Labor wars, Blog ads, Democracy, and SEIU/CNA

Many readers are probably mystified about the explosion of competing union ads on a host of major blogs, especially since the ads involve groups going after each other, with national SEIU at war with two other groups (CNA/NNOC and UHW, a dissident local within SEIU).  This posting provides a guide to what’s been going on and what is at stake.

Labor unions aren’t a major feature of most blogs, even though unions are perhaps the single force most able to move working class voters.   In 2004, gun owners favored Bush by a 27% margin, but union gun owners favored Kerry by a 12% margin; Bush had a 25% margin among white men, but Kerry had a 21% margin among union white men.  Progressive Democrats clearly need to take an interest in what’s happening inside labor unions.

In terms of membership growth, political clout, and ability to mobilize members, SEIU is perhaps the most successful union in the United States today, growing rapidly as other unions have shrunk.  SEIU reports it has doubled its membership in the last dozen years; if all unions had done so we’d be talking about labor’s amazing success and growing power.

Any time an individual or organization gets held up as a model of success it invites others to launch criticisms, and that’s certainly been the case for SEIU, which may simultaneously be the most admired and the most criticized of all unions today.  Those criticisms focus above all on SEIU’s top-down staff-driven model, and the consequent lack of democracy, combined with the argument that this sometimes leads SEIU to collaborate with employers.

These criticisms, and the heat of the exchanges, have escalated dramatically in recent weeks.  SEIU thought it had arranged a streamlined route to unionization for 8000 workers at Catholic Healthcare Partners in Ohio; the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), the California Nurses Association’s vehicle to expand to a national presence, leafleted employees to oppose the deal, leading SEIU to end its effort.  SEIU has accused NNOC of union-busting, and NNOC has accused SEIU of trying to form a sweetheart behind-the-scenes deal with the boss.  At almost the same time, the leader of one of the largest locals in SEIU, Sal Roselli of United Healthcare Workers, a 140,000 member California local (which thus has more members than all but a dozen or so national unions), broke with the national leadership of SEIU, and the local has been leading a battle to democratize SEIU.  All of this leads to lots of blog ads, among other things.

During the past two weeks I was both on a conference call with top SEIU leaders giving their perspective on the issues, and a few days later was on the front-line with locked arms trying to keep bus loads of SEIU members from disrupting the Labor Notes conference.  (The person with whom I linked arms was knocked down, had blood streaming down her face, and had to go to the emergency room.)  At the conference I also attended three sessions featuring heated exchanges between representatives from SEIU and NNOC.  This is my perspective both on the larger issues and about the current disputes.  I hope to inject a little reality, and a little analysis, into a debate that seems to be dividing into two sides talking past each other.

WINNING UNION REPRESENTATION

In theory, the official way for workers to win union representation is to petition the government to conduct an election.  If 30 percent of workers ask for an election, the National Labor Relations Board in theory must conduct a speedy, fair, unbiased, election; during the election process (and thereafter) no one may be penalized for supporting the union.

In practice, that process has been totally subverted and is now a travesty.  Imagine an election in which you were running for governor against an entrenched office holder, but:
• You were not permitted in the state
• The governor could round people up and force them to attend meetings where they watched movies and heard speeches about how awful you were
• Your supporters could speak up for you, but if they did so they could be harassed by the police, their taxes could be raised, and their kids could be given a hard time at school
• If supporters nonetheless campaigned for you, and did so effectively, the governor could deport them from the state.  You and your supporters could then petition the federal government to get your supporters reinstated, but your supporters would have to remain out-of-state until the governor exhausted all appeals – which could take three years.  If your supporter won the case, he or she would receive almost no reward and the governor almost no penalty – no matter how often the governor had been convicted of wrongful deportation.
• The governor could also have the police round-up any of your supporters, bring them to police headquarters, and grill them about their preferences in the election.  In theory no one could be penalized for speaking their minds, but in case of dispute about what took place (did your supporter use foul language, attack the police), it would be your supporter’s word against the police.

If those conditions prevailed in a gubernatorial election, how fair would we call the election?  And yet those are almost exactly the conditions that apply to elections for union representation:  union staff may not enter the worksite, the employer can force all workers to attend "captive audience" meetings as often as needed, workers who speak up for the union can be discriminated against or fired, even if workers are reinstated there is essentially no compensation to the employee and no penalty to the employer, and workers can be grilled by supervisors in "one-on-one" (or two, three, four on one) meetings.

