[lbo-talk] Andy Stern: dupe of Leslie Dach?

Jim Straub rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com
Wed Mar 28 11:42:47 PDT 2007


Hey, good restatement, with one key distinction: by more union members, stern's goal is not to grow the healthcare industry. It will grow beyond the labor markets capacity, for sure, no help needed. And right now a very small percentrage of hc workers nationwide are in unions. His goal of more union members is pursued rather by getting more companies to cave in and grant their workers organizing rights which, in practice, make them vastly more able to unionize successfully. Its no longer a situation where like all the steelworkers in the country are in uswa, and so uswa tries to pass legislation for the us to make more steel. Its rather a situation of getting us steel to grant organizing rights in 1936, after which one can be confident the vast majority of steelworkers will choose to be union, and then we can start remaking their jobs and society with the massive institution that results.

Also, I don't think his hc plan is to increase the number of people in employer-based plans exactly, just make laws that they all have to either provide hc or pay into a gov fund, have the gov provide it to many more people. Like the MA and CA plans.

I agree those plans are not a real longterm solution to hc. We do need single payer: a society that values and will fight for a new set of institutional arrangements where hc is not a commodity. Unfortunately the tide of history has been going the other direction in our country for decades but fuck it lets roll up our sleeves.

I also hate stern's positioning the union as this labor snuggle institution that can rationalize the costs of globalization for our domestic population and offer centrist technocratic solutions in partenrship with biz. Bleh. This worldview is held by really very few people in the chain of command at seiu--- I have the impression only stern and burger get hardons from saying this kind of shit. I wish seiu would consciously position itself as part of the left and work to rebuild the left. That said, its not hard to see why the stern team concludes the left is not a useful political formation for getting results anymore. Smaller- every year.

The radical left needs to do what the stern team has done- successfully build mass organizations capable of moving individuals on political questions, winning battles for gains, and institutionalizing and growing its power in concrete forms inside a very fucked up system. But not only is the left not doing that, I'd say its on page sixteen of its priority list, in between pupppetmaking and paper vending.

Here's the way I would rephrase your argument to make it perfectly blunt.
> Feel free to correct me if I've left out something essential:
>
> 1) Stern's top priority is more union jobs.
>
>
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