From: Andrew English <aenglish1958 at yahoo.com> Date: May 12, 2008 6:40:28 PM EDT To: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> Subject: Re: life in SEIU Reply-To: aenglish1958 at yahoo.com
I read the LBO-talk list archives and I am amused by the contortions of the SEIU apologists. While I worked for SEIU, I never saw a more hypocritical, arrogant, cynical bunch. You should hear how they really talk behind closed doors.
Keep the following confidential - I have to be careful on how public I am, since I am looking for work. I'll never go back to SEIU, but they make a lot of deals with other unions in various jurisdictions, which then become complicit in their methods.
I worked mostly in the public sector in Colorado, on state employee organizing and Boulder county organizing, as a communication specialist.
YOUR EYES ONLY-- CONFIDENTIAL
SEIU staff
in my area were told to attack other unions as "needlessly adversarial" and "stuck in the 50s", while hyping SEIU as the "21st century" "pro-business" union. Staff were told that "we don't do representation", that workers with grievances were most likely lazy bad "disgruntled" workers who deserve to be fired, and that SEIU organizers should recruit "shiny happy workers" (they really said this) who liked their bosses as the leaders of the campaign.
Rather than organizing workers around their issues, they put the emphasis on good relations with the heads of departments.
They would run around asking employees to sign one pledge or survey card after another, but there was no interest in creating local chapters or structures where the workers could make their own decisions about actions.
I saw the same sort of things happen on a local government campaign as well.
This is how they actually talk in internal trainings and strategy sessions in the South/Southwest special organizing region (led by Eliseo Medina). This is the new orientation being promoted as "21st century" unionism.
After experiencing all this first hand, I am inclined to believe the worst that is said by the SEIU dissidents and distrust anything said by Stern loyalists.
I've worked as union staff for a different union before coming to SEIU, and was a rank and filer in a union factory before that. So I was not inclined to drink purple kool-aid just because some one said so. That was my undoing.
SEIU prefers to hire naive and inexperienced kids.
The kid they hired to replace me on the communications staff had a political gossip blog. Now he's running as a democratic candidate for county commissioner while he's on the SEIU payroll. Real commitment to the working class there.
SEIU talks about making politicians accountable. But they are only interested in deals that increase their dues base.
I know that SEIU not only failed to ensure accountability of politicians in Colorado, but actively attacked other unions for trying to do so.
A year ago we had a Governor, a State Senate leadership and a State House leadership all committed to passing a full collective bargaining law for state employees. The Democrats controlled all three for the first time in decades. It was an historic opportunity to expand worker rights in the public sector here.
SEIU, as part of its effort to curry favor with the business community, urged the governor to scrap the planned legislation for collective bargaining, and instead institute a weak executive order (which inevitably be scrapped by the next GOP governor, as has happened previously in Indiana, Missouri and Kentucky).
This executive order has no provisions for independent arbitration of the contract or arbitration of grievances. It explicitly states that there is no way to bargain for more economic benefits. It's basically what is called in the union movement "meet and confer" or "meet and beg." SEIU dresses it up as "21st century partnership" - typically SEIU will cover up a sell-out with lots of progressive-sounding buzzwords, that's their style.
Despite SEIU's backpeddling, the business community still reacted against even this weak order. So to further curry favor by undermining worker rights, SEIU supported a bill banning state employee strikes, amending an earlier statute guaranteeing the right to strike that was passed in the wake of the Ludlow massacre.
The Colorado Public Employee Alliance (affiliated with Communications Workers of America) has criticized these blatant sell-outs. See their web site: http://www.cpeacolorado.org/
CPEA-CWA attempted to amend the anti-strike bill to have it sunset with the executive order, but SEIU lobbyists opposed the CWA amendment. So SEIU gave up Colorado workers' right to strike for a temporary executive order that isn't even full collective bargaining. The strike ban will stay in the law when the executive order is revoked.
On the Boulder county campaign, the SEIU managers even went so far as to take the organizing leaflets to the county commissioners who were the employees' bosses for their approval before they could be printed. That the first time I've ever seen a campaign where
the boss had to approve the lit! The campaign ultimately failed because the commissioners did not agree to support unionization and SEIU wouldn't allow the organizers to agitate around worker issues until it was too late, and county management had killed the campaign. Which is what happens when the "organizing the boss" approach fails.
and I wrote this in an email to a labor friend...
Gov. Ritter and the Democratic leadership of both state houses were publicly committed to passing a full collective bargaining law for state employees.
In the wake of the corporate backlash against amending the Labor Peace Act (another broken Ritter promise), SEIU began urging Ritter to back off the collective bargaining pledge, seeking to make a weaker deal that would favor SEIU over other unions in Colorado. SEIU staff were told not to even say the words collective bargaining to workers, and I was told to edit footage of Ritter using the phrase at a CAPE gathering out of a video.
While the local leaders of AFSCME and AFT, along with Teamsters and UFCW, were still pressing for full collective bargaining, SEIU began urging Ritter to adopt its plan for "partnership." I was on SEIU conference calls were SEIU leaders complained about AFSCME and other unions for their "stupid" adherence to "adversarial" unionism and insistence on real collective bargaining.