These rules – won by employers through the years in a series of small steps – make a mockery of the NLRB election process.  As a result, very few workers come into unions through this official process; about 80 percent of the workers who join unions today do so through some alternative process.  The most common alternative is for the union, together with community groups, to put pressure on the employer to accept a neutrality agreement, and to agree that instead of an election, if a majority of workers sign cards stating that they want to be in the union, the employer will accept that as evidence that the union has majority support.  In these circumstances, it is far more difficult to get the employer to accept a neutrality agreement than it is, once the agreement is won, to persuade workers to join the union.

A DEAL WITH THE BOSS?

The charge has been made that in order to get the Ohio fast-track to a union election, SEIU made a deal with the boss, Catholic Healthcare Partners.  My response is:  Of course they did, and so what?  A hundred years ago, more-or-less, the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, refused to make any deal with employers.  It was always a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, and even if the employer took it today, the Wobblies refused to sign an agreement to honor those terms; they reserved the right to go out on strike tomorrow, and to fight the employer to the death at any time.  For good or ill, these days ALL unions that I know of make a deal with the boss:  they sign a collective bargaining agreement and have a process for handling grievances.  

The question is not "did the union make a deal with the boss?" but rather "what kind of deal did it make?"  The deal that is made generally depends on power:  how many workers are committed to the cause, how militant are they willing to be, what strategic position do they have, what kinds of allies do the workers have among other unions, community groups, faith-based communities, and the general public?  It depends as well on the union’s militance, leadership, and willingness to take risks.  One of the best sessions at the Labor Notes conference focused on neutrality agreements:  in what circumstances do they make sense?  What sorts of conditions should unions resist no matter what, and what sorts of conditions are an acceptable compromise?  What sorts of leverage enable us to win better agreements?  SEIU’s seminal Los Angeles Justice for Janitors campaign involved not just a strike, but hundreds of people tying up traffic in downtown Los Angeles during rush hour, police beating workers, and the threat of re-doubled disruption.  Under that pressure the boss, that is, building owners, made a deal.

One crucial issue in evaluating any neutrality agreement, or any other agreement with an employer, is:  Does this build workers’ power, or undercut workers’ power?  What does it do in the short-run, and what does it do for the long-run?  An agreement can provide immediate benefits, but at the expense of undercutting workers’ long-run ability to build more power.  Alternatively, a deal can look bad for the short-run but position workers and the union to make major gains at a later time.  

If our purpose is to build long-term power, one central issue is union density.  If 95 percent of an industry is non-union, the 5 percent that is union is very limited in what it can win, because any agreement that involves substantial extra costs to the employer may force the employer into bankruptcy.  (Obviously, employers will insist this is the case whether or not it’s true – but sometimes it really is true.)  In this circumstance, an employer will fight the union as if it were a matter of life-and-death – because it might be.  On the other hand, if the industry is 95 percent unionized, employers have less worry that a union gain will put them at a competitive disadvantage.  A study of the hotel industry showed that being in a union always improved workers’ conditions, but if the city had a low union density the improvement was quite modest; if the city had a union density of 80 percent or above, having a union made a huge difference.  Given this, it might sometimes be sensible for a union to accept a not-very-good contract in order to increase union density, as part of a long-run strategy to raise density in an area, knowing that the greatest gains would come only with high density.  

I don’t have an adequate basis for judging the deal that SEIU reached in Ohio with Catholic Healthcare Partners.  It may have been a terrible deal that undercut workers’ power for the long-run, and that was made simply to enable the union to bring in more dues-paying members.  Or it may have been a brilliant move to build long-run power, positioning workers and the union for tremendous gains at a later time.  The deal might have helped build SEIU’s power, but done so by undercutting worker power.  The deal might have been made precisely to keep out a more militant union – the National Nurses Organizing Committee, for example – and this might be why the employer was willing to reach agreement.  It’s crucially important how we evaluate the deal that was reached, and the debate over this should be intense and heated, but I don’t have an adequate base for deciding, and I have my doubts about many of the authoritative proclamations made on the basis of minimal information.  My point here is simply that no easy formula enables us to decide.  

