Re Doug: You know, in all my travels around SEIU, I've never heard a person whose opinion I trust say a single sincere positive thing about Tyrone Freeman. So I guess I'm not surprised to see these corruption charges. My understanding is that Stern has gotten allied to Freeman bc Freeman is the main counterweight to UHW out in CA. And altho any corruption in the union is despicable, hearing about this case cheers me, because it makes it less likely UHW can get sliced up by Freeman's local. But I actually don't know much about Freeman, despite the fact that I'm actually doing a temporary gig for the union right now in LA. I haven't met him around the office or anything.
A quibble: how on earth is our union 'stalinist'? That word means some pretty specific things, and as SEIU to my knowledge has no opinion on the various marxist minutae you people use to determine which flavor of marxist they are; and we do not kill millions of people; so how is the word 'stalinist' useful? Maybe it's as useful as when you called my local from Ohio a 'company union' because you were having fun making up facts about it before Esther Kaplan actually did a solid investigative piece for the Nation. I will grant that you can make a case for 'leninist'--- because SEIU's organizing departments practice chain of command and something like democratic centralism, they centralize resources and power, and they practice a pretty ruthless realpolitik in favor of advancing what they say are the goals of working people. That sounds similar to what I know of Leninism, but you have to add a bunch of corpses, or maybe a position paper on Hungary, to square the circle to 'stalinism'. No?
Here's a fun anecdote from planet earth regarding Stern: a friend of mine was telling me recently that while they were doing an NLRB election to organize a hospital in a small, blue-collar, conservative town, part of the boss' anti-union fight was to circulate fliers about how Andy Stern was a communist. My friend said something in the email like, "dealing with this stuff in the context of an organizing campaign with actual workers is a lot trickier than laughing uncontrollably and then saying, "He's not a communist, but we wish he was!".
> means to an end, while Stern seems to see it as an end in
> itself. But Sobatka is nevertheless always political because he tries
> to influence and shape political situations that benefit the
> membership, while Stern just wants to make the union a player.
Re Eric: This paragraph reminds me of an Onion headline: "Dan Quayle bravely denounces fictional character" (re the Murphy Brown thing). But in this case, you're comparing a fictional character to your mental cariacature of Andy Stern, which is just about as close to fictional.
Look, people know I have negative opinions toward Stern. But I don't think SEIU's detractors on the left grapple with the reality of the organization in a way that would make their criticisms useful or relevant. Let me try to fill in a little detail so at least haters can hate on reality. Stern is not a singular agent of power in the union. Rather, he is the media figurehead and titular officeholder who represents a bloc of leaders we can call the "Stern team" (that's what they call themselves). These people make up the large bulk of leaders in SEIU, they 70% agree on strategy for the most part, and the only thing they care about is results and number of workers organized.
Now, in US labor, the vast majority of unions have undergone catastrophic losses of power and members in the past three decades. These unions are run by the 'sobotkas' of the world you speak of. Straight up--- they have to a person failed to stop the rout in a very unfair fight. Only a few unions in the private sector have managed to grow or rebuild at all in that time, and of those, only a couple have on a national scale. Of those, the Stern team made SEIU the most successful. They did this through a relentless administrative reorganization of the union towards organizing new members. Although a majority of SEIU's gains in that time have been either through affiliations, the public sector or the quasi-public sector, a big chunk has been in the private sector--- lots of low-wage janitors, nurses aides, security guards and dietary workers, all over the country. Although some of those organizing gains came in hard-fought traditional NLRB campaigns, the largest and most strategically important has been through some form of neutrality arrangement with a company. This is because employer ruthlessness and crappy labor law allow bosses to exploit a workforce that is typically already somewhat divided, apathetic or conservative to usually defeat unionization.
ALL unions that have had substantial organizing wins in the private sector these days have used some version of getting neutrality from the boss--- from the CNA and CWA to UNITE HERE and UFCW. It always involves using some mixture of the carrot and stick to get employers to limit their boss fight. But SEIU has done the most of this type of neutrality dealing, and has clearly in some cases improvised in questionable ways in how it proceeds. This is natural--- 'wholesale organizing' as we call it is pretty new so the playbook and rulebook are both still being written, just as modern labor relations were still being figured out in the 40s. But that era of labor relations was decided in a time of intermittent mass rebellion by workers; today's organizing unions have a very different predicament, facing a workforce deeply politically and culturally divided, a united employing class, and a time when working-class losses are dealt with through consumer debt and multiple family incomes as opposed to the factory uprisings, shop-floor violence, urban revolts and regional populist crusades of the 30s.
Now, a good labor leader in my opinion sets these carrots and sticks in context for the membership and the public: as strategic measures in a conflict between workers and owners (I think John Wilhelm of HERE does the best at this, although there are others). This is where the Stern team, and specifically Andy Stern the individual, fail massively. Stern instead talks eagerly about only the carrots, and sets them instead in a post-class future-world he imagines has arrived. This I find deplorable. Worse still is the fact that some of his weird futuristic post-left, post-class ideas seem to exert ugly influence on our strategic direction. Seriously, the dude sometimes seems to want to make SEIU more like facebook and less like a union. These particular faults are, as far as I can tell, particular to Stern the individual--- although some other ugly incidents from our recent history, like the puerto Rican teachers union debacle, indicate that others in the leadership are losing their trade unionist ethical bearings as well.
On the other hand, people like Stern and Rivera have still executed for their members with an amazing and unmatched track record of success. So it's complicated. The sad reality is that Stern, despite all these things I hate about him, has increased workers power more than anyone on this list. He's also done bad things and he didn't do the good things alone--- the Stern team has a lot of different personalities on it and every single thing that happens in our union depends on working people bending their muscle and taking chances and making tough calls: from the worker I talked to three hours ago trying to decide whether or not to sign a union card all the way up to Scott Courtney and Mayee Crispin directing their little armies of leftist workaholic organizers in day to day operations; from a shop steward in a nursing home in canton ohio going out on leave to be an organizer and then an elected official of her local union to workers in las vegas having a brutal factional fight against each other because of an eclectic mix of strategic differences and personal conflicts.
All that said, at least you bravely denounced an interesting fictional character--- season two of the Wire is by far my favorite. :)