POLITICS APRIL 14, 2010
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There will be a mixed reaction to Andy Stern’s forthcoming resignation as the head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Many in the labor movement, even inside SEIU, will rejoice that he is out. But many friends of the labor movement like myself, who share its ideals but don’t have to live with its daily travail, will regard Stern’s departure with foreboding—as another step downward in labor’s descent.
During the last decade, Stern, who took the helm of SEIU in 1996, burnt many of his bridges inside the labor movement. In the early 2000s, SEIU was involved in bitter jurisdictional disputes with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) over how to organize public-sector workers. These were the kinds of disputes that the AFL-CIO—the umbrella organization which contained both the SEIU and AFSCME—had been created, in part, to eliminate.
Then came the split within the AFL-CIO. In 2005, Stern took his union and four others out of the AFL-CIO into Change to Win, a new labor federation. Stern and his chief theoretician, Stephen Lerner, compared the current plight of the labor movement with that of the labor movement of the early '30s. “The labor movement is at a point today that has similarities to the early 1930s, when union workers were a small minority in an economy dominated by the emergence of huge industrial corporations,” Lerner wrote in an influential manifesto. Stern proposed to do for today’s movement what United Mine Workers head John L. Lewis had done for the movement of the 1930s.
In 1935, Lewis had taken his union out of the floundering American Federation of Labor (AFL) to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which in a few years succeeded in organizing many of the industrial workers that the AFL had spurned. Stern wanted to do the same through Change to Win. But under the leadership of Stern’s lieutenant, Anna Burger, Change to Win has enjoyed little success. And the split in 2005 looks in retrospect merely to have been another symptom of the labor movement’s decline rather than a sign of its awakening.
More recently, Stern has been involved in jurisdictional disputes within his own union and within Change to Win’s unions. These disputes have left some of his own members and staff questioning his leadership. As my colleague Bradford Plumer described in The New Republic, Stern attempted to build a home-care workers union in California at the expense of the membership of an existing and successful SEIU local, the United Healthcare Workers. Stern eventually put the local under trusteeship, but rather than complying with his dictate, the local’s leadership, enraged by the move, broke away and organized an independent union that drew members away from the United Healthcare Workers.
Stern also intervened in a dispute that was roiling UNITE HERE, a union within the SEIU that had itself been formed out of two very different unions. UNITE HERE had been created in 2004 by the merger of HERE, which under John Wilhelm was organizing workers in hotels and food services, and UNITE, which under Bruce Raynor organized textile and apparel workers. HERE brought to the partnership a reputation for organizing, while UNITE brought along a dwindling membership but formidable financial resources, including a bank. When Wilhelm and Raynor quarreled over organizing, Stern allied himself with Raynor. He brought Raynor and his members into the SEIU, and according to Wilhelm, threatened to take his jurisdiction and assets. Wilhelm, meanwhile, took what remained of UNITE HERE back into the AFL-CIO.
For Stern’s critics, the disputes over United Healthcare Workers and UNITE HERE confirmed their worst opinions of his leadership. He was a “raider” out to enhance his own power and fill his union’s declining coffers. He had not revived the labor movement. Instead, he had undermined it. But, of course, there is another side to the story.
For all his faults, Stern was one of the few union leaders of the last two decades who worried and actually did something about arresting the labor movement’s decline. SEIU’s membership increased by 50 percent during his tenure. And while some of those new members were acquired by taking over other unions, a great many were not. No other American union enjoyed this kind of boost in membership. Within the AFL-CIO, only AFSCME and the American Federation of Teachers—both of whom organize public employees—enjoyed any increase at all.
Most of what Stern did, and most of what he did wrong, stemmed from his own view of how to rebuild the labor movement. As Bill Fletcher Jr. and Nelson Lichtenstein pointed out in an article in In These Times that is highly critical of Stern, part of what he did in the battle over the United Healthcare Workers simply reflected his view that all home-care workers should be organized together in a single statewide local, so that they would gain greater bargaining power relative to being organized along with nurses or doctors. The conflict between Raynor and Wilhelm also seems to have originally been over a theory of organizing—with Raynor backing Stern’s idea that the most important thing is to get an employer to sign a contract, even if it’s a lousy one.
Stern’s theories might have been wrong, but at least he had a theory and acted upon it. The same cannot be said of many other union leaders and of the AFL-CIO leadership. There are still innovative leaders inside the labor movement—such as Larry Cohen of the Communications Workers of America—but they are outnumbered by leaders who are primarily concerned with managing the decline of their membership.
Stern also had considerable impact on public policy. As my colleague Jonathan Cohn will attest, Stern deserves considerable credit for the passage this year of national health care reform. During the 2008 campaign, Stern and the SEIU locals made health care reform a litmus test for Democratic candidates. After Barack Obama took office, Stern pushed the administration to get Congress to enact it, and he remained the bill’s most enthusiastic and vigorous supporter even when it looked as though it might go down to defeat.
Stern’s legacy is somewhat like that of John L. Lewis, but not in a way that Stern or Lerner imagined. Lewis revived his own union in the '30s, as well as the labor movement itself, by organizing the CIO. But he was also a contentious man who brooked no opposition within his union. After the 1936 election, he erratically veered to the left and then the right. He backed Wendell Willkie over Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. He quit the CIO that year. He rejoined and then again left the AFL. He was a rugged individualist who dreamed of creating a new cooperative movement, but whose insistence on doing things his way or not at all finally undid his best intentions. Does that sound familiar?
