http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050725/ap_on_bi_ge/labor_rift_49The long expected news is breaking as Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has joined with three other International Unions to boycott the AFL-CIO convention which starts today in Chicago. Barring an eleventh hour deal to salvage the current structure of organized labor, the SEIU, the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and UNITE-HERE will form a rump group that some have compared to the Congress of Industrial Organizations, an associatgion of more aggressive unions that John L. Lewis led away from the original American Federation of Labor some seven decades ago.
The American corporate media never offer in-depth coverage of labor issues, while the moderate to extremely left wing magazines and web platforms do not have the resources to do much background investigation to find out what is really going on in this most significant labor story in half a century.
This essay is offered for the benefit of liberals and leftists who consider themselves allies of organized labor. I am a professional union representative who has worked on the staff of the UFCW, SEIU and UNITE! (before it merged with HERE.) Currently, I am an independent consultant representing independent public sector unions in Southern California. You cannot understand what is happening to organized labor unless you recognize the fact that the "elected" leadership of International Unions is a self selecting and self perpetuating class of middle and upper middle class "professionals." Over the last 20 years, the unions have drawn more women and people of color into the higher ranks of the career ladders, but this has done nothing to change the fact that every nationwide union is run by people who live white collar life styles.
This is not a crime or a disgrace -- it is probably inevitable.
I am not embarrassed to charge a fee for my services that enables me to remain in the middle class. Most of us firmly believe that we "earn" what we take from the dues paid by "our" members.
But there are unexamined consequences to this professionalization of union representation.
First, it means that the top guy at every union has to meet a payroll. Maintaining a specific level of revenue must be one of the top priorities for the organization. And this need for a constant cash flow never stops. The corollary to this is that everybody on the staff works "for" the top guy.
Second, it means that those of us who provide "representation" to the membership live a different life style from the overwhelming majority of "our" members.
Please do not misunderstand this point. Our members
want us to be professional -- they want us to earn a good living for the obvious reason that we have to contend with their bosses. They assume that the boss hires the sneakiest and meanest talent that corporate greed can afford, and they assume that their dues money goes toward hiring comparable talent to negotiate their wages and benefits and to protect them from oppressive management tactics on the shop floor. Any alleged "leftist" who tries to deny this fundamental democratic truth is lying to you.
Even though our members really do not begrudge us our middle class economic security, this definitely creates a cultural gap that is all but impossible to bridge. After a couple of generations of this professionalization of union "leadership," there is almost nothing that binds us together. We relate to "our" members the way that a dentist relates to his patients -- or, in the most common metaphor -- an insurance agent to his client.
Third, we cannot maintain our career ladders without some assurance of organizational continuity. This is a nice way of saying that we don't let our members fire us.
Unlike the other two factors I just described, this one
is pernicious. Talking about it openly will also draw the nastiest response from the Official Voices of organized labor.
But the dirty little open secret is that very few International Unions allow direct election of top officers. And in those that do, the membership has no real chance to make an independent choice. To campaign nationally, a candidate needs money, time and organization. This means the incumbent structure of organized labor has an overwhelming advantage in every nationwide union – and none of them has ever been successfully challenged from below without the assistance of the Federal Government.
Occasionally, a staff rift will occur as two or more factions of staff professionals may fight it out for control of a union. The norm, however, is for the Administration to perpetuate itself generation after generation.
Direct democracy takes place all the time in organized labor -- members get to vote on their contracts, their stewards, their "local" leaders, and all manner of referenda and resolutions. But members almost never get to vote on who will hire and fire the staff; how will the staff be deployed; and which major efforts will the entire union make in organizing, collective bargaining and politics.
Instead of direct democracy most International Unions employ the "convention" system with delegates elected at the local level traveling at union treasury expense to some exotic locale once every few years to choose the top leaders of the organization. The beauty of this system for the incumbent structure is that any local rebellion will be contained. Even if a few dissident delegates manage to get themselves to the convention, it would take an unprecedented miracle for them to coordinate with enough other dissidents from around the country to make anything but a token protest at the national convention. When this happens, loyalists who are enjoying the junket can always be counted upon to jeer on cue when the "crazies" get on the floor.
