Ken Silverstein
November 29, 2007
No labor leader in America gets better press than Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which according to its website “is the fastest-growing union in North America, with 1.9 million members in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico.” Stern is routinely portrayed as a progressive union leader who is fighting for the rights of workers and revitalizing the long-declining labor movement in America (surely a worthy and important task).
Yet Stern is currently presiding over what some within the union describe as a power grab, and one that could squelch opposition to some controversial deals he and his allies have supported (like a provision, ultimately shot down by internal opposition, that would have imposed a seven-year ban on strikes by Tenet Healthcare union employees). On Friday morning Stern is seeking to push through a deal that would severely weaken his chief critic inside the SEIU, in the name of “restructuring.”
“Stern is essentially seeking to take a public entity private,” one person familiar with the situation told me.
The chief battleground is California, where SEIU has around 650,000 members, 40 percent of its total membership. Back in 2004 there were 38 SEIU locals in California but that number was subsequently reduced to 20. This has occurred because in 2006 Stern and his allies pushed through a statewide reorganization that merged numerous locals into bigger entities, whose membership, critics say, was gerrymandered. Stern then handpicked the leaders at the newly formed unions, installing close allies as officers.
Some of those picked by Stern had been elected at the smaller, pre- merged entities, and some held unelected staff positions. But in essence, Stern was able to stack the deck with loyalists who were not voted on by the new merged local memberships.
In doing this, Stern exploited a legal loophole. When a new union local is organized, it has no board of directors. Because someone needs to be in charge, federal law stipulates that the parent union can appoint officers for up to three years, by which time elections must be held. Stern is treating the merged locals–which have large memberships, up to 130,000 in one case–as entirely new entities, even though many of the individual locals have existed for many decades.
Major policy issues are also at stake. Stern’s primary in-house critic has been United Healthcare Workers West leader Sal Rosselli. He is currently head of the state council of the SEIU in California, and has opposed deals reached by Stern and his allies that Rosselli believes limit workers’ rights.
The San Francisco Weekly has reported on this and ran an excerpt of a letter that Rosselli sent to SEIU members:
Some in the national SEIU are negotiating an agreement with nursing home employers—in California and nationally—and have repeatedly excluded UHW nursing home members and elected representatives from the process. These agreements could restrict our nursing home members’ voices on the job and be implemented without affected members even having the right to vote.
There’s also a suspicion among some SEIU dissidents that Stern is planning to take a relatively conciliatory stance towards Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed health-care reforms. Opponents–and the state council under Rosselli’s leadership has been quite critical– believe the reforms would shift the primary burden of health care costs to individuals as opposed to employers.
Stern’s 2006 reorganization package included a provision that abolishes the old California state council and creates a new one. On Friday, in a conference call scheduled for 7:30 AM California time– the score of state local leaders are set to vote for president of the new council. It’s virtually a foregone conclusion that Rosselli–whose four-year term would have run into 2009–is going to lose to Annelle Grajeda, a Stern ally. (I’ll explain why in a moment.)
Stern’s supporters offer a number of rationales for the steps he has taken. The leaders he has appointed at the new locals will have to face elections down the road, they say. And the vote for the head of the new state council is democratic, so what’s the big deal?
Steve Trossman, an SEIU spokesman, said the whole reorganization package grew out of the national convention in 2004. “There were hearings about it all over the state and any question that could have been asked was asked. The whole process was above-board and then it was put to a vote.” Trossman emphasized that hundreds of thousands of members were eligible in the 2006 balloting and that the reorganization was approved by 86 percent. “The whole point was to build stronger, more effective locals… and to enhance the voice of our members and the working people of California,” he said.
As to Stern’s appointment of local leaders and charges of cronyism, Trossman said that Stern “selected the logical people to head the [newly created] locals.” For example, Grajeda had come from the largest single local within the ones that merged to form newly- created Local 721.
But critics tell a different story. “Why should Stern decide who the ‘logical’ leaders are?” asked the source I cited above. “Why didn’t he let the members of the new locals decide who the ‘logical’ leaders should be in a vote? There are union mergers all the time and the normal course is to schedule a special election to select the leadership. There was no need to have locals headed by appointees named [by Stern].”
Another person with whom I spoke scoffed at the notion that the plan’s origins were democratic, saying that SEIU conventions are even more scripted and controlled from the top than political conventions. After the 2004 convention, this person said, the SEIU’s national leadership sold the reorganization on the basis of creating bigger and more powerful locals through merger. That Stern would appoint the new local leadership was barely discussed and certainly not something that members were broadly aware of. This person said that mergers could certainly make sense at times, but in this case the whole process has been “inherently wrong” and “political.”
Furthermore, complex rules excluded roughly one-third of the state’s 650,000 SEIU members from voting on the reorganization in 2006, including all but 3,000 of the 135,000 in Rosselli’s local. Incidentally, Trossman is right that the merger did pass by a wide margin and that hundreds of thousand of people were eligible to vote, but only about 16 percent of the total membership actually took part in the balloting.