The eventual executive order that resulted did not include arbitration of grievances or arbitration if the contract talks lead to impasse (which is the typical resolution in most states where public employees give up the right to strike, for example Iowa). And while the "partnership" union can bring up economic issues. the state is under no obligation to actually negotiate them. Really the "partnership" order amounts to what is called "meet and confer" (or "meet and beg") plus a lot of hot air rhetoric about "partnership."
State employee organizations were already able to represent employees under civil service. So except for reinstating dues deduction (which the Owens administration abolished, the act that lead to CAPE's collapse of an long standing independent association and its later affiliation with SEIU), Ritter has very done little for the unions in reality.
Internally SEIU staff was told to position the union as the "21st century" and "pro-business" union that was for "partnership" and against the old-fashioned, adversarial, anti-business unions. We were told that the business community would go along and embrace the partnership order if we presented ourselves this way. SEIU leader put a lot of effort into seeking support from business, even joining the chamber of commerce. (Didn't work - now big business is pushing a right-to-work ballot initiative.)
We were also told that SEIU "didn't do representation" and that in place of workplace reps we would use call centers, which was presented as a good thing. All other unions were attacked as "stupid dinosaurs" who didn't know how to organize. We were told that the role of the union was to help management get rid of "bad workers." And that we should seek out workers who were not "disgruntled" and liked management to be leaders in the SEIU campaign. SEIU organizers were told to put a lot of effort into seeking support from managers to gain favored access to workers.
SEIU wrote the executive order. They made sure there would be a high threshhold and small window for any other union to intervene, to prevent other unions from getting on the ballot (the same 30 percent and only two weeks after the first union filed).
Then they held closed door negotiations with the AFT and AFSCME international unions. The local affiliates were told it was to come to an agreement dividing the jurisdiction. In reality it was to create a forced top down merger into an organization that SEIU would control, and AFT and AFSCME tops would be paid off by getting 25 percent of the per capita each. The AFT and AFSCME affiliates knew nothing of this until the agreement was reached and they presented with a fiat accompli that they were told they had to accept or they would be cut off from support.
Under the merger agreement which established "Colorado WINS", the merged union is controlled by a committee of 4 apppointees of the international union presidents (2 from SEIU, 1 from AFT, 1 from AFSCME). None of the appointees live in Colorado, they all live in California or Washington DC. Day to day control over all aspects of the merged organization is vested in one high level SEIU bureaucrat who lives in Oakland. There's no convention until the summer of 2009 and even that can be postponed by the committee.
Internally SEIU staff was told that local election of leaders is a waste of time and its just more efficient for SEIU international to appoint leaders until a much later date (when they can rig the election in reality ... I can tell you already, Mitch Ackerman will be installed as leader, not a state employee).
AFSCME had only a few state employee members, about 100. Most of their Colorado membership is in local government. So the AFSCME Colorado council, having little to lose, went along with the forced merger.
AFT's affiliate, the Colorado Federation of Public Employees (CFPE), had about 800 members who were active state employees, and a long 10 year history of aggressively fighting for employee rights. It's also the only one of the state employee groups that was actually lead by a former state employee (President Jo Romero, a 20 year state employee) and her executive council of other state employees. CAPE, once it had been affiliated by SEIU, was totally dependent on the international union, and its executive director (a nice guy, but a figurehead with no real power) was a former state legislator.
The over a year CFPE had been begging AFT international to give it some support to fend off SEIU raiding of its members, and AFT had refused to increase their grant. Then came the revelation of the merger plan. AFT said join the SEIU-dominated merged group or lose your grant totally.
CFPE leaders also rejected the giving up of the fight for real collective bargaining law and the right to strike in exchange for the "partnership" executive order.
The CFPE disaffiliated with AFT and sought to join CWA, which is a union that emphasizes union democracy and workplace organizing (in distinction to the SEIU vision of appointed leaders and call centers). AFT sought to block the disaffiliation. In reaction CFPE leaders then dissolved their organization, and reformed as the new Colorado Public Employee Alliance-CWA.
CWA opposed the recent strike ban law. Seeing that it was going to pass, they proposed an amendment that it would sunset with the executive order if the executive order was revoked by a future administration (which will happen when the GOP regains the statehouse, just like it did in Missouri, Indiana and Kentucky a few years ago, where they had real collective bargaining at least). SEIU opposed the amendment. So know state employees are stuck with a "meet and beg" order that will eventually be revoked, and a permanent ban on strikes.
See the CPEA-CWA web site at http://www.cpeacolorado.org/
Jo Romero and state senator Tochtropp co-authored an op-ed in the Denver Post about their amendment. There's a link to it at the CPEA web site.
Jo Romero and the other leaders of CPEA are honest trade unionists. They could have gone along with the sell-out and been rewarded with paid positions in Colorado WINS. But they chose to stand up for workers and not give in. If you want to talk to real unionists in Colorado, talk to them.
END OF CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL
So anyway you can see what a bunch of phonies the Stern Gang really is. Not a pleasant bunch to work for.
-andy english