The power struggle between healthcare workers in California and the SEIU in Washington D.C. isn't just about those workers right to democratically control their own organization, it's about the kind of unionism that will survive in America. Will we have an actual labor movement, or will SEIU's brand of unionism turn labor into another corporate tool, enhancing corporate power by putting workplace accountability out of reach?
It's no secret that organized labor in the U.S. has been in a state of decline for quite some time. Nonetheless, it's pretty customary within American union culture to talk about "the labor movement." But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that American unionism doesn't have much it can point to that resembles anything like a real movement. Most American unions have, for a very long time, operated a lot more like insurance companies than unions. Workers pay a premium called 'dues,' and in return, they get protective coverage, in the form of a contract with wage guarantees, and other protections. The "union," in this context, is understood as being the staff of the union. These staff members negotiate and subsequently enforce the contract; in short, they act on behalf of the workers, make decisions for them, and in their enforcement capacity, represent the power of unionized workers. Union reformers call this model of unionism the "business model," or "business unionism," and it's become so universal that most people, even most union members see it as normal, as the way that things in a union should be done.
The problem with this kind of unionism is that the power is not held by the workers. In fact, actual workers don't even have to be involved. The work of the union is a thing that's done for them, instead of by them. It would be pretty easy to make a historical argument that this kind of unionism was the real cancer that enabled the dramatic decline that American unions began to suffer from some 30 years ago. The overall percentage of the American workforce that was organized had already begun to decline before Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controllers strike in 1981, and if the muscles of what was less than a movement hadn't already atrophied by that point in U.S. labor history, workers across America could have struck in support of those air traffic controllers, and the years since might not have entailed such a massive gutting of the accountability mechanisms in place in American society.
What a union is supposed to be is really not that complicated or difficult to understand. At it's most basic and best, a union is a group of workers who act together to get their employer, the boss, to stop doing some things and to start doing others. The reason that workers are able to get the boss to change like that is because the union can leverage its power by striking. The strike is the reason that the union has power, which is another way of saying that if it can't strike, it's not a union. An organization that can't or won't fight for itself is not a union, regardless of what it calls itself. And an organization that tries disenfranchise workers from that exercise of power, or inhibit the union's internal democratic processes, such an organization, even if it calls itself a "union," is really just a corporate tool, the kind of corporate tool that striking workers have always called a "scab."
And this is precisely the kind of "union" that SEIU is trying to impose on healthcare workers in California and throughout America.
The campaign that Stern is waging against California healthcare workers isn't too complicated either, though there is a lot that has to be taken into account to fully appreciate the depth of the danger posed by Stern's move a few weeks ago to take over United Healthcare Workers-West. Regardless of the changes in name or even the specific points of contention, of which there are many, it has always been a fight between a group of workers and a boss. The workers in this case are the members of the fastest growing and likely most democratic workers organization in the country: today's National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). The boss is SEIU, the Service Employees International Union. This is where things begin to appear a little confusing: on one side of the fight is a union; on the other side is a "union." Before things get too tangled to keep track of, lets review a little history.
Until a few weeks ago the movement of California healthcare workers called itself UHW-West, and was a chapter, or in union lingo, a "local" within SEIU. The Service Employees International Union, SEIU, has managed to grow while most American unions have been in steady decline. The fastest area of growth for SEIU has been healthcare, and the fastest growing healthcare worker's union in America since before Stern's time has been the union built by California healthcare workers, formerly called UHW-West, now called NUHW. Going back even further, this same workers movement called itself Local 250 (also part of SEIU) back before 2005. It was still called Local 250 back in 2000 and 2001, when I had the privilege of being a part of this movement, one of very few examples of a real labor movement in the U.S..
