> And something I don't get about the Ohio affair... Steve Early says
> CHP cancelled the election that it essentially called. Steven
> Greenhouse, in his writeup of the Dustup in Dearborn in today's NYT,
> says that SEIU cancelled it. Which is it? And in any case, if SEIU's
> roots in Ohio were so deep, after all those years of organizing, why
> would the CNA's parachuting in at the last minute and chatting up
> some nurses "interfere" with the election? Early says that the
> employer cancelled the election because they wanted a clean
> endorsement of a company union and the CNA threatened that. The
> cancellation of the election sure fits with that analysis better than
> the SEIU's explanation, I gotta say.
1. It was something of a joint decision. Obviously, SEIU didn't want the vote to go forward because thanks to the CNA's unionbusting, workers would have voted against the union. Technically, the employer filed for the election, so I'm assuming it was CHP that canceled it with the NLRB. I could be wrong on this last point. But moreover, the idea that unions and bosses should never reach agreements is a silly one. What do you think a collective bargaining agreement is in the first place? Certainly much ink has been spilled by historians and others on what gains and what was lost in this legalistic system of union jurisprudence, one that Robert Zieger has written "tends to make workers spectators in their own drama." But this happened long ago and we're all prisoners and all that.
Sure, the CNA loves to sells the idea that they'd never sign a deal with the boss, certainly not one in private. But at the end of the day, they sign the same collective bargaining agreements and the same union election agreements with the boss that SEIU does. We're just more honest about it.
2. You simply don't get union organizing in today's political environment. I haven't been doing a good job explaining this. To build density, a union can't just go out and organize workers as the first step. Sure, a union might win a "hot shop" or two under a straight-up NLRB election campaign, but this is no strategy to build enough power to be able to raise standards in a given market, etc. So smart, sophisticated unions start off with a strategy to make the boss back off, to let a company's workers have a free and fair election. Without this, its far too easy to scare and intimidate workers into voting no.
So all the years of organizing in OH -- thus far -- was not to build committee in each CHP hospital in the state, with the idea that developing worker leadership in each unit would allow the union to build strong majorities to weather a boss campaign in an NLRB election. Sure SEIU had many CHP workers in motion, but as part of SEIU's "Corporate Social Responsibility" (CSR) campaign, whose goal it was to prevent CHP from engaging in a host of bad business practices, including preventing their workers from having a free and fair election. As I still work for SEIU, our legal department tell me I've got to be sure I accurately characterize what these campaigns are about. Suffice it to say, the decision to agree to a free and fair union election was not one CHP reached easily. So we didn't build committee in each and every CHP hospital, because the goal of the campaign at this point was to make the boss back off, not to build the union on the shop floor (which without the CNA's intervention would have come during the contract campaign phase).
3. I know how satisfying it can be for some on the left to adhere to lurid stories of betrayal by counterrevolutionary forces. Unfortunately, this narrative doesn't fit the facts in Ohio. You must resist the lazy temptation to fall back on it. It doesn't give you pause to see the CNA characterize their own agreement with Tenet as a sweetheart deal? It certainly should.
Oh yeah, SEIU has 85,000 RNs as members. More than the CNA. If you don't think that this is a good thing, and that they'd be better off with no union at all than SEIU, you've totally taken leave of your political senses.