I've got to say, Kaplan's article on all the SEIU controversies seems to be by far the single best piece written on the subject. (disclosure: I was interviewed for it and quoted once or twice). She does what no other left commentator has done on the issue: she actually asked a number of in-depth questions, got the back story, learned about the workers and fights involved in Ohio and elsewhere. She hardly spares stern from harsh criticism, but there's an enthusiasm in her piece for actual facts about actual working peoples' lives, experiences and organizations. It seems absolutely amazing to me that in dozens of left diatribes by outside observers, Kaplan is the first (and so far, only) one to actually learn about the years of struggle between 1199 and CHP in Ohio, in the wake of the boss fight the Lorain nurses faced when they first unionized in '99 and the subsequent comprehensive campaign (including worker committees in dozens of hospitals and Ohio towns) against CHP that I worked on and Doug doubted actually took place. I would be curious what someone like Doug thinks of the article, and if it makes you question how informed or not you really were on the issue when you were calling seiu a company union and expressing such faith that the CNA's actions were justified. Many people have had much to say about SEIU lately, and the dialogue tended to get a bit shrill and non-comprehending between the different sides, but in light of this article might it be possible to revisit the subject with a bit more attention to facts and a bit less hyperbole?
Not to say that the previous level of discourse on the issue wasn't somehow superior to Kaplan's investigative reporting--- like, when that one dude claimed SEIU was in a conspiracy with Fox business news and said we should lynch Andy Stern because his union supported compromise immigration legislation. Yeah, that was great stuff.
The piece by Lichtenstein was very good too, I thought. Nobody had anything to say about that one either, except that Doug offered that SEIU was 'insane' to think that a House and Senate with large dem majorities is more likely to pass pro-worker labor law than a republican one.
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> The Nation ? June 16, 2008
> <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080616/kaplan>
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> Labor's Growing Pains
> by ESTHER KAPLAN
>
> The biggest union feud since the AFL-CIO split three years ago, some
> would say, began in Ohio. The way Dave Regan tells it, the Service
> Employees union (SEIU) first began its effort to organize Catholic
> hospitals there in the small city of Lorain, just west of Cleveland,
> in 1999. Regan is president of a union that spans Ohio, Kentucky and
> West Virginia, one of SEIU's newly merged megalocals at the heart of
> the international union's ambitious plans for turning around labor's
> decline. The 500 or so nurses at the facility faced, he recalls, a
> "classic, textbook, very intense, very nasty election environment."
> The hospital hired antiunion consultants and campaigned aggressively
> against unionization, pulling in nurses for mandatory staff meetings,
> as well as for intimidating one-on-ones with their supervisors.
> According to one organizer, nuns serving as hospital administrators
> even hinted to the nurses that voting union was a sin.