The two years that I spent working for NUHW (then called Local 250) came at the end of a six year period during which I worked as an organizer with nine different labor organizations. Like most people who start out organizing, I started full of energy, and ready to fight for economic justice and try to make a difference. But after four years of experience with over half a dozen organizations I had become more than disillusioned. Every organization I encountered seemed to be run by opportunists concerned primarily with getting and protecting more in dues dollars than facilitating workers movements that have the potential to really hold corporations accountable. At this point I started to get the sense that all these organizations calling themselves unions were really anything but. In the summer of 2000, about two months into the last of a series of organizing jobs for business unions, I figured out that the campaign I'd been hired for was actually a campaign to save a business-union's right to extract dues from members it had ignored for over a decade. I'd had enough. I quit that job, determined to find another line of work. I had never wanted to work for insurance companies, much less negligent insurance companies. I'd wanted to work for a real union, an organization of workers fighting for their shared interests, and I hadn't yet come across one of those.
I decided to take a job with Local 250 based in Oakland, CA in the summer of 2000 as a way to transition myself into the next thing. All I knew was that I didn't want to do the kind of work I'd been doing. But for the moment, I needed work, I had a solid resume as an organizer, and I knew that I could tolerate something new for long enough to figure out my next step. Over the next two or three months I realized that I had unwittingly taken a position with an actual union, and I found myself in the middle of a long and difficult struggle in which it challenged a major California hospital corporation. This particular employer had in recent years systematically taken over community based hospitals throughout northern California, and had implemented cost cutting measures to the detriment of patients and workers alike. In response, the members of that real union fought hard, struck several times, and in the end won a fight that had lasted over a year and a half.
Over the course of my time working for Local 250 I learned a lot about the difference between a union and a "union." I saw for the first time a real workers movement, and learned a bit about what it takes for that kind of movement to come to life, to stay alive, and to win. I saw, and experienced, how hard people have to work to maintain a real union. The people I worked with at Local 250, both members and their staff alike, are the hardest working people I've known, and their commitment has born fruit for both the members who own the movement as well as for all Californians. For example, the nurse-to-patient staffing ratios for acute care hospitals that are now part of California law have their roots in contract language that California caregivers fought for in their union contracts. Where hospital corporations tried to save money by short-staffing, workers fought for contract language that made sure there would be enough caregivers on hand to adequately care for number of patients on hand, which simultaneously reduced the rate of injury to those caregivers. This kind of protection was in a union contract before it was made a part of the law. Had it not been for the vision and hard work of Local 250's members and the staff they hire to help them realize their vision, California law would have fewer protections than it does today. The same hard work has earned NUHW members in hospitals and nursing homes the highest wage and working condition standards in the country.
So what could possibly motivate a union boss in Washington D.C. to try to take the reigns of a movement of workers that's already raising standards of accountability for caregivers and patients everywhere? All of the specific points of contention between the Stern's SEIU and the actual labor movement of NUHW can be understood in terms of this simple distinction: the workers of the NUHW think they should be able to determine their own future as an organization; SEIU's leaders thinks they're in a better position to decide what those workers want, and worse than that, he thinks that workers' interests are better served in the hands of a few privileged decision makers rather than in the hands of the workers themselves. In a nutshell, it's about top-down versus bottom-up leadership, autocracy and elitism versus democratization.
The most obvious question that arises from this distinction, even if it is superficial, is this: Which situation is better for the workers in question? In contrast to the unprecedented standards already won by the NUHW movement, SEIU's leadership has on multiple occasions attempted to negotiate deals behind closed doors and behind workers backs, deals that would reduce the standards workers decided to fight for and deals that undermined workers' power at the bargaining table. The deals that Stern has tried to impose on healthcare workers in California have consistently been less-than what those workers determined for themselves to be important. But there is more at stake in Stern's attempts to keep actual workers out of the bargaining process than an inferior deal for healthcare workers in California.
For starters, California isn't the only place that SEIU has tried to make deals that involve thousands of workers without ever so much as seeking their input. Stern has tried to make top-down deals with employers, both in California and elsewhere. In some of these deals, workers who already have a union would be robbed their right to strike for years on end in order get the Stern's SEIU more dues-paying members from the same corporation. In another scenario, Stern gets a corporation that controls several nursing homes to agree to recognize "the union" in some homes in exchange for "the union's" agreement to stay out of the the rest of the homes, and to not strike in the homes it does represent. Both in California and throughout the U.S., Stern is negotiating deals that will increase SEIU's membership while keeping those members from exercising any real power. A kind of unionism that makes it impossible for workers to fight for their interests isn't unionism at all. In fact, it's class treason.