John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
8 comments
Those of us having a friendly inclination toward the organized labor movement know that it has an ebb and flow: sometimes it is up and sometimes it is down. Institutionally the labor movement remains a powerful force in collective bargaining and in Democratic politics. Reading John Judas' article, I am remined of the famous beginning of Marx's "Eighteenth Brumaire. This line is often quoted in the New Republic and deserves our attention again: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire. Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue."
- LawrenceGulotta
April 14, 2010 at 11:20am
We can only hope that the labor movement is in decline; it has long outlived its usefulness. And there is a special place reserved in hell for those who gave us Obamacare. No one should have a problem with voluntary unionization in the private sector, where both employees (e.g. skilled trades) and employers engage in voluntary commerce. It can be useful for groups of employees to have representatives. However, the labor laws and the practices of government labor "regulators" has allowed unions to engage in coercive behavior (which would put CEO's into prison), which is both immoral and, as we've seen with the UAW, harmful to those it is supposed to help. Private-sector unionism is adversarial and self-limiting. However, public-sector unionism is collusive. States like New York, New Jersey and California, where public-sector unions are strong, face enormous budget deficits and pension liabilities. In such states, the public sector has become a parasite sucking the life out of the private-sector economy. Public-sector unionism tends to be a self-perpetuating machine that extracts money from taxpayers and then puts it on a conveyor belt to the Democratic Party. Dale Ogden, Libertarian, 2010 Candidate for Governor of California; http://www.daleogden.org http://www.daleogden.net
- dalefogden
April 14, 2010 at 11:44am
Don't weep for Andy Stern. He stepped on other unions, and tried to make sweet deals with employers. See the 2008 Ohio nurses controversy, when SEIU tried to fast-track a union vote in certain Catholic hospitals. Insufficient notice had been given. This sub rosa strategy threatened to "set a dangerous precedent of employer-union collusion." But he made a name for himself in Washington, joining the HCAN coalition in support of reforms that benefit the for-profit health care industry instead of protecting and expanding workers' benefits. As the inadequate reforms are rollled out, his own SEIU members will not thank him.
- hmseil01
April 14, 2010 at 12:03pm
A very interesting story which leaves out the most glaring inconsistency in Mr. Stern's approach to labor: the support of illegal immigration. As an immigrant (legal) and a supporter of the union movement worldwide, I contend that if it were not for labor unions we would still have nine-year-olds working in our textile mills. The fact that some (probably most) of the sweatshops located within the borders of the U.S. are staffed by illegal aliens is indicative of the loss of focus on the parts of labor unions in general and the SEIU in particular, a loss of focus which -- in time -- could very well have us back to the days of children working in factories. After all, how else does corporate America expect us to compete with China and other nations (where labor unions are outlawed) whose workers live in thatched huts with dirt floors? I submit that Mr. Stern's drive to increase the membership of the SEIU at all costs clashes directly with the primary goal of unionism: to improve the working conditions of those who labor in America. Adding 12-20 million illegal aliens to the workforce may help keep the Mexican oligarchs happy, but it does nothing for the American worker. Virtually every construction job in California is done by Mexican crews. Are we to believe that they are here legally yet can speak not a word of English? In the '80s, the meatpackers in Omaha paid American workers $20 an hour; now they pay illegals $8 and hour. How is that progress and why has the American union movement accepted that reality without a murmur? Even Cesar Chavez, founder of the UFW, declared his opposition to illegal immigration because he understood that it undermined everything he was working for. Who, then, are the unions of today working for? No, I cannot agree with the plaudits heaped upon the head of Mr. Stern. In his way, Mr. Stern is like Bernie Maddoff: he did something big, but it helped nobody.
- alexyaron
April 14, 2010 at 2:30pm
Hey, Dales's back! How's it going? We didn't miss you at all believe it or not. As for the usefulness of unions being gone, go tell that to the 29 miners that died a horrible, needless death due to a criminal employer in WV last week.
- tnmats
April 14, 2010 at 4:48pm
Unions are not reliably democrat, either. Remember how UAW successfully blocked energy conservation legislation a couple of years ago. A short time later, of course, gas hit $4.00 a gallon and two of the big three automakers collapsed like flan in a cupboard.
- haricot
April 14, 2010 at 6:48pm
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303828304575180270979668714.html Unions todays are extracting massive benefits today at the expense of non-unionized worker. And it's not sustainable--in other words, if the non-unionized workers became unionized, there is no way this deal could be shared with all. Not even close. These lavish benefits only work because union membership is so low. State workers in New Jersey, for example, can retire after 30 years and $130,000 in pension contributions, and in return they'll see a $3.8M benefits. That return on investment is staggering. And it's guaranteed. And it's paid for by tax payers who have no such deal. Hardly fair.
- seattleeng
April 14, 2010 at 7:15pm
"In 1935, Lewis had taken his union out of the floundering American Federation of Labor (AFL) to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which in a few years succeeded in organizing many of the industrial workers that the AFL had spurned." Not exactly correct. The CIO initially was the the Congress FOR Industrial Organization, which was created to advocate for, encourage and facilitate the organizing of industrial unions. At the time, bolting on auto fenders or emptying out coke ovens was not considered a "trade," which is why the AFL had spurned such workers, and which was why few if any of them were union members. It was only years later, after nascent industrial unions had succeeded in organizing millions of workers, and there actually were a number of sizable such groups, that the CIO changed its name to the Congress OF Industrial Organizations. Why is this slight error of any consequence? Because it recalls an era during which the labor movement was as much or more so disunited as Judis portrays it today.
- dworkinm
April 15, 2010 at 1:45am