Okay: the biggest thing ya need to know about the big purple is its institutional goals.  Once you do, a lot of other things that seem strange, ominous, idealistic, evil or whatever will fall into place as making more sense.  SEIU has only two real goals, one short-term and one medium-term (once you get to long-term vision it breaks down; I'm for revolution, Andy's for social democracy, and the membership at large is as divided and ambiguous as any two million-strong chunk of the US working class today).  They are: <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="1" type="1"> <li class="MsoNormal" style="">Organize literally millions of workers in our three core industries (healthcare, public services and building services).  Rebuild the US labor movement to its fifties height of 35%-plus density by developing the same type of mass-scale industrial organizing among all jobs that physically cannot be taken outside the US; recreate the social contract around the service sector, involving a substantial redistribution of wealth, risk, security and economic power in a way that puts MUCH more money in the hands of the workers, be it in social wages like good free healthcare, social security like pensions, or just old-fashioned cold cash on the hour).  At some point achieving this goal will hinge on getting a national right to organize law (including in the south), breaking some juggernauts like Wal-Mart, and getting the other Change To Win unions to execute successfully.</li> </ol> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="2" type="1"> <li class="MsoNormal" style="">Use that base of millions, to turn the politics of the country around and set them marching in the other direction. </li> </ol> Beyond that there is nothing instiutional.  SEIU is as a whole committed to doing anything to achieve the first, and then the second, but nothing else.  Neither preventing nor initiating revolutionary change is an institutional goal of the group; while the national board has voted to take many positions like opposition to the Iraq war, at the end of the day, we are about number one up there.  The idea is, until we've arrested the decline of the labor movement and turned the tide in the US march to the far right a little bit, we won't be able to make a meaningful impact on other pressing national issues.  We're about organizing, first, second and last.  Until the movement's rebuilt.  Then the real battle begins! Now on goal #1, the elephant in the room that goes unnoticed during the debate on our merits is the fact that we're one of the only unions or organizations to make solid acheivements in the hundreds of thousands on this score.  I'll talk a little about the strategic perspective behind how and why we execute the way we do on this goal.   In most workplaces, there are small groups of workers who are ideologically either in favor of forming a union to bargain collectively against their boss or are against it.  They know how they feel already at the first meeting in the parking lot after shift--- maybe ten percent on each side.  The vast majority are in the middle.  These folks share in common that they have issues they want to improve about their work--- more money, better conditions for them or their patients/community, a voice, fairness, respect, health care, a right to retire, whatever.  But they also are afraid, because their employer is one of the most absolute dictatorial tyrants in the average US workers' life--- in the sense that they feed their family with their wages, and the employer has undisputed, 100% power over that paycheck.  So in the course of any organizing campaign, the employer uses that power to prevent unionization--- they lie, threaten, cheat, harass, intimidate, suspend and fire.  The law is with them on this--- while we have laws (insufficient ones, but the principle exists) to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace, there is no law to prevent its equivalent on a class basis.  Although theoretically you can fight it if they do certain over the top things, the NLR process is almost perfectly structured to aid all employers in their inevitable boss fight against unionization.  That untrammeled power, plus all the anti-union, anti-collectivist hegemony soaked into every level of our society adds up to the stunning defeat rate of workers trying to unionize over the past couple decades.  That in a nutshell is why we've fallen to 7% of the private sector and counting. So yeah yeah you know this already, get to the point Jim.  SEIU has concluded that trying to organize under the existing process is hopeless.  While you might occasionally pull off a victory here and there, where there is the kind of courageous leadership among and by workers that allows them to weather the boss fight and come out on the other side still swining.  But in today's economy, if you organize just one nursing home, in a chain of three dozen homes, you know what the workers will get in their contract?  Yeah, it ain't pretty.  These days you either organize the whole company or you get beaten coming and going. So since existing labor law and boss power makes it impossible to organize successfully on that scale, and reform of labor law is (sadly) a distant goal in a political climate far closer to passing a nationwide right to work law, what do you do?  In SEIU's case, we reform labor law--- with individual companies, one at a time.  You get an organizing rights agreement, or card check, which allows crazy things they have in other countries like ability to talk on premises with the workers, real restrictions on what they can say and do, etc etc.  We get these by waging 'comprehensive campaigns'--- basically a process of beating on a company in the press, courts, legislatures, workplaces, everything--- until they knuckle under and agree to a fair process for their workers to decide if they wanna unionize.  Once won, you extend organizing rights through leverage--- bargaining with a company in contract negotiations for more workers in the company to get organizing rights (UNITE-HERE's hotel workers rising is based around this), or getting an already-organized company institutionally invested in seeing their competitors also get organized, or extending organizing rights through a corporation gradually in a phased in agreement.   All that fancy stuff doesn't change any of the basics, though.  Card check or no, comprehensive campaign or old-fashioned one, at the end of the day organizing is just one hard conversation after another, one foot in front of the other, with and among workers, a million-fold.  That's the end I work on in Las Vegas.  I do nothing all day every day but talk to workers.  The hours are long but after so many years in the echo-chamber of the left, I'm actually pretty happy to put in a twelve hour day if it means I just talk to ordinary people about fucking up their boss.   