as Bob Fitch argued, unions typically take their cue on political matters from their employers. SEIU represents a lot of health care workers—and health care providers [so-called] would hate single-payer.

Yep.

Of course, the real health care providers are people, well, provide health care. Other than that, the analysis is spot on.

"Safety in numbers" cuts a lot of ways.

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Submitted by MontanaMaven on

on Wisconsin. Doug first interviews Glen Ford on Corey Booker and then John Nichols and Sam Ginden (labor activist and now professor) on the state of labor. The Ginden section is particularly relevant to what we have been discussing here. Ginden calls for some kinds of intermediate organizations like communities assemblies to teach history of labor, do comparative analysis e.g. with Greece, and class analysis. The Montreal movement has assemblies that started with students and now has branched out into neighborhoods. You can't have direct action, ground game, he says, without perspective. So that's where sites like this come in and people like us. We gather info and then can help with perspective. I had a discussion last night at the bar (radicalism often started in Irish bars. See "Faces Along the Bar" by Madelon Powers) about people's experience with unions. We should probably record them and get them on the air.
Have a movie night and show Paul Schrader's "Blue Collar". Then have a discussion.

The union movement must be about more than contracts and dues.

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