The significance of these three factors is that "organized labor" is an insular group of professionals running permanent bureaucracies which are distanced in time, space and social class from their membership. As I said before, this is not all bad and probably inevitable. And I know first hand that Bruce Raynor of UNITE-HERE and Joe Hansen of the UFCW really do care about what the members think and believe. But, from a structural perspective, it is a coincidence that democratically inclined individuals are now in their positions of power.
The members never had anything to say about either of them becoming International Presidents.
The disagreement splitting the AFL-CIO this week is among highly paid professionals, and the rank and file membership that pays their salaries has nothing whatsoever to say about it.
The Current SplitIt is about money. It is about careers. As the labor movement continues its long decline, the number of comfortable middle class careers that the dues flow will support is shrinking. The question of the day is what if anything can be done to stop the game of musical chairs?
The instigator of the split is Andy Stern, a man with a vision. Personally, I think his vision is even worse than the lethargy of Lane Kirkland -- but I will try to give you an honest account of his theory of unionism as I experienced it on the staff of SEIU Locals in the San Francisco Bay area from 1999 through 2001.
There are two dimensions to Sternism: (1) Union resources should be diverted from "service" to "organizing." (2) Smaller labor organizations should be obliged to merge into larger ones. The refusal of Sweeney and the 50 or so other International Presidents to accept the full monty of these “reforms” is the proximate cause of today’s split. This post will address the first of these propositions; a later post will deal with the second one.
(1) Union resources should be diverted from "service" to "organizing."In practice, this means laying off "business agents" and replacing them with "organizers." Reflecting the final phase of a decades long rivalry between two distinct career ladders within our profession, Stern now advocates an inversion of the traditional pecking order within the House of Labor.
From the inception of the labor movement in the 19th Century, the first several waves of union staff representatives came “up” from the rank and file membership. Usually by virtue of being elected to local office or by being appointed by someone else who was elected by direct democracy, the Business Agent established the basic paradigm of providing “service” in exchange for dues. By the post WWII era, as the labor movement established pension and health and welfare funds while negotiating steadily improving contracts, the job of “leadership” slowly morphed into the expertise of a profession.
In the Fifties and Sixties, unions were still growing. Organizing was not considered a particularly difficult task, as union contracts tended to sell themselves. Business agents would handle organizing duties in their spare time under most union staff structures, and individuals hired on to do nothing other than organize generally received much lower pay.
The organizing campaign was largely a matter of advising prospective members of the benefits of union membership. Exhibit A was invariably an existing union contract that showed higher pay and higher benefits. The upper echelons of union leadership assumed that virtually anybody could handle organizing and “organizing departments” generally had far less status than the negotiators who kept existing members happy – and who created the “product” of good contracts that the organizers would be able to “sell.”
As the decades have rolled by, the political, cultural and economic environment has changed to our utter disadvantage, and our contracts are no longer an unquestionable selling point, and it is definitely not a simple task to attract potential members. During this era of decline, the organizers have generally complained – with considerable justification – that their role within the House of Labor has been unfairly and unwisely denigrated. As old unionized enterprises close down, it is an imperative for institutional survival to organize new workers to take the place of the jobs that have been lost to international trade and economic “modernization.”
Andy Stern was the Organizing Director of SEIU before becoming its International President. He has developed a comprehensive doctrine for establishing organizing as the central activity of the labor movement. In his view, service and organizing are locked into a zero-sum struggle, and the only hope for our future lies in the triumph of organizing over service. His contribution is to articulate a theory of unionism that not only exalts organizing – which is hardly unique or even remarkable – but also affirmatively denigrates the concept of service.
SEIU ideology in the Stern era holds that "service" is not just unwise, it is morally wrong. The idea of a "professional" acting on the member's behalf in the manner of an insurance agent is regularly ridiculed and is asserted to be the root cause of labor's downfall.