This is already fairly long, but I wanted to take a crack at dispelling the left myths I notice a lot about SEIU.  I'll try to be brief.   <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="1" type="1"> <li class="MsoNormal" style="">"SEIU is against single-payer health care because to be for it would displease the employers of the workers in healthcare."  Based on some mighty thin 'let's google it' style research in Fitch's new book and advocated by folks like Doug and Yoshie, I must disagree.  They're already very, very, very displeased with us--- we're up in their friggin bottom line!  Whatever relationships exist do not out of mutual admiration, but cold blunt power relations in the company--- if you look at how much of a hospital chain is unionized yet you can ascertain how good a contract can be gotten with a good bargaining strategy, and how likely I am to be arrested if I go on the premises.  In fact, the thing HCA and UHS and CHW would like BEST is for SEIU to transform itself into a single-payer healthcare advocacy group, and STOP FUCKING WITH THEIR PROFITS!  Nah� SEIU is on record as being for single payer, of course.  The problem is that we don't do enough to make it happen.  Well, thing is, we're kinda working on another thing� organizing millions of people� its turning out tougher than we thought� so we're sort of prioritizing.  Goal # 1, remember?  However, the health and welfare fund we have is going bankrupt, and like every union in the country, we're institutionally in favor of single payer because then we could bargain about other cool stuff (like MONEY!) in contracts rather than have to strike just to get hospital workers access to family health care (talk about labor being denied the fruits of its labor).  However, the view inside the union is that the existing single-payer movement is too weak and tiny to get the job done.  And we ain't starting a whole new one while we have goal # 1 to take care of.  We're highly interested in getting some other potential actors with more power whose bottom lines are also affected by lack of single payer (like starbucks and GM, two entities we apparently have some mysterious high-level conversations with about what it would take to make single payer happen sometimes) to start pressing their shoulders to the grindstone, which is the reason for Andy's CEO-letter Doug didn't like.  But of course at the end of the day if and when it happens it won't be because of either Stern or Kerkorian or whathisname at Starbucks; it'll be because a movement of millions of working people has been organized to fight for and demand and win the right to healthcare.  I'm fully confident SEIU will be in on that when it happens, but to spend time complaining they're not making it happen right now is a little besides the point.  The leftists who know better how to make it happen should prove their point by doing so--- talk to workers, build coalitions, move the undecideds, put millions in the streets.  I'm for it politically, strategically, and personally--- because my organizing gig is the first time in my adult life I've had health insurance, and if it don't last, my ass is still gonna need a dentist once in awhile.</li><li class="MsoNormal" style="">"SEIU doesn't actually organize, it 'games the welfare system' and pretends welfare recipients are workers and gets to rep em."  Well� public sector and healthcare employees also used to be seen as 'not really workers' who shouldn't be allowed to unionize.  They were also predominantly poor, non-white, and female (as are these non-workers Fitch writes about).  They bucked the predictions and thank god they did, my mom was able to have me in a hospital because her city job had union health insurance.  No, these 'welfare workers', like public sector workers, bus drivers, and health aides, are involved in the production of social wages--- their sweat is every bit as salty despite not making a capitalist money in a factory.  It is true that they wield relatively little industrial power, and that their unionization proceeds in legalistic re-classifications by politicians we help put in office.  But among all the childcare workers in South Chicago I've talked to, I never met one who didn't work harder than your average lefty college professor (no offense intended to them!).  Right now these organizing gains are coming in by the tens of thousands, whereas executing comprehensive campaigns to unionize mass numbers in say private sector hospitals will take longer.  But at some point soon the 'blue state organizing' (as they call this gaming the system type stuff) will be tapped out; millions of very poor workers will have voted to join a movement of workers, will have been able to bargain for things like healthcare previously unimagineable in state-sponsored child care, and the organizing gains will be coming in much larger chunks after vicious battles over organizing rights with private-sector massive corporations.  Don't believe me?  Ask the folks in the crosshairs right now--- Advocate Health, Catholic Health Partners, various Texan janitorial firms, etc.</li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""> "Andy Stern� [anything]".  No meaningful discussion of SEIU can come from any sentence involving Stern's name.  In contrast to former union leaders like Reuther or Murray, Stern is remarkable in his singular lack of charisma and personal power.  The guy is not the dynamo driving for better or worse the engine.  That's how he's being presented to the media by the executive board these days (I hear gossip about how it comes from Dennis Rivera's belief that in our culture of celebrity, SEIU needs a celebrity� but who knows) to the media.  But really, Stern is just the highest-ranking administrator of a larger tendency or faction, that creates and drives what we inside the union call The Program.  This dominant tendency, of officers, organizing directors and leaders, has no formal name or organizational incarnation, but I could throw names at you left and right of who makes it up.  People like Callaghan, Keifer, Medina, Woodruff, Burger, Courtney, August, MacAlevey, Rosselli, Rivera� bla bla inside baseball gossip.  Seriously though, these people and their successes or failures at their different organizing campaigns and regional strategies define what SEIU is a thousand times more than any dumb idea Stern manages to wrap his lips around while the new york times kisses his ass.</li> </ol> Okay, that's all.  Hope the perspective from the belly of the beast helps make more sense of why SEIU does the strange things it sometimes does.  Nothing nefarious, my comrades, just a very particular strategic approach and a very singular lack of interest in talking to the left about it.  Which is a subject for another (shorter) post another day, and one in which I disagree with The Program on.   Jim