9/26 Mass Labor Protest In San Mateo Against SEIU Stern Planned Trusteeship Of SEIU UHW

ANDY STERN & "CORPORATE PARTNERSHIPS":
FROM IMMIGRATION REFORM TO SINGLE-PAYER HEALTHCARE

By ALAN BENJAMIN
http://www.owcinfo.org/Trade_Union/7_Face_In_US.htm

Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), has been spending a lot of time lately hanging out with the CEOs of some of the largest U.S. multinational corporations in his quest to work out a "much-needed partnership" to the big problems facing our country.

In February, Stern addressed a gathering of corporate lawyers in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he told them that "SEIU's goal for 2006 is to bring unions and corporations together as partners, not enemies." He continued: "Employers need to recognize that the world has changed and there are people who would like to help them provide solutions in ways that are new, modern and that add value to companies. ... A partnership between labor and corporations would be a step towards the intended goal."

Then, addressing himself directly to the trade union movement, Stern stated:

"On the other side of the coin, union members have to understand that companies are not their enemy, but must think about increasing shareholders' wealth. ... Labor should ask itself, 'how can I contribute to meeting those [shareholders'] expectations in a way that also meets mine'?" (Epoch Times, February 27, 2006)

For Andy Stern this is not just rhetoric. Stern's first project was to build a "partnership" with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Tyson Foods and Wal-Mart known as the Essential Workers Immigrant Coalition (EWIC). Together with these "partners," Stern and SEIU drafted the outlines of what would become the McCain-Kennedy "immigration reform" bill - an essentially anti-immigration bill that was approved earlier this year by the Senate in a slightly amended form.

The SEIU-sponsored bill calls for futher militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border, expanding the second-class "guestworker" (or "essential worker") program, increasing employer sanctions, and expediting deportations. These measures have been advocated for many years by the corporate CEOs.

What was the tradeoff for labor and the immigrant rights movement? It was the inclusion in the Senate "compromise" bill of a "path to citizenship" -- after 11 years or so, and after clearing major hurdles -- for some of the 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

Most immigrant rights advocates have called this tradeoff unacceptable. Nativo López, president of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), calls it a "Corona-Lite" version of the widely despised Sensenbrenner bill adopted by the House of Representatives last December.

"If they thought that compromising on the enforcement measures to obtain some form of legalization would satisfy the immigrant community or the immigrant rights movement," López said, "they're absolutely wrong." (Democracy Now radio program, June 26, 2006)

Speaking at a July 24 Educational Forum sponsored by the San Francisco Labor Council, Olga Miranda, president of SEIU Local 87, said openly it was not the role of a union to seek out "common ground" that would compromise the interests of union members. Such "joint solutions," Miranda noted, are inevitably detrimental to immigrant workers and to the labor movement as a whole.

Miranda insisted that her union must return to its traditional role of fighting for the rights of its members -- and for the rights of all working people -- against the bosses' agenda.

Miranda said her statement was not an "act of defiance" against her union. Rather, she insisted, it was an act of defense of her union against the attacks on the labor movement by the bosses and the Bush administration -- attacks that have been relayed, "misguidedly," by the leadership of her union.

Comments such as these by Sister Miranda are becoming more and more commonplace within SEIU and some of the other unions that are part of the newly formed Change to Win coalition.

Perhaps what most shocked SEIU members -- particularly those within the union's Latino caucus -- was when SEIU Executive Vice President Eliseo Medina publicly praised Bush's May 16 speech in which Bush briefly mentioned the so-called "path to legalization" while announcing he was sending 6,000 National Guard troops to beef up border enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Medina said, "We are encouraged that the president understands it will take a comprehensive solution to address the complex immigration crisis our country now faces."

SEIU members across the country were outraged that Medina ignored all the repressive aspects of Bush's proposals. Many pointed out that Bush's directive will lead inevitably to more deaths of undocumented immigrants seeking to cross the Arizona desert.

Opposition to Stern's new course, in fact, has expanded throughout the labor movement.

Ana Avendaño, associate general counsel at the AFL-CIO and director of the labor federation's immigrant worker program, called the Senate "compromise" bill "punitive and inhuman." And she added, "The fact that some national Latino organizations and some unions have signed on to it is very offensive." (interview with labor journalist Lee Sustar on May 19)

Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association, was asked to comment on Stern's policies during a 15-minute segment of CBS TV's "60 Minutes" that was devoted to Stern's "new course for labor." DeMoro told Lesly Stahl of "60 Minutes" that Stern's "partnerships with giant corporations [would] result in undermining a union's prime mission to defend and advance the interests of its members."

"Unions," DeMoro said, "would have to make enormous concessions to get corporations to accept them as junior partners, to the detriment of their members." (CBS TV, May 14, 2006)

Trade unionists understand instinctively that what DeMoro said on "60 Minutes" is right on the mark. The corporations' only interest in seeking a "partnership" with the unions is to co-opt the unions into accepting -- and co-administering -- their anti-labor agenda.

