From: "Jim Straub" <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> Date: August 1, 2006 12:29:23 PM EDT To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: SEIU (Doug Henwood)
I take no umbrage with the income of professors; indeed I think they should be paid more, and have no illusions that the academy's comforts are monetary in nature. What I find annoying about academic labor geeks is that most have a connection to real flesh and blood workers comparable only to the connection participants at a renaissance fair have to the real 16th century. An imaginary one of fantasy. These professional criticizers' work would be immeasurably enriched by being embedded in the real social life of ordinary working people; my own radical beliefs and rhetoric were tempered severly (hard to believe, maybe) by having to actually talk about them with thousands of workers who did not necessarily agree. For instance, Yoshie Furahashie (I know I can't seem to let this go, but its worth holding onto) uses the fine name of MR to make false and offensive claims about a union local I used to work at, which she has lived near for a decade but never crossed paths with in any way (nor would she be welcome at a picket line in the future I suspect), and based her claims on what? A grad students paper in southern california. Yeah, fuck college labor geeks.
Contrast that to the immeasurably better work by people like Mike Davis, Susan Erem, Robin Kelley, David Simon, Liza Featherstone, Eric Mann or Susan Faludi. By actually talking with and being embedded in the lives of those they write on, authors like them manage to strike a better balance in the tensions involvede in understanding and respectfully analyzing and critiquing the actions of different social actors involved in their issues. Even Barbara Ehrenreich leaves tony Charlottesville to live the life she plans to write about for a year.
True, Fitch has been both a dues-paying laborer and an organizer for CWA. That's why I expected so much from his book (and I think his one on NYC in a classic). But while his historical scholarship on building trades corruption is rigorous and well-argued, in talking about SEIU he makes deeply offensive claims (like that our whole strategy is to drive down employment standards--- sure, Bob, material realities in the existing service sector versus the existing manufacturing sector have nothing to do with this; I wish he would explain to the terrified single mothers I took unfair labor practice statements from last night that they were not taking a stand for their co-workers but rather pawns in a plot to drive down wages nationwide). And by the evidence of the book itself, he talks to far fewer service sector workers than he reads books about dead ironworkers. In one place, he paints a portrait of an seiu homecare worker--- by repeating what a LA times story says about the individual! Elsewhere, he finally speaks approvingly of a single worker who's strategy meets his standards, and proposes we use that workers' ideas to rebuild the labor movement. Who is it? Why, a French flight attendendant. Yes, Fitch argues in favor of right to work laws (which I actually organize under here in nevada--- no, they don't help), and that scabbing on dues is 'democracy', on the basis of a French airline steward.
You wanna talk about "strategies that can't help rebuild private sector unions"? Well, ya got the seiu model you disdain, which is actually organizing more than a hundred thousand private sector workers this year--- or a sentence by a French flight attendendant. If you're a CNA doug, which union are you joining?
But about Stern's annoying health care ideas. I aagree. He also randomly mouthed off to the new york times last year that maybe we weren't against school vouchers; fuck him, we are, and he should be disciplined for incorrectly stating the position of our 2 million members. But a quote from stern does not a policy make; like I've said here before, he does not indivdually have the kind of power in seiu that say reuther, chavez or hoffa had in theirs. In SEIU like any masss organization there are competing tendencies; we call ours "labor snuggle" versus "labor struggle". SEIU does not have always take the courageous or visionary stands I would like. But they take many of them. And they execute superbly at the bottom line goal everything else is icing on--- organizing on a mass scale to rebuild the labor movement. You might be right that we will eventually endorse some shitty state plan that isn't single payer. But one can be a socialist, and fight for incremental changes short of socialism, without losing your red card right? I am certain that the fight on health care will never be over till we have single payer, but I am also certain we will not win that battle this year or next. I am also sure the fight over wages won't end till we get rid of captialism altogether, but for right now, the sub-fight is over COLAs and percentage raises workers immediately want. At a time of profound historic weakness, incrementalism and popular frontism is the order of the day. Those who disagree should work in the IWW and UE, and may we all succeed.
But one more thing, about stern's op ed. Is the problem that he talks to ceos, or that the ceos don't talk to him? In fact Doug, it is the case that many ceos do talk to us. From starbucks ro GM, there are plenty of companies who see single payer in their material self-interest; that is a popular front my rotting teeth can get behind! And companies in our industries, after being unionized to say 20% by us, while still full of hatred for us, often give up trying to crush the union entirely, and instead get leveraged by us to agree to organizing rights for the other 80% of their workers. We do do a lot of the old maxin, "punish your (temporary) enemies, reward your (temporary) friends". But which is the problem? That we leverage our power for organizing-rights relationships with some employers, or that other employers rebuff us?
I drone on. Apologies. Jim
On Jul 30, 2006, at 4:01 PM, Jim Straub wrote:
> No offense intended, Doug! Perhaps I'm indulging in some strategic
> snideness. But the specific professors I jab at are Fitch--- who
> believes
> home health aides are not 'really' workers (in a way that, presumably,
> college profs are); and Yoshie, who's made many offensive claims
> that are
> baldly false about a great seiu local I used to work for which she
> has lived
> down the street from for a decade and never met in any way.
First a clarification: Fitch is an adjunct and freelance writer who lives on a poverty-level income. Yoshie is a grad student who lives on roughly the same income. So these are not privileged people talking.
And Fitch's point about home health aides is that organizing them is very different from organizing workers with real private-sector employers: in Calif and Illinois, they won recognition from politicians who'd received campaign contributions from SEIU. This is hardly a model for organizing the service sector.
> SEIU is on the record as being for
> single payer.
You sure could have fooled me, given the nonsense that Stern has been spewing lately. As Adolph Reed says, Stern's vision of the labor movement seems to be as one giant human resources department. And before you denounce Adolph as some Ivy League professor, remember that he's spent much of the last decade trying to organize a Labor Party, a thankless and very non-elite task.
> I actually do not have a spare
> hour each day to devote to single-payer organizing.
No one expects you to. But how much money does SEIU have? And why is it expending human and financial resources on pay or play schemes, if time and money are so short?
> To win something that big takes more than it polling
> well (many building blocks of socialism poll well, which could not
> be won by
> any conceivable political alignment in the real world in the US
> today). But
> if it is so imminently acheivable, surely evil Andy Stern's truculence
> cannot slow down the existing left from winning it without the
> purple hordes
> joining in?
Organized labor still has oodles of resources, so how they expend them matters a lot. And if stuff polls well, it means you're not pissing in the wind trying to organize around it. If, instead, Stern writes op-eds in the WSJ appealing to CEOs, he's wasting his time, and that of anyone who sympathizes with the working class. Given the current balance of forces, CEOs don't need to give Stern the time of day, much less sign on to his program.
Doug