That said, the signs about the Ohio deal are not good.  Although SEIU argues it had a three-year long on-going campaign, most others do not seem to feel this campaign was particularly visible, nor that it involved many workers.  One of the participants at the Labor Notes conference was a bedside nurse from Ohio who reported she had been working with SEIU for three years, that the CEO of her hospital said they’d have a union over his dead body, and that they had won a vote through aggressive action.  She was absolutely genuine, but was misinformed about the steps that had led to the election, and put things in personal terms, never talking about other workers or an organizing committee.  The agreement that was reached called for a flash election, to be over and done with very quickly.  The election came as a result of an unusual request by the employer, a provision of labor law that most union organizers had rarely if ever encountered, and which does not require any showing that workers support the union.  The election called for a decision on SEIU or no union.  As soon as another union (CNA/NNOC) appeared and urged workers to vote no, SEIU abandoned the vote; normally you’d expect to have enough worker support that union supporters would ignore any such Johnny-come-lately call.  

I think it also seems fair to say, as SEIU does, that it appears CNA/NNOC came to Ohio – where it had no particular base, and had done little significant organizing – simply in order to keep the workers from joining SEIU.  (Some NNOC people I talked to argued that NNOC was building strength in Ohio, but this was in terms of having at least "some" membership in hospitals across the state.)  NNOC’s rationale appears to have been:  better no union than to join SEIU under these terms.  Even though we, NNOC, are not ready to organize Ohio, even though we could put our resources into campaigns targeting unorganized workers in many other locations, we will make a push in Ohio just to keep these workers from joining SEIU.  Although the California Nurses Association has a justified reputation as one of the best unions, one with high member involvement willing and able to take strong action, NNOC’s Ohio campaign emphasized professionalism, that nurses don’t belong in a union with other workers and should have a union that promotes only nurses’ concerns.  An SEIU nurse at the Labor Notes conference quite reasonably responded:  If the patient’s room is dirty, if the linens aren’t cleaned properly, if there is a problem with dietary, that affects my patients and my ability to provide care; I want those people in my union, although I also want – and have – a separate caucus for nurses.  Just as it is reasonable to ask whether the Ohio campaign would have built SEIU power by undercutting worker power, so too it is reasonable to ask whether the NNOC campaign was aimed to increase NNOC’s leverage vis-à-vis SEIU, even if doing so left the workers worse off.  At the Labor Notes conference, people from NNOC were cautious, but in effect admitted that they went to Ohio not to organize workers, but to prevent SEIU from doing so, arguing that this kind of SEIU deal would be terrible for long-run worker power.

WHO DECIDES?

The decision about whether or not the Ohio agreement was a good deal shouldn’t be made by pro-union academic experts.  Or by union staff.  Or even by elected leaders.  The decision has to be made by the working class.  Most immediately that means the workers at the affected facilities, but ultimately it should also mean their brothers and sisters at places-not-yet-organized, and even their brothers and sisters who do not yet have jobs.

And this leads to the second prong of the challenge to SEIU’s national leadership.  Sal Roselli, the long-time head of a huge SEIU healthcare local in California, United Healthcare Workers (UHW), resigned his position on the SEIU Executive Board and raised serious issues about the course SEIU is taking and the level of democracy inside SEIU.  The UHW local has more than 140,000 members, more than most national unions, and argues its membership has increased more rapidly than the rest of SEIU.  Until Roselli challenged the national SEIU leadership no issue had been raised about problems in the union; after the challenge, Andy Stern, the national president of SEIU, sent a letter charging "unethical conduct" and "financial irregularities," and national SEIU has also challenged UHW’s election of delegates to the SEIU convention (which apparently did violate fairness and labor law).  Many people – both inside and outside of UHW – expect the local to be put into trusteeship, with Stern appointing a trustee who can rule for 18 months without the consent of the membership.  

The trusteeship is expected to come in June, after SEIU’s national convention.  The trusteeship, if it comes, will send a message that no dissent will be tolerated in SEIU – and that would be a tragedy for the workers, for the labor movement, and (although the national leadership may not realize it) for SEIU itself.  Meaningful democracy is made almost impossible through SEIU’s creation of mega-locals and its repeated use of trusteeships, with the appointed trustee coming from outside the local but ending up elected to be the new leader of the union.  This leads to the proliferation of former staffers who become "elected" leaders even though they have never worked a day at the jobs held by union members.  The UHW case implies that even a mega-local with an organizing approach and demonstrated success (UHW claims to be the fastest growing local in SEIU) will be trusteed if it disagrees with SEIU’s national leadership.

