AMY GOODMAN: Well, at the same time as the Democratic primary was taking place, the Service Employees International Union was holding its national convention in San Juan. The SEIU has some 1.7 million members and is organized labor's biggest and most vocal backer of Barack Obama.. As we've reported before, there's a major internal battle going on within SEIU. Union President Andy Stern is facing growing internal criticism that he's seeking to increase the union size and the leadership's power at the expense of rank-and-file members. Speaking on the convention floor in San Juan, Stern claimed he was decentralizing the union.
ANDREW STERN: In a union as complex, as complex and rapidly expanding as SEIU, we must decentralize our decision-making even more. Decisions once made by international leaders need to be made by our union's industry leaders, from local unions, closest to where the members work.
AMY GOODMAN: But dissident members of SEIU took to the floor on Monday in what's being described as the most contentious labor convention since Stern split the AFL-CIO in 2005. This is Maya Morris, a leader in SMART, the SEIU Member Activists for Reform Today, speaking on the convention floor.
MAYA MORRIS: Ironically, these proposals turn democracy and worker empowerment on its head. Therefore, I move to reject the proposal as it is, and I move to amend the proposal to include a set of principles, policies and programs that guarantee the right of elected rank-and-file members to participate at every level of contract negotiations. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Juan, talk about this split.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yeah, well, I actually got a chance to talk to many of the SEIU members, even though I did not have a chance to go to the convention. But they had about 5,000 people in Puerto Rico for this conference, so they had all the hotels, and I know quite a few of the leaders and members.
Clearly, there is a continuing battle going on in SEIU, and the focus really has been now the United Healthcare Workers-West in California, led by Sal Rosselli and who have been spearheading this rank-and- file movement calling for greater democracy. Stern and the leadership there have come down very hard on this movement. They did allow debate, because obviously the movement does not have a majority within the union, but it is significant that there's any kind of a sharp debate or a strong caucus now developing within SEIU.
And I think that there are fundamental issues now within SEIU over how do you define union growth and union democracy. And the reality is that SEIU has increasingly become a more centralized union in the way it operates, and it is increasingly, in terms of some critics, doing anything it can to grow, in terms of making arrangements or deals with political leaders to be able to expand membership in different parts of the country. So I think that this is an important or watershed moment, because the SEIU is leading the supposed reform movement within organized labor, when now the leaders of the reform movement are being challenged over the nature of their reform. And I think that this is the opening salvo in what's going to continue to be an ongoing battle.
AMY GOODMAN: I also want to talk about the teachers' union, but let's go to break, and then we'll come back. After that, we'll be joined by David Sirota. His new book is called The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington. And then we'll meet one of the Guantanamo protesters and find out about their sentences. This is Democracy Now! We'll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We're staying in Puerto Rico for a moment. The largest union in Puerto Rico, the teachers' union, is involved in a bitter struggle, where the SEIU sought to raid the union and get their members to arrange a deal with the governor to have their members join the SEIU. This is the president of the Puerto Rico teachers' union, Rafael Feliciano Hernandez, speaking at a press conference last week here in New York.
RAFAEL FELICIANO HERNANDEZ: We are asking to the SEIU opposition group to stop the Stern anti-democratic politics and to stop the attack of the SEIU union against the teachers' union in Puerto Rico. We are a rank-and-file union. We are a union that fights for our people. Not only do we fight for our teachers, we fight to develop a good educational system for all our people. And that is the history of Federacion de Maestros.
And I think that the convention is a good moment for the Federacion to develop any struggle against the SEIU direction, the Stern direction and the tactics that they are developing, but also the convention is a good moment to share with the SEIU delegates, the opposition sector of the SEIU delegates that thinks that the Stern politics is bad for the union, and we ask for solidarity, and we ask to stop the aggression of SEIU against our teachers and to our country, because the Federacion is a very important institution in Puerto Rico that is fighting with the communities in many areas. And I think that the alliance between the government, Dennis Rivera and SEIU is an imperialist attack against our country.
AMY GOODMAN: That's Puerto Rican teachers' union president, Rafael Hernandez. Juan?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Rafael Feliciano Hernandez, yeah. I think that the key thing here is that the teachers' union is the largest and most militant union in Puerto Rico and has always been, and the efforts of SEIU earlier this year when the teachers were in the middle of a major battle and a strike with the government to step in, in essence, and to try to take over or raid the leadership of the union, has created enormous reverberations throughout the labor movement in the United States, as well as in Latin America. I think, in fact, one of the most interesting things was that Stern and Dennis Rivera announced before the convention started that they are going to begin a new effort from Puerto Rico throughout Latin America to build ties between the SEIU to build global unions. So, in essence, what SEIU is trying to do by gaining control of the teachers' union and, in effect, the Puerto Rican labor movement is to then branch out into the rest of Latin America. Now, they insist that they're not going to do it in a way that will hurt the autonomy or the democracy of those unions, but the record has so far—has not been too good in that way.
And in fact, on Saturday, just as I was on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton covering that campaign, there was a major confrontation at the SEIU convention center, where the teachers' union demonstrated, and they were then confronted. The SEIU called in the police. The Puerto Rico's infamous Fuerza de Choque, the shock police that came in and confronted the teachers, beat quite a few of the teachers. And I think one policeman was injured in the confrontation that lasted a considerable amount of time. Several teachers were detained. I think one was eventually arrested to be charged with the assault on the police officer. But the fact that SEIU would have such a demonstration at its national convention shows that the contradictions are growing there.
And also, Barack Obama was scheduled to be a keynote speaker at the convention but then decided at the last moment not to attend.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you know why?
JUAN GONZALEZ: No, it's not clear. His campaign just said he wasn't going to Puerto Rico, so—but he was listed as the keynote speaker at the SEIU convention. I have a feeling it had something to do with the teachers' demonstration, but I don't know that for sure.
AMY GOODMAN: And for our radio listeners, we are showing on the television screen the video of the confrontation, and you can go to our website at democracynow.org to see what happened with the Puerto Rican teachers' union and the police who were confronting them.