[lbo-talk] SEIU

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Jul 30 15:28:03 PDT 2006


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



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