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ONCE AGAIN, WHERE DOES SEIU'S ANDY STERN HOPE TO TAKE THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT? (reprinted from Unity & Independence, November-December 2006) By ALAN BENJAMIN If you pick up a copy of a newspaper these days, you're bound to find in the business section an article about SEIU President Andy Stern and his frenetic drive to convince corporate America to forge a new "partnership" with the unions. On Oct. 5, for example, Bloomberg News Service ran an article titled, "Stern's Group Shows Slow Growth a Year After Split With AFL-CIO." The article reports that, "Stern has started talking to Wall Street firms, including New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Boston-based Thomas H. Lee Partners LP. The talks, Stern says, are devoted to building new relationships and changing old perceptions. "We are trying to say to them that we aren't here to make you uncompetitive," Stern said. "Let's at least have a conversation as opposed to us just showing up when you are trying to buy a company and beating the hell out of you and having you think we are a bunch of traditional union people who want to slow down progress." Could it be, as Stern writes, that these Wall Street speculators and merger sharks are promoting "progress?" Who in the labor movement could ever accept this absurd claim - a claim belied by the past 25 years of Wall Street-driven corporate downsizing, union-busting, job destruction, and offshoring? What Wall Street has done is to fuel the corporate cannibalizing of our country's industrial base, because that's what happens when they "buy" company after company. These Wall Street tycoons are the enemy of all working people. Any worker can tell you this. There is no common ground with them. And since when is it the job of the union to help make Wall Street "competitive?" "The new face of labor" On Oct. 15, the Chicago Tribune noted that, "Andy Stern is a union leader who talks like a management strategist. Some labor stalwarts call him a sell-out. A recent profile in Fortune labeled him 'the new face of labor'." One Fortune 500 CEO, Steve Burd from Safeway Corp., has in fact become a big fan of Stern's new-age "unionism." This is the same Burd who only a few years ago waged a multi-million-dollar effort to defeat a protracted grocery workers' strike in Southern California. An article published in the Nov. 4 San Francisco Chronicle describes Stern's full-court press to find a "solution" to the national healthcare crisis in the United States "that serves working people and American business alike," as Stern writes in a recent open letter to the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies. After Stern's open letter was published, Burd told an audience at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, "I could have written that!" What is Stern's proposal for healthcare? Don Bechler, coordinator of the Health Care For All-San Francisco coalition, sums it up: "Andy Stern wants Americans to switch to something like the Federal Employee Benefit Health Plan. This keeps the insurance companies and HMOs, the real swindlers, in the healthcare loop. This is unacceptable for all of us who advocate a single-payer system. But it's the reason someone like Burd is so supportive of Stern." Stern's "broad agenda" The San Francisco Chronicle article puts this discussion on healthcare in the larger context of Stern's strategic orientation. "Today," the Chronice reports, "the 55-year-old Stern has a broad agenda, laid out in a new book, 'A Country That Works: Getting American Back On Track.' Š Stern says that unions for too long sought confrontation rather than common ground. This has been Stern's mantra since July 2005 when he pulled his union out of the AFL-CIO to form a new labor federation, Change to Win. "'We led with, "The employer is the problem",' Stern told the Chronicle. 'When you lead with, "We understand you are in a competitive environment and there are things we can do",' you make workers partners rather than adversaries,' he said." "Stern learned about organized labor from people who had come before him -- union men from an industrial era 'when they were fighting for their lives, in many cases.' Class conflict permeated his world. "The thinking was, 'The employer is the problem, whatever he is doing is not truthful,' Stern said." Stern on the AFL-CIO split Stern's book is, indeed, very revealing. For one thing, it explains the real reasons behind the split in the AFL-CIO. Stern writes that the split was necessary to "organize new members into our unions" and to "build greater union density." It was precisely for this reason that many progressive-minded unionists gave Stern the benefit of the doubt when Stern organized the split in the trade union movement 18 months ago. But the overriding reason for the split - the one that overshadows all others and that has nothing whatsoever progressive about it - comes through