> Jim, I'll concede that Esther's piece is more balanced than anything
> I've said, but it's a lot harder on SEIU than anything you've ever
> conceded either. The stuff on the California single payer and
> staffing bill fights is very damaging to SEIU, as is the Roselli-UHW
> stuff.
Thanks for posting this -- too busy with convention stuff to read the 10+ pages yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
> And as I recall you and
> other pro-SEIU listmembers rejected criticisms of the employer
> agreements; they come off rather badly in the article.
Some are bad and some are good; the Devil is in the details and the political context in which they are produced -- that is, did the union give up too much, or did it force the employer into something it otherwise would never have agreed to? I'm eager to see how specific she is in her critique.
> She also
> reports that more than half of SEIU's growth comes from deals with
> politicians; as I recall, SEIU apologists squealed at Bob Fitch's
> characterization of these as payback for campaign contributions, but
> it's looking more and more like Fitch had a point.
Who were these apologists? And this is a rather cynical interpretation of union members using their resources to elect pro-worker politicians to office, no? Of course, we must not forget that for Fitch homecare isn't real work, right Doug?
> So I'll concede
> that I was unfair on Ohio (though I'm still mystified about how all
> this effort evaporated in three days of CNA mischief), if you concede
> the points I've just listed.
Tried to explain offlist why such support could evaporate. Also, I'm sure Jim is more familiar with the ground campaign than I, but in my understanding we didn't build committees in all the hospitals that were to vote in the first go-round. Also, for a contested NLRB election organizers like to have approximately 10% of the bargaining unit as active members of the organizing committee. Don't think that the CHP committee came close to meeting this standard -- the point was to get workers in motion to support the goal of getting CHP to agree to a free and fair election, not to be able to weather a unionbusting campaign.
FYI there was a minor skirmish with the FMPR outside of SEIU's convention in Puerto Rico this morning. I eagerly await the breathless condemnation of the FMPR's actions from the Labor Notes crew. :)