UHW members have raised issues both about national SEIU’s policies and about its democratic functioning.  UHW argues that Stern took control of negotiations away from them, and negotiated minimal raises in order to cut a deal with the employer making it easier to organize new members.  UHW believes that unions won’t appeal to members unless they can show that they win significant advances for workers, and that SEIU is too willing to sacrifice the interests of current workers in hopes of gaining future members.  The charge is that in effect, Andy Stern has cut a deal with the employer not to insist on substantial pay raises, in exchange for the right to sign up new members. SEIU nationally responds that UHW is willing to put the interests of current workers ahead of the unorganized, that UHW would cut a deal with the employer for a current pay increase and in exchange accept conditions that made it harder to bring in the unorganized.  This, SEIU nationally says, is "just us" unionism (instead of justice unionism), making unions into a narrow interest group concerned about the interests of the small number of people currently in unions, instead of the interests of all workers, including those not yet in a union.

THE LABOR NOTES CONFERENCE

These issues will undoubtedly be fought out for some time to come, but one place they came to a head was the Labor Notes conference April 11 to 13 in Michigan.  Labor Notes has long been the advocate of a rank-and-file approach, and of democratic unions; its conference provides a place where all views can be debated in a host of stimulating panels, and a handful of plenary sessions that bring everyone together.  

At numerous panels representatives of NNOC and SEIU went at it, sometimes engaging the issues and sometimes simply expressing anger.  Representatives of UHW were also there in force, condemning NNOC for its interference in Ohio but also objecting to undemocratic practices in SEIU nationally.  I attended some of the most heated sessions, and talked to friends who were at the others.  Some SEIU participants apparently attended solely to disrupt any presentation by NNOC, and essentially tried to shout down NNOC speakers, which seems totally inappropriate.  In other cases SEIU’s participation raised important issues, including, for example, a challenge to NNOC’s exclusive focus on a privileged part of the hospital workforce, nurses.  National SEIU did not, however, use the Labor Notes conference – perhaps the best forum for debate inside the labor movement – as an opportunity to have large numbers of articulate participants fully engage the debate and make the case for SEIU’s position.  That’s a serious loss.

Labor Notes had invited Rose Ann DeMoro, head of the California Nurses Association (which formed NNOC in an effort to make its organization national), to give the speech at Saturday night’s banquet.  The banquet was sold out – the room’s dinner capacity was 840 at tables, so chairs were put at the back for those who couldn’t attend the dinner but wanted to hear the program.  Just a day or so before the event Rose Ann DeMoro canceled and sent a video instead, because of her fear that her speech would be disrupted.

Labor Notes had people at the doors to the banquet, checking that people had badges (since space was sold out), but also to provide security in case of disruption.  About 15 minutes after the banquet’s announced beginning, a large group of SEIU members appeared at the hotel doors nearest the banquet hall, banging to get in.  (SEIU claims 800; my estimate is less than 200; people arrived on seven buses, so SEIU’s number seems impossible.)  I went to friends at the banquet doors, arguing that the spirit of Labor Notes was that we should let the SEIU members in and permit them to march through the hall if they would agree to leave thereafter, or stay and listen; my friends argued the SEIU members were only there to disrupt the gathering and should be kept out.  

Two minutes later an inside supporter opened the doors for the SEIU members and they swarmed inside, with the clear intention of disrupting the event.  Suddenly wiser, I found myself locking arms to hold back the crowd.  One of the two people I locked arms with, Dianne Feeley, a retired auto worker, was the worst casualty on the Labor Notes side – she had copious amounts of blood streaming down her head as a result of being knocked off her feet and hitting her head on a table.  Our line formed at the end of the entryway, perhaps ten feet from the doors, but the line did not take shape until perhaps ten to twenty of the most militant SEIU participants had made their way past us and to the doors.  Sometimes I could see what was happening behind us at the doors, sometimes my attention was entirely on the large crowd pushing against me and trying to break through the line.

