[lbo-talk] Contradictions of contemporary working class consciousness

[michael yates]

Joanna suggests we read Jane McAlevey's book on her time with the SEIU. She makes good points about the leadership of the union, and her chapters on negotiations are excellent. However, she fails to note in her book that at the very time the SEIU's leadership was doing all sorts of crappy things, she took a position on the SEIU Executive Board (the very group doing all those crappy things), appointed by Andy Stern, and a bit later ran on Stern's slate for a position on the Board. She violated the Landrum Griffin law, the law aimed at protecting the rank and file against a host of abuses by union leaders, when she tried to have the elected leadership of the Las Vegas local of which she was the appointed Director ousted and replaced by members whose outlook was closer to her own (many members liked what she wanted in the union, but many did not). The violation occurred when her slate illegally took money from two SEIU locals elsewhere in the country, including the one headed by the wretched Dave Regan, a man who personifies corrupt union leadership.

I reviewed McAlevey's book in the May 2013 Monthly Review. In preparation, I interviewed a dozen of so people who knew McAlevey, most of whom had worked with her in one capacity or another. I kept most of the negative stuff(other than her egotism) I knew about her tenure at SEIU out of the review and kept mainly to her good points. Still, however, there are many other and better books you can read about unions and their leaders. Bob Fitch's Solidarity for Sale goes overboard sometimes, especially in his criticisms of former Teamsters president Ron Carey, but the book is good. And Bob never engaged in the kind of willful forgetfulness McAlevey seems to embrace in her book. Probably because he didn't have a checkered history to forget. In my review, I also reviewed Gregg Shotwell's Autoworkers Under the Gun. This is a book by a rank and file autoworker that lays out the autocratic rule of the leaders of the UAW in a way that I think is superior to McAlevey's. 

Joanna might also be interested in Frank Bardacke's Trampling Out the Vintage and Bruce Neuburger's Lettuce Wars. Both books have a lot of interesting things to say about the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez. The shit Chavez did and authorized makes what SEIU and UAW leaders have done look mild by comparison.