I know the situation with the union busting they did in ohio very, very, closely. It is so far over the line and such a dangerous precedent for a craft union to set I wholeheartedly support hitting the cna back as hard as possible, hopefully with as little damage to their actual rank n file members as possible. But hard. Then settle this thing and have the respective parties go their separate ways and compete and see who's strategy turns out to work and whose doesn't, and just not fuck each others shit up.
The rhetoric involved in this is only gonna get worse, the fight dirtier. I imagine seiu sees dealing with the cna as a priority, because your whole strategy gets fucked up, if you fight companies for years to get a code of conduct on organizing rights out of them, and they finally knuckle under, but then during the election a competitor craft union can step in and run the same thing as a boss fight normally would be, well you're back at square one despite ten years of fighting the shit out of that company.
There's plenty of great people in LN. there's also a bunch of silly labor nerds. Lot of grey area between those two things too. I think they've got a great history. But they're very wrong about this. And their own record of actual success in the existing real world, is exceedingly slim. I'm sorry but its true. they can't win. They're not gonna rebuild the labor movement. They'll make great contributions in many ways and I wish em the best. Count myself in their ranks even on many many issues. But they've spun too deep in their own myths, downloaded from the trotskyist fantasy archive, to ever address the difficulties faced in actually organizing and winning and rebuilding on a massive scale.
SEIU and Unite here, on the other hand. I have plenty to criticize. I disagree on many things. Clearly they have their own problems. But at the end of the day, they have success and numbers and power and material gains, where other unions have much smaller gains if any and other actors (like LN) have only rhetoric and analysis and mimeographed newsletters to jerk each other off to. Not to say their strategy doesn't have its problems, inherent contradictions, areas improvement is badly needed, etc etc etc. But at the end of the day, the people who have put density first and waged corporate campaigns to get organizing rights have been able to win on a massive scale in hte private sector where nobody else has. That means something.
Why doesn't the left care about results. Numbers. Real things you can put your hands on. Why is success or failure never an evaluative tool on the left? I don't get it. It's weird.
Doug, tell me honestly: do you believe LN people can rebuild the labor movement up away from the 7% of the private sector workforce it currently comprises? Do you believe they can organize, literally, hundreds of thousands of workers per year every year and grow and win and get stronger and change this country?
Maybe you don't believe seiu and unite here can go much further with their current strategy, or think it compromises too much. Fair enough. But theirs is the only example that exists of success at the scale needed. That fact towers over our bloviating like a gigantic period ending the meaningful debate.