I therefore can’t speak to the scrum at the doors themselves where I am told some of the Labor Notes people were punched in SEIU’s desperate effort to break through the doors into the banquet hall.  Where I was, although the confrontation was physical and involved a lot of pushing and shoving, with force the order of the day, no one tried to hurt anyone else.  We had our arms linked together, and thus could not have defended ourselves had anyone wished to punch us.  No one made any remotest effort to do so, although they did push hard and try to break through the line or slip under it, and none of that was gentle.  Dianne Feeley, the retired auto worker who was injured, believes the woman who knocked her over did not intend to do so, much less intend to have Dianne hit her head.  (The woman who knocked Dianne over saw Dianne later and asked if Dianne was all right.)

Some conference participants speculated that the SEIU participants had been paid to be there, and others argued that the participants did not really know why they were there.  My own take – and I was chest to chest and face to face with a lot of different SEIU people during the scrum – is that they were good union members who had a reasonable sense of what they were doing, although they were missing many nuances.  The SEIU crowd had more women then men (mostly African American), I would say, and many of the women were happy to shove hard to try to push through, although the twenty or so who slipped by us and got to the door, where the pushing was most aggressive, were almost entirely men.  Some of the SEIU members had children with them, a clear indication (to my mind) that they had not come intending violence.  Although they may not have understood the subtleties of Labor Notes and its on-going policy of providing a forum to debate labor movement issues, the SEIU participants did seem to be clear that they were there to confront union busting, that they hated union busting, and that they were determined to take a stand against it.  (One chant that energized the crowd was "Union busting is disgusting.")  Moreover, my faculty colleagues often get confused on points that I, as a union leader, would swear the leadership has repeatedly communicated and made every effort to make clear; why should SEIU members do better than University of Massachusetts faculty?  Although there may have been exceptions, the people I saw, and pushed, and was pushed by, all seemed like people I’d be glad to have in my union and whose energy, determination, and commitment I admired – they had, after all, given up a Saturday night for this.  (I only wish my faculty union’s members were willing to get on a bus to go disrupt a speech by our opponents; a week earlier I had tried unsuccessfully to persuade my fellow members to protest at a speech by the governor.)  

I don’t know what SEIU’s intentions were, nor what the members were told, and that information is relevant to evaluating the action.  I also don’t know how the SEIU members felt after the action, also relevant to any evaluation of what they did.  SEIU has charged that CNA security were involved in the scuffle, but I saw absolutely no evidence of that.  If SEIU participants threw punches, and far more so if there was an advance plan-authorization to do so, that is totally unacceptable, and choosing the Labor Notes banquet is at best peculiar, given that this is the main fund raising event for an organization that offers room for debate to all sides.  I suspect SEIU would have been less willing to confront DeMoro at a Teamsters convention.

The NNOC substitute speaker, and the leading NNOC conference participants, left the banquet, according to their press release in fear of their safety.  On the front lines I did not find the event frightening, but I know I’m a guy, and I know that in general I don’t mind militance and physical confrontation.  It may well be that from inside the banquet hall – where people could hear yelling and banging but could not see what was going on – the event seemed frightening, and it may be that others would have found what I saw frightening.  To my mind, if your right to speak is challenged it seems important to hold your ground and not be silenced.  Not to do so invites your opponents to show up again.

When SEIU or other unions take such actions directed at employers, we applaud.  If SEIU believes that union leaders have intentionally undercut workers’ attempt to form a union, should we be surprised that they treat the offending union leaders much as they would treat an employer – that is, confronting them, chanting at them, trying to embarrass them and disrupt their ability to engage in business as usual.  

Is more of this in labor’s future?  I’m tempted to say:  I hope so!  I certainly don’t want to encourage a macho approach and it would be a huge mistake to substitute punches for debate, but disruptive demonstrations have a place in a movement.  The labor movement has been much too bland, much too tame, for much too long.  It’s good to see people on different sides getting passionate.  Although many deplore competition between unions, and although competition will involve some excesses and destructive actions, the last many years of "no raid" agreements has produced continuous union decline.  The 1930s were a period of intense labor competition.  Despite the bitter disagreements between the AFL and CIO, with a famous fight on the floor of the convention, LOTS of name calling, and employers favoring one union over another, the labor movement grew rapidly.  Physical confrontations within the house of labor should be avoided, and there are some downsides and negatives to competition and conflict, but the conflict also stimulates debate, creates new initiatives, and may well offer workers a real (democratic) choice of union alternatives.  I’d rather see that continue than have us go back to everyone-agrees-but-we-aren’t-going-anywhere.