Stern asserts that the member needs power rather than representation. This manifests itself in the motto, "actions not grievances." When a worker (never called an employee) is mistreated by the boss (never called management), the workers should rise as one to confront the miscreant boss to correct his misbehavior. This bit of confrontational theater is called an "action."
There are some obvious problems in the application of this theory of worker "power." How wide is the participation in the "action?" Do we have a nationwide strike every time a boss abuses a worker? No, of course not. But do we shut down the entire hospital? The floor? The ward? Or just bring three or four workers along for this bracing exercise of power?
A bigger problem is what do we do when the worker is wrong? Do we march on the boss anyway, because we are engaged in the class struggle and we must never concede that management has any legitimate rights at all?
These rhetorical questions go to the heart of what a union does. The traditional unions that Stern is challenging continue to provide “service” to their members – practical expertise at dealing with management on management’s terms. That means evaluating what the legitimate demands of management are – and trying to get as good a deal as possible for our members in exchange for meeting those legitimate demands.
A good service representative has to understand the enterprise, what its goals are, and what it really takes to achieve those goals. He or she must also build human relationships with supervision so that the abstract ideas written into a union contract can have practical application on the shop floor.
Most contracts have an enforcement mechanism called grievance and arbitration which Sternism attacks as being slow, costly, legalistic and slanted in management’s favor. All of these criticisms are valid. But they create the misleading impression that the “service model” of union representation is based primarily upon arbitration. In some cases this is probably true. But the solution for lazy and unskilled business agents is not to fire them all; the solution is to have better people working on the front line.
Shifting resources from "service" to "organizing" under the Stern theory of union representation involves both the deskilling of the field staff position and drastically increasing the number of members each individual staff representative is assigned to handle. At Local 715 in San Jose, this is taken to its logical conclusion as the job title itself has been changed to "worksite organizer."
Of course, in reality worksite organizers do not stir up wildcat strikes every time there is a bitch on the job. The motto "actions not grievances" is ludicrous on its face, and SEIU field staff are stuck with a Stalinist Party Line that they have to pretend to employ while somehow keeping the members from kicking their shaggy asses in the parking lot.
The overwhelming majority of union members do not care about the ideology of “The Service Model” or the notion that having a skilled business agent disempowers them. What members want is better pay and benefits at contract time and a reliable representative who can provide meaningful help with problems that come up on the job. In good American fashion, they innocently believe that their dues money is supposed to "buy" this service.
The Stern theory recognizes this problem and asserts that it can be solved with “education.” All of the advanced SEIU locals have hired fulltime Education Directors whose task is to conduct perpetual “training” of the membership. Field staff are required to meet quotas for recruiting members to these “training” sessions – as well as an infinite series of other union functions mandated by the union hierarchy.
Obviously, this puts Field Representatives into a double bind. The average member has no interest in spending a Saturday being “trained” in the theories of Andy Stern. The average member does not want to be “trained” at all – which by definition means having her mind changed about what she wants for her union dues.
The training program also advances the flip side of the Stern program of reducing the Union’s commitment to service – obliging members to handle the duties formally done by their paid staff representatives. This takes the form of “training” stewards in how to handle contract enforcement and other member complaints. This further denigrates the role of business agent which Sternism claims can be taught in four or five afternoons by an Education Director who has never been a business agent herself.
The turnover rate for field staff in the SEIU is an open joke in the labor movement. Today, for example, there are 28 open positions posted for SEIU jobs the state of California on the Union Jobs Clearing House – more than 40% of the total for all of organized labor in the state. This statistic never changes as no sane person can handle the double bind of being stuck between members who want service and union executives who insist that you not provide it.
http://www.unionjobs.com/staff/ca/Andy Stern would probably tell you that all this is unavoidable if the labor movement is going to reverse its downward cycle. Organizing new members is the only hope of preventing our extinction. If this means that current members get pissed off because they don’t have a business agent to hold their hand, so be it.
In the next post I will deal with Stern’s method for dealing with the dissatisfaction of the current membership through consolidation of small units into larger ones.
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