Stern and Single-Payer Healthcare

But Stern has not been content to deal only with the issue of immigration reform.

As trade unionists and healthcare activists around the country are fully aware, the fight for single-payer healthcare is back on the front burner. Nationally, there is growing support for HR 676, the single-payer resolution introduced in the House of Representatives by Congressman John Conyers of Michigan. HR 676 now has 72 congressional co-sponsors. Unions across the country are coming on board.

In California, the fight for single-payer is heating up as unions and activists are increasing their outreach and lobbying in support of SB 840, the single-payer healthcare bill introduced by State Senator Sheila Kuehl. A vote in the State Assembly on this bill is expected in the coming weeks. SB 840 supporters believe they are on the verge of securing the votes of the 41 State Assembly members needed for the passage of the Kuehl bill.

A big boost to this effort occurred on July 25-26, 2006 when the biennial convention of the California Labor Federation endorsed SB 840.

It is precisely at this moment -- when momentum is beginning to shift toward single-payer -- that Andy Stern has chosen to reach out to his wannabe corporate "partners" to implore them to do the "right thing" by addressing the healthcare crisis. But what single-payer activists find scandalous is that in all Stern's recent statements and invocations to the corporations, Stern has openly and forcefully dismissed single-payer as a viable option.

This Part Two of Stern's "corporate partnership agenda" began with an op-ed article by Stern published June 17 in the Wall Street Journal in which he begs corporate leaders to do something, anything -- except single-payer. Stern writes, "Today I sent a letter to every CEO in the Fortune 500 asking them to make healthcare their national priority. I urge corporate leaders to come forward."

Stern's letter to the business leaders concludes as follows:

"Our union members -- your employees -- will work with you. The old idea that business and labor can't work together for the common good is as outdated as lifetime jobs. The Service Employees International Union is the largest healthcare union in the country. Our membership includes nearly one million nurses, doctors, hospital staff, nursing home and home care workers. We know health care. You know business. Together, let's build a new 21st-century American economy."

Stern's letter is explicit in stating that "single-payer is not viable," as it will not be supported by corporate America. This, of course, is true. Countless corporate CEOs and politicians talk about the need for "universal healthcare" -- but they are adamant about keeping all the health insurance companies, which are reaping mega-profits, in the mix.

Single-payer would eliminate the healthcare insurance companies from the healthcare system. These companies are the middlemen who contribute nothing of value to the system. The savings realized by getting rid of them would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars annually and would be enough to provide coverage for all who are currently uninsured.

Stern's proposals -- in the name of "universal healthcare coverage" -- call for tinkering with the current healthcare system; nothing with which the bosses could disagree. In fact, the very same day Stern published his article in the Wall Street Journal, GM CEO Richard Wagoner came out with a plan similar to the one proposed by Stern.

Stern Reneges on 'New Deal Answers'

Stern presented his case to the employers more fully in a talk he gave at the pro-business Brookings Institution in Washington, DC on June 16. He was one of many panelists asked to address the healthcare crisis. Other panelists included the senior vice president of Costco Corp., the president of the National Small Business Association, and the director of the Health Policy Program of the New America Foundation.

The transcription of Stern's talk, published on the website of the Brookings Institution, reveals Stern's all-out effort to find "common ground" with corporate America -- that is, with the very people who have been cutting workers' wages, reneging on paying healthcare to their employees, dropping pension plans ... and just simply attacking all the gains and rights won by working people through bitter struggles for close to one century.

Stern's starting point, as usual, is his desire to help the corporations find solutions to their growing woes. He states:

"Obviously, we have a huge problem for American business because it is pretty hard to compete in a global economy when the price of your healthcare is put on the cost of goods, while in other countries, it is shared amongst society....

"We live in a new century, and we need a new healthcare paradigm because we have a new economy. ... We can't drive into the future in America, looking in the rearview mirror. We are as far today from the New Deal as the New Deal was from Abraham Lincoln. ... I don't think we can simply look back to the answers in 1935 and imagine them working today."

But what are the "answers of 1935" if not the recognition of trade unions by the Wagner Act, or the understanding that the State has a fundamental responsibility to all its citizens to provide Social Security, healthcare, public education, and other vital social services? Isn't single-payer healthcare one such 1935-type answer?

Stern's rejection of single-payer becomes more explicit later in his presentation. He continues:

"I think we need to find a new system that is not built on the back of the government. I am here to also say I don't think we need to import Canada or any other system. We are going to build an American system because we are Americans and we don't like anybody else's system."

Of course, the Canadian model that Stern does not wish to import is the highly vaunted Canadian single-payer system. And not building a system "on the back of the government" is the language of the corporations, not of the labor movement.

Stern Joins Schwarzenegger at Healthcare Summit

To make things even more explicit, Stern and other Change to Win top officials agreed to participate in a July 25 Heathcare Summit in Los Angeles organized by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that featured corporate executives, doctors, and medical administrators.