Stern’s appointees will have to face election, but by then they will have the advantage of incumbency and will have been able to promote themselves heavily through their holding of office. (Just like politicians do.) Finally, it’s basically a foregone conclusion that Grajeda will win because voting is weighted and she only needs support from the six local union heads that Stern has handpicked since the 2006 reorganization.
This story was reported and written with Rachel Heinrichs
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Los Angeles Times - November 30, 2007
Union power struggle may shape California healthcare overhaul SEIU factions seen as more conciliatory to the governor's plan are pressing for the ouster of the state council's president. By Jordan Rau Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
SACRAMENTO — Leaders of California's largest and most influential healthcare union are embroiled in an intense power struggle that could affect the shape of any deal lawmakers reach this year to overhaul the state's healthcare system.
The SEIU California State Council -- the umbrella group for the local chapters of the Service Employees International Union -- has been one of the biggest pockets of resistance to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt to require all Californians to obtain medical insurance. With 600,000 members across California and tremendous influence among Democratic legislators, SEIU can make or break any deal negotiated by Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders.
While enthusiastic about the goal of securing coverage for the 5 million Californians who now are uninsured, Sal Rosselli -- the president of an Oakland-based SEIU local as well as the state council -- has insisted that any deal fully protect middle-class residents from having to pay premiums they may not be able to afford or forcing them to buy bare-bones policies.
But through a labor fight that has been more than a year in the making, Rosselli may be removed as president of the state council as early as this morning, two years before his term is scheduled to expire, according to union officials.
Many of the issues involved in the action have more to do with internal union politics about labor's direction than with the healthcare battle, but the leadership change could have substantial consequences. The potential new leaders are more eager than Rosselli and longtime Executive Director Dean Tipps to cut a deal with Schwarzenegger -- in part to help advance their campaign to overhaul healthcare nationally.
That has been the view of Andy Stern, the president of the international union, who has personally expressed to the governor's office his frustration with the stance of California SEIU leaders, according to people familiar with the discussions.
"Our experience in SEIU and across the country is you don't have to have the perfect bullet to slay the dragon," said Tyrone Freeman, president of the Los Angeles-based SEIU chapter representing 170,000 home care and nursing home workers.
Asked about the move to change leadership, Freeman said Rosselli had often acted based on "his ideological belief about how things ought to happen with the de facto inclusion of other leaders."
He disputed assertions of Rosselli's allies that Stern was masterminding the leadership change. "It would be more of a story of Tyrone Freeman and Sal Rosselli," Freeman said. "I have a very big local that is bigger than his. We've got impact, and we just believe things ought to be done differently."
The president of the state council is elected by the local chapters. Rosselli declined to discuss the leadership fight, saying in a brief telephone interview, "The agreements I've made with people is to try to deal with these things internally."
Rosselli said it would be a major mistake to approve Schwarzenegger's proposed healthcare overhaul without adding substantial protections for families -- a view in line with those other major California labor leaders, including Art Pulaski, the leader of the California Labor Federation.
Rosselli said that whatever deal is passed will have to go on the ballot next year, and said SEIU's extensive polling and past experiences with similar fights in California have convinced him that Schwarzenegger's version will not pass.
"People won't vote for something they can't afford or something that's not defined," he said, referring to the provisions in Schwarzenegger's plan that would assign state officials the role of deciding what benefits insurers would have to include in plans they offered to people.
Stern was on a flight to Los Angeles on Thursday and not available for comment, his office said. He is scheduled to appear at a downtown luncheon of the Asia Society, a nonprofit dedicated to improving relations between people in the United States and Asia. A spokesman said Stern was not engineering the leadership change.
The leadership fight comes after more than a year of struggles and reorganizations of SEIU in California, part of a larger battle over the direction of the union everywhere. Stern has been pushing to centralize union actions on the theory that local unions have lost much of their leverage to negotiate labor deals with national and global corporations, according to Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor history professor at UC Santa Barbara.
But some local unions have bristled at his approach. They also complained that Stern has been too willing to sign weak labor agreements with companies in order to organize their workers. Rosselli and Stern clashed directly over what labor agreements should be struck with nursing home chains, according to an article in the Bay Area's SF Weekly last April.
The difference has extended to politics as well, where California's SEIU leadership in Sacramento has taken a much more aggressive posture than the national SEIU has in Washington under Stern.
As part of Stern's plan, several California SEIU locals consolidated last year, and Stern appointed interim leaders of the new chapters.
The presidents of the locals have moved to establish a new state council and elect a new president, something that Rosselli's allies call a veiled attempt to dislodge him from his leadership role and part of Stern's broader movement to wrest power from the local unions.
Council presidents serve four-year terms, so were it not for this move Rosselli would remain at the helm until 2009. If he is replaced, Rosselli would continue to serve as president of his 130,000 member local and remain on the state council.The council is scheduled to convene Tuesday, but late Thursday, Annelle Grajeda, the only candidate to replace Rosselli, called a state council meeting to be conducted via a conference call at 7:30 this morning, according to an SEIU e-mail obtained by The Times.
Grajeda, whom Stern elevated to interim president of a Southern California local representing public service workers, is said to favor a more conciliatory approach to healthcare negotiations than Rosselli's. Before her elevation she had not been elected to the presidency of a local but had served as the top staff member for a decade.