http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53547.html
New labor plan: Nationwide protests By: Ben Smith April 21, 2011 02:31 PM EDT
In a major strategic shift, the Service Employees International Union plans to use its giant political operation to try to build a grass-roots movement of public protest and organization similar to the massive show of pro-labor support that overran Madison, Wis., last month.
The SEIU’s ambitious effort is a dramatic departure from its straightforward approach to the 2008 campaign. That year, the union pressed a single-minded and ultimately successful focus on getting Democrats to commit to a health care overhaul. Then it spent more than $32.5 million in independent expenditures to elect President Barack Obama.
SEIU President Mary Kay Henry acknowledged in an interview that the new strategy, which would include aggressive outreach to non-union members, is “a risk.”
“We felt like we were called in this moment to roll the dice and to think about how to use our members resources for the greatest hope for changing members lives,” she said. “I hope what people will see is more of what we all witnessed in Madison. ... more people in the streets making demands about what kind of America we want to see.”
The new plan, revealed in a planning document reviewed by POLITICO and in the subsequent interview with Henry, reflects the widening recognition by labor leaders that the shrinking national ranks of union members no longer carry the political heft they once did. The draft plan, titled “Fight for a Fair Economy” in what Henry said was a preliminary planning document, would reach outside union ranks to focus on “mobilizing underpaid, underemployed and unemployed workers” and “channeling anger about jobs into action for positive change.”
The plan does not revolve as centrally around the 2012 elections as the SEIU’s political program did in 2008, when it was the largest outside supporter of candidate Obama. It does, however, aim to organize public campaigns for economic issues around “national flash points” including this August’s recess, corporate shareholder meetings next spring, and the debates and conventions next year. Henry was elected last year with a promise to reorient the union, and some Democratic officials worry the change will mean a less intense focus on their party’s needs.
Not the case, said Henry, who insisted that SEIU will put similar resources into the coming elections as in the most recent presidential cycle. SEIU reported spending $85 million on politics in 2008, including the independent expenditure program and a massive mobilization of its own members.
“We intend to have as many resources in play around the presidential in 2012 as we did in 2008,” she said.
The plan — an earlier version of which was described by The Wall Street Journal in February —- anticipates beginning with a “17-city blitz” in which more than 1,500 SEIU staffers would knock on more than 3 million doors from Seattle to Miami in an effort to rally nonunion workers to their cause.
That part of the effort will focus on areas with an average income less than $35,000 annually, the document said.
Henry said the plan had broadened in the wake of what she described as the “uprising” in Wisconsin, a failed effort to block anti-union legislation and, then, to defeat a Supreme Court justice allied with Gov. Scott Walker.
“The people of Wisconsin stood up in numbers and ways that we’ve never seen before and it turbocharged our thinking about what was possible,” Henry said.
She said the Wisconsin battle had encouraged workers to increase their contributions to the SEIU’s political account and that the new campaign has added state-level organizing around conflicts in New Hampshire, Maine and elsewhere to its planned outreach.
The new SEIU plan is a shift for a union that had previously sought assidously to brand its political activity under its own purple flag and to ensure that it got credit for every move. This cycle, SEIU plans to work on campaigns under different names in different areas, building organizations in tandem with existing liberal groups around jobs, but also immigration and labor issues.
The plan comes at a moment of organizational weakness for the grass-roots left, after the community organizing group ACORN collapsed last year under intense conservative pressure. SEIU said it doesn’t plan to build a new organization on the ACORN model, but they are very likely to attempt to mobilize some of the urban poor toward national politics as ACORN did, while the local remnants of ACORN continue to focus largely on local political issues.
“2010 came and the Democrats had no ground game! Who was registering folks to vote last year?” asked former ACORN President Bertha Lewis. “Anything that unions do that goes outside of the workplace, that’s excellent.”
The SEIU plan makes no mention of voter registration, which ACORN had conducted on a large (and — critics on both sides said, sloppy) scale for the Democratic Party.
Henry said the effort would also aim, by 2013, to focus on more traditional union organizing for SEIU and to win rule changes that would allow for quicker union elections.
“We are recommitting ourselves as a union to reach out in cities and neighborhoods and states across the country to build organizations of unions and nonunion members to make demands,” Henry said.