This forum was viewed widely by single-payer activists across California as an event aimed at undercutting support statewide for the Kuehl bill. It also was seen by most healthcare advocates as a photo opportunity for Schwarzenegger's re-election bid. What came out of the event was the illusion that Schwarzenegger cares, when in effect his record proves otherwise.

An article in the July 25 Los Angeles Times highlights the divisions within the trade union movement over this healthcare summit. It states, in part:

"As some organizations picket the talks at UCLA, others thank Schwarzenegger for convening the session on funding medical coverage. .....

"The divide was apparent in the differing tones inside UCLA's air-conditioned Covel Commons, where Schwarzenegger held his 'Summit on Health Care Affordability,' and outside in the sweltering courtyard.

"Outside, the California Nurses Association ran a picket line of 40 people. 'Any union leader that crosses is a scab,' said Rose Ann DeMoro, the union's executive director.

"The head of the California Labor Federation, Art Pulaski, recalled last year's fight with Schwarzenegger over his special election and denounced the governor for not doing more to provide health coverage to Californians.

"Inside, the national presidents of three prominent unions -- the Service Employees International Union, the United Farm Workers and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America -- took seats around a long table with the 50 summit participants, and thanked the governor for convening the session. ...

"DeMoro, the executive director of the nurses' union, which voted last year to join the AFL-CIO, said union leaders who participated in the summit were betraying their labor brethren.

"'It's really shocking frankly, because working people have been hit the hardest by the governor's healthcare policy,' she said. 'The right wing has been extremely effective in dividing the labor movement.'

"Doug McCarron, the carpenters union president, called the criticism 'ridiculous. I want to see bipartisan programs and solutions for American workers'."

Here you have it all: Stern and his CTW colleagues were inside the convention center around the same table with Schwarzenegger (who has opposed one union-sponsored healthcare bill after another) and with the heads of major corporations, while outside, picketing this anti-labor and anti-healthcare summit were the head of the California Labor Federation and leaders of unions, such as the CNA, that have been the most vocal supporters of healthcare rights and single-payer.

For DeMoro and the CNA, Stern's participation at the governor's summit was tantamount to scabbing.

California CTW Unions Not Following Stern's Course

But in California at least, SEIU and the other Change to Win unions don't seem to be going along with Stern's new pro-corporate course.

At the California Labor Federation convention in late July, the SEIU and Change to Win delegates voted to support SB 840, the Sheila Kuehl single-payer bill. They also approved a policy statement on immigration that lambastes "guestworker" programs and opposes the further militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border.

Across the state, SEIU delegates to central labor councils have endorsed the statement by the National Network For Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which takes issue on every major question with the positions put forward by Stern.

Stern's new policies have little support among the rank and file -- and even among many top leaders -- of SEIU and the other Change to Win unions. This is a very good thing. But there is still an urgent need to organize the discussion in these unions, and more generally in the labor movement as a whole, about the dangers of Stern's new course. This pro-partnership orientation must be rejected explicitly by the ranks of the CTW unions and by the entire labor movement.

Don Bechler, who chairs Health Care for All in San Francisco and who has been a leader in the Machinists union for 17 years, explained why the unions must reject Stern's new so-called "strategy." He said:

"Union leaders have been elected to lead. Leaders should put forward what they think is sound health policy for working people. Universal healthcare with single-payer financing has been shown over and over again to be great health policy. It saves money and delivers one great class of care to all classes of people.

"What we have with the private insurance companies is delivery of different classes of care for different classes of people, wasteful spending, and most important a hideous system where insurance companies try to avoid the sick and only insure the healthy. That is good business for them, but bad health policy for America. The insurance companies are the ones who brought us the term 'pre-existing condition.' It is a term used solely by the insurance industry to deny care to those who need it.

"Again, the role of union leaders is to advocate what is best for working people. Keeping private insurance companies in the healthcare loop is not in the best interests of workers. You always enter contract negotiations with a clear idea of your objective. When it comes to healthcare, it's not that corporations don't know what single-payer is; the problem is that they have chosen other anti-worker solutions to cut healthcare costs.

"On the issue of healthcare, Andy Stern seems to have steered away from this responsibility to lead."

True, indeed. The unions should not be groveling at the feet of the corporations, pleading with them to change their ways. They can't change; all they care about is the need to make more profits. The unions should not be seeking a place at their table. Labor's interests and those of corporate America are diametrically opposed. Labor should stick to its guns, fighting for its own interests in opposition to the employers and the government.

The only table labor should be seated at is the negotiating table, where labor is across the table from management, fighting for its demands, based on a mobilized membership to give their bargaining team the best relationship of forces possible to wrest concessions from the bosses.

This is what independent trade unionism is all about.

**********************


ONCE AGAIN, WHERE DOES SEIU'S ANDY STERN
HOPE TO TAKE THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT?

[Note: The following article is reprinted from the November-December 2006 issue of Unity & Independence, the regular supplement to The Organizer newspaper. To subscribe to Unity and Independence, please contact us at .]

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."

But 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.

The Chronicle article continues:

"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."