SEIU-Backed Hotel Invasion The Purple Punch-Out in Dearborn By STEVE EARLY
A rent-a-mob of rowdy, punch-throwing demonstrators burst into Labor Notes' biennial labor conference in Dearborn, Michigan, last Saturday night. When it was over, the local cops had been called in, one demonstrator had collapsed and died and SIEU's chieftain Andy Stern had etched himself another benchmark for intolerance.
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Just before all of these brave folks took the stage in the Hyatt's banquet hall, jammed to capacity with nearly 900 people--the SEIU's unregistered conference visitors got off their buses and began to "picket" outside the hotel. They were transported to Dearborn-by their local union handlers, not to participate in any of the free- wheeling Labor Notes debates, but rather to protest one additional banquet speaker-the scheduled keynoter--California Nurses Association (CNA) director Rose Ann DeMoro. Due to CNA "security concerns," DeMoro was, by early on Saturday, already an announced "no-show" at the dinner. (She did end up sending her greetings and thanks to Labor Notes, via a short video that was played at the banquet.) As a vocal new addition to the AFL-CIO executive council, DeMoro was originally invited last Fall to speak about CNA's exemplary work on behalf of single-payer health insurance and California's first-in-the-nation nurse-patient staffing ratios. She was also asked to explain why CNA is so critical of labor-management "partnership" schemes in health care-a longtime target of Labor Notes itself.
Since that invitation, however, organizers and RN supporters of CNA's National Nurses Organizing Committee (MMOC) have clashed bitterly with SEIU in non-union hospitals run by the Catholic Healthcare Partners (CHP) of Ohio. After several years of "corporate campaigning," SEIU persuaded CHP hospital management to petition the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a representation election in February involving 8,000 of its employees-a step usually taken by unions themselves. Only SEIU was scheduled to be on the ballot but with no apparent showing of union authorization cards (the usual indication of worker support for unionization or any particular union), RN organizers working for CNA strongly objected to this deal- calling it a formula for "company unionism."
They proceeded to visit CHP hospitals to talk to nurses about joining CNA instead. In response to this competitive union intervention, CHP asked the NLRB to cancel what was supposed to have been a quick and quiet vote, involving the union that management apparently viewed as being more partnership-minded.
This, of course, infuriated SEIU District 1199-which covers Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky, not to mention its parent organization in Washington, which is headed by President Andy Stern, founder of the Change To Win (CTW) coalition. Over the last month, Stern and his large army of purple-jacketed staffers have unleashed a heavily- funded nationwide jihad against CNA, complete with fatwahs against anybody who still consorts with this "union-busting" outfit. Among the possible collateral damage targets of Stern's counter-offensive are AFL-CIO central labor councils around the country; there, he has directed SEIU local unions still affiliated with CLCs (under "solidarity charters" created after the 2005 AFL-CTW split) to stop paying dues until AFL-CIO President John Sweeney imposes sanctions on the CNA, one of his newest national affiliates. (Sweeney has pointed out, in response, that an established internal procedure for settling such disputes would have been available to SEIU, if Stern hadn't led SEIU and six other unions out of the federation three years ago to form CTW.)
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Several leaders of the pack wore purple bandanas to conceal their faces; others started pushing, shoving, and throwing punches when their path was blocked by the linked arms of a hastily assembled but experienced group of Labor Notes marshals (among them, veterans of many past encounters with far more formidable Teamster goon squads). Casualties suffered on the LN side included a retired auto worker and longtime socialist activist Diane Feeley. Diane (who once studied to be a Catholic nun) ended up with a bloodied head and a wound requiring stitches. Earlier in the day, her "union-busting" activities had included taking two busloads of conference attendees to the nearby UAW picketline at American Axle, where she once worked herself. On the SEIU side, the skirmish may have exacted a more serious toll. After the cops arrived and the repelled purple invaders were boarding their busses to leave the hotel, this reporter and other witnesses saw a heavy-set African-American protestor, who had collapsed on the ground, being moved onto a stretcher by police and EMTs. On Sunday, SEIU's Michigan local briefly posted an obit for one of its home care worker members-David Smith. Before this message was taken down, it informed Smith's co-workers (in rather chilling fashion) that "he passed away during a rally to give healthcare workers the right to organize in Ohio."
How much better might it have been if Smith's union had paid for him and others on the busses to register and attend the Labor Notes conference, rather than just try to disrupt it? At one well-attended session earlier on Saturday that I chaired, "top-down" organizing rights deals -- including the SEIU-CHP arrangement in Ohio -- were, in fact, discussed and often heatedly debated. A crowd that included SEIU District 1199ers (part of a delegation of Stern loyalists who actually registered for the conference), nurses from the NNOC, SEIU and Teamster dissidents, UNITE-HERE and CWA organizers spent several hours trying to assess the appropriateness of negotiated trade offs between "organizing rights" and "contract standards" in a number of industries. The panel had been provocatively titled, "Neutrality Agreements and Organizing Deals: Salvation or Sell-Out?" After it, most people probably left concluding that the reality of organizing rights agreements lies somewhere in between. As one SEIU observer- from the dissident United Healthcare Workers (UHW)--reported: "Many participants, who can fairly be described as members of the labor left and generally suspicious of top union leaders, were actually very sympathetic to the SEIU's grievance against CNA surrounding the events in Ohio." But by "bum-rushing" the banquet instead of participating in the conference, Stern's "purple army"-Ohio/Michigan division, quickly dissipated any residual sympathy it might have had regarding this issue and many others--in Dearborn and elsewhere.