Well, during a new organizing campaign, you don't go into larger political questions than the campaign itself. I do draw a line in confronting racism, sexism or homophobia that is voiced by workers during the process (the standard line is "seiu is one of the most diverse unions in the contry, and [gay manager's gayness/ philipina nurses suck because they speak their own language sometimes/ don't want to be in same union as those illegal mexicans/ suzy's lazy, all the blacks are] is not the issue most workers doing this have, their issue is management."). If you take on anything besides the campaign itself while organizing, you will loose.
But in the ongoing organizing of building the union ("internal organizing"--- mostly what I did this year) political education is in some sense non-stop. That is, almost everything you do from that point forward involves moving a message about broader things in some sense. Only a very few union with left leadership and established power get into 'popular education' as I think you probabl mean it--- workshops on mumia or the war, broader visions for things society should do or value instead, economics night classes for the members (mike yates here used to do one of those courses for the members of my old local in ohio!). But moving progressive people on progressive message on a number of issues was tied to most of the internal organizing I worked in this year.
And I doubt you value the most basic type of political education as much as someone outside new york does--- moving workers to not extend support to politicians who are their extreme enemies. In a world where the biggest political divides are between green-leninist-anarchist-leftyliberal, it's easy to forget that for most people it's R-D, and that millions upon millions upon millions of our proletariat are all about the Rs. More than just an unpleasant task in the popular-front, I see mobilizing workers political support to the center party against the extreme-right party as a very fulfilling and meaningful step in the right direction away from fascism.
Another example of education would be how back at my old local, we helped sponsor a delegation of iraqi union activists, and sponsored some public meetings for them, and also arranged a series of meetings between them and shop floor leaders up in cleveland. Or an example here would be the education we did with our big bargaining teams this year on the assault on retirement security in the US, and the math and politics of pensions, 401ks, etc.
But in general, the education is usually tied to a short or medium term goal of the shop, local or national union. There is some broader stuff than this. But I wish there were a lot more.
Of course for there to be more seiu would have to in some sense institutionally decide to join the traditional american left, and I just can't see that happen soon. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061130/bd595eef/attachment.htm>