From: "Jim Straub" <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> Date: August 24, 2006 1:36:25 PM EDT To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: Stern: we are Americans and we don't like anybody else's I suppose a response from me is obligatory.
Unions are in the business of 'doing deals' with the owners and the enemies. All collective bargaining agreements are 'deals' or 'partnerships'; a temporary truce between two sides whose interests are different, if not always mutually exclusive. It has been my experience in the revolutionary left that many, many, many radicals cannot engage with a reality like that. I sympathize with this very much; my personal feelings towards bosses and owners as a class consist of hatred and disgust. But with unions, now and for the foreseeable future, there is no question about the fact that what you do is deals. The question about those deals is which to do, how, and why. Strategy, program, tactics, rhetoric, analysis, goal.
What we have found at SEIU is how to successfully organize hundreds of thousands of workers (a goal that has eluded others, on the left and not, who have tried in contemporary America) by bringing the spirit of struggle for collective bargaining into more aspects of organizing. This is often called 'bargain to organize'; to organize more folks and build larger power, in contract negotiations we bargain not only for more money, but for 'organizing rights' or card check at more of the corporations workplaces. If an employer gives up, rolls over, concedes to not fight their employees when they organize, SEIU then is willing to work cooperatively on areas where the members and the owners interests overlap; getting funding basically. If the head start agencies in west Virginia stop fighting and firing their workers when they organize, then SEIU can work with head start to try to stop the legislature from gutting the funding for the most successful social program for children in the history of the state.
Some of these relationships are good (as close to it as you get in the capitalist world at least), but most are not. The worst is with HCA; the biggest healthcare company in the world by a long shot, their CEO stands a good shot at being our next far-right president; they have two hundred some hospitals, SEIU reps the workers at about a dozen of them. That is very, very little power institutionally inside HCA. We try to bargain to organize with them and have a relationship, but of course, their attitude is fuck off, we can destroy you once we get national right to work laws passed by our CEO when he's president, fuck you, we will destroy you, even in the hospitals where you rep the workers if a seiu person sets foot on the property they'll be tackled and arrested.
SEIU has different tendencies with respect to a situation like that. We call it the difference between labor struggle and 'labor snuggle'. Stern and some folks prefer to do more and more toothless deals with bosses, de-emphasize militant and left demands and goals, and put a happy face on everything. Other tendencies--- mostly springing from the 1199 locals and people--- want to fight more, put a higher standard on our cooperation, do more bitterly fought straight up class war board elections, strike a lot, etc etc. The difference is one of degree, though. I disagree with stern far less than I disagree with folks in the self-appointed labor left who have no power, numbers, plan, and who are only good at writing college papers about labor. Stern, at the end of the day, has proven himself a capable administrator of a nationwide gearing up of organizing that has organized many hundreds of thousands of people already. I find his rhetoric in the wsj repulsive, but I find all pseudo-left rhetoric from labor geeks with no discipline or strategy for power far more repulsive. Andy is at least a part of the ongoing social struggle I am a part of here in vegas; labor notes, to put it mildly, is not.
The same thing applies to getting everyone healthcare. It is in the objective self interest of some sections of US capital to get everyone healthcare now. SEIU definitely wants a popular front with them. Some folks like Stern will pursue that by sucking a lot of corporate dick. There are many different messages and styles of rhetoric we move, for different audiences and goals. Speech is just another tactic. Others, like me and people from seiu quoted in the article, would rather seiu just helped rebuild a self conscious left to fight for healthcare for everyone period. But again, it's a question of degree.
Outside this, there are people who consider themselves the labor left whose rhetoric and tactics are not those of the popular front or incrementalism, but more trotskyist in orientation. Labor Notes, various old lefties who got real jobs to agitate, sect folks, etc. These folks would disagree with the entire proposition of unions doing deals of any kind with bosses. I respect the position. But, it is one that will leave them with what they have now: no power, no numbers, no members, no industrial strength, no millions of people. It is a position that will work best for what they use it now: editorials in left-wing publications to be read by other leftists. Some unions will pander to them, like the CWA and CNA, but make no mistake, these unions members will not tolerate them not doing deals and getting wage increases etc. The CNA is a fucking craft union poor workers are not allowed to join, fer chrissakes!
I am all for leftists with different ideas about how to organize and build power to do so separately in a spirit of solidaristic competition: if ten years from now this 'labor left' has succeeded in building a more militant movement of millions of workers who spurn capital and want to fight more assertively for socialism, I will have been proven happily wrong, and will join up humbled. Let the chips fall where they may.
But I am saddened that the labor left is not willing to build their own strategy for organizing millions around their own non-popular front program. Instead they just publish editorials that invariably consist of malevolent vitriol against SEIU or whoever they're hating on at the moment. It is unimpressive and indicative of why they are unable to build membership and power. If your idea of 'organizing' is to write screeds for other radicals to read, then I'm willing to be your union doesn't have a plan to, and won't, organize millions of workers industrially over the next decade. Does the OPEIU have this, people? Or labor notes? Ha ha ha. No. Labor geeks sit at a computer wanking each other off with imaginative rhetoric. SEIU members and organizers work long hours just talking to unorganized workers inside a structural strategy that has this year successfully organized more than 200,000 workers.
In ten years labor notes will still be leftists writing editorials for other leftists about unions in the manner renaissance fair enthusiasts write about the 16th century. In ten years SEIU will have organized millions of service industry workers, and will be using that to turn the country in the other direction.
George Jackson said get to the left of the people and pull. He didn't say, "get to the left of the people, then turn to the left, and run away from the people at top speed. Don't look back. Write articles for each other about how far and fast you can run away from the people to the left."