In particular, it's a class treason all the more treacherous for Stern's heralded reputation as a "firebrand" of progressive leadership. Stern's is perhaps the loudest voice within the ranks of organized labor in America today. He blogs for the Huffington Post, and is interviewed throughout the media on a regular basis. But where the media like to seek his analysis as coming from a "new" kind of union leader who bears the gift of newly discovered options for the relationship between corporate America and working people, he is in actuality bringing nothing new to the table. His program constitutes the precise reversal of movements like that of NUHW, and a regression to the type of unionism that has been dominant in America for so long: rather than seeing increased worker involvement as the goal and trusting workers to be able to decide what they need, Stern fights against worker involvement if he can get more members by doing it. Stern would kill the union in order to have himself a bigger "union."
It might appear that this labor dispute doesn't have much to do with anybody that's not in a union, but the results of this struggle will impact union members everywhere, and even unorganized workers. Having a actual an vital labor movement in the U.S., as opposed to just more business-unionism, is of crucial importance for people everywhere for two reasons. The first is, admittedly, somewhat theoretical: Union activism is, among other things, an educational process through which activists learn to be skeptical of what is said to them by those in power. When a boss agrees to terms he swore earlier in a contract fight to be impossible, the workers that forced that movement begin to make assessments and decisions for themselves, and to make those decisions in the context of new information: their involvement changes what's possible. In short, real unionism encourages people to be more politically engaged, and to expect more political engagement from friends and family members. I think that comparing labor in Europe to labor in the US sheds a lot of light on the level of general political engagement in those places. Maybe if the US had the training ground of a real labor movement giving a segment of society some experience in fighting for corporate accountability, there would be greater pressure from society at large for governmental accountability. I think that one of the key reasons for most Americans' reluctance to protest in any way whatsoever is the fact that there isn't a viable institution in American society teaching anybody how to do it, much less teaching anybody that it works.
More concretely, though, a viable labor movement will be necessary for any meaningful level corporate accountability to be attained in and for American society. I've already described one instance in which union contract language evolved to become law that now protects everyone in California. This is just one illustration of the way that real unions have the power to limit what corporations can do, and to hold them accountable to the communities in which they operate. I don't think that very many people reading article this would argue against a broader coalition of partners working together for corporate accountability. The simple fact of the matter is, real unions are indispensable to that goal, and are often better positioned to change corporate behavior than even the legislature or the courts. But that can only be the case where workers have the vision and will to demand such accountability, and the strength of a movement to back up that demand. In California, SEIU is trying to destroy both the vision and the movement behind it.
At the most basic level SEIU has a fundamentally flawed understanding of what a union is. A union is not just an aggregate of workers, it is the acting together of a group of workers for the realization of common goals. A union exists in the collective action of the members who constitute it.
What all this means is that the deals SEIU hopes to implement like those I've described here won't result in the growth of an American labor movement. Broadly speaking, there is no American labor movement. Fortunately, there are regional labor movements in America. NUHW in California is one and there are others, but they are few. But the deals SEIU aims for will only work against those movements: they'll oblige some workers to pay dues to a union they didn't seek, while leaving them impotent to fight. Simultaneously, his deals will make it impossible for even greater numbers of workers to build Unions for themselves. Such arrangements, over time, can only result in the same kind of apathy and atrophy that had already begun to set in before Reagan ever got into power. In short, SEIU's program for healthcare workers is the literal anti-matter of real unionism, and it's old news. While it boast of growth and new leadership, SEIU plans to pass members by the thousands into the debilitating condition of business-unionism, a state that anybody with an attention span and a sense of labor history should already understand as being bad for workers and for America.
The good news, though, is that SEIU isn't the first boss that the members of NUHW have had to fight, and NUHW members have a record of winning. Because of their dedication to the goal of constantly increasing democratic accountability in the workplace, the labor movement of the NUHW stands to grow, and to continue to raise standards for both patients and caregivers in California and throughout the country.
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