loud and clear in Stern's book. This is how Stern puts it: "The break [in the AFL-CIO] was necessary Š because of the failure on the part of the AFL-CIO to modernize its strategic approaches to employers in order to take into account their competitive business needs. Š Unions are overdue for substantial change. They need to find ways to persuade business leaders to work in partnership with them. Š "Like most traditional labor leaders, I had been trained to be distrustful of and antagonistic with 'the boss,' and I brought that attitude toward the relationship. The distrust can be rightfully earned, but this class-struggle mentality was a vestige of an earlier, rough era of industrial unions, and our new service-sector union had adopted it without much strategic examination. Š "Understanding the many issues confronting our employers - rising benefit costs, outsourcing, globalization, decreased public funding for their services, non-union competitors with lower costs and more flexibility - gave us insight into how to enhance each individual employer's competitiveness. Š "A working relationship that can add value to the business can result in workers sharing fairly in the employers' success. Š Disappointingly, only a few employers have shifted from their 'unions are the problem' mentality. Asking our employers to make the choice of cooperation or confrontation is a dramatic paradigm shift. We have reinvented ourselves, but it takes two to tango." Stern doesn't mince words. His clear intent is to "reinvent" the entire trade union movement - and not just in the United States. As we will discuss more fully in a special section of our next issue of Unity & Independence, Stern's book helps to explain the true nature of the recent merger in Vienna on Nov. 1 between the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the World Confederation of Labor (WCL). The new merged "union" federation is called the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). It was founded on the basis of "partnership" principles, bylaws and objectives that could have been taken straight from Stern's book. In defense of trade unionism The unions were forged through bitter struggles with one purpose -- to defend workers' interests against the bosses and all those in their service. They were not created to promote partnership "tangos" with the employers. In fact, whenever such "partnership unions" arose - and they were called "company unions" - sooner or later the workers overcame these new obstacles and found their way back to basic trade unionism. Today, the bosses are no different than they were 100 years ago. If anything, they are even more profit-thirsty and more rapacious. From Wall Street to Main Street they are hell-bent on lowering their labor costs. Wherever you look, corporate downsizing, privatization, sweatshop labor, forced labor, child labor, and union-busting - just to mention a few of the scourges of this era of capitalist globalization -- are more and more widespread. This is not the time to throw in the trade union towel, as Stern proposes. It's time to act with even greater determination and collective strength as "a bunch of traditional union people." ----------
SEIU members in San Francisco are not pleased with Andy Stern's wholesale endorsement of the Kennedy-McCain "immigration reform" bill and its provisions for "guestworker" programs. [See the July-August 2006 issue of Unity and Independence for a complete report on this bill and on Stern's unacceptable compromise with the employers' Essential Workers coalition.] In mid-November, SEIU members were invited to a meeting of "SEIU for Immigrant Rights" to "hear the latest in the struggle to get SEIU to drop its support for 'guestworker/bracero' language that hurts immigrants and other workers." The call for this meeting reads, in part: "Arnold Schwarzenegger, a friend of big-business, was just in Mexico recently talking up a federal 'guestworker' program. It looks like the man who last year attacked unions in California (and lost) is now at it again! "How? Guestworker programs are designed to take away the rights of immigrant workers within them. Then they are used to erode the position of all workers. That's why bosses love them! Our union can't support this! Not only are many of our members immigrants, but we all as workers have a stake in fighting for the rights of other working people. "Our group will present a resolution for membership education on immigrant rights and to change SEIU's support of guestworker legislation." Groups such as this one are springing up in SEIU locals across the country. SEIU members are among the most militant unionists you will find anywhere. They are fighting to preserve their unions as fighting instruments to defend and advance workers' rights - against the bosses and against Andy Stern's abandonment of trade union principles. These SEIU members deserve our full support. - A.B. - 30 -
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