Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » labor

Do NLRB Election Changes Matter If No One is Organizing

jstuart — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:29:51 +0000

New Orleans The surviving members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) published a final rulemaking on some “modest” (quoting Rich Trumka of the AFL-CIO) changes to election procedures this week. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has quickly announced that they will file suit to block the regulations as an assault on “free speech” before they are scheduled to take effect on April 30, 2012. This surely is a political posturing exercise on their part in order to prevent more extensive and perhaps more meaningful proposals from emerging in the workplace, because these changes are at best technical and though important will not change the organizing climate significantly for workers.

The new rule modifications primarily affect elections that go to a hearing before the NLRB and involve appeals. The NLRB in their release of the rule indicated that only about 10% of elections are currently going to hearing, since mostly the parties are agreeing to stipulated elections. The number of elections in the last available year (2009) only totaled 1304, so we are talking about 130 elections involving perhaps 7000 workers. Some of these hearings are quick and simple matters for unsophisticated employers and attorneys hoping for the best, so only a subset of these 130 elections actually involve appeals. Previously I’ve argued that this is not insignificant because the larger the unit being organized, the more likely the hearing and the appeals, and if a union is stuck in that rut it is absolutely a world of pain with a recent Berkeley Labor Center report, based on a FOIA filing with the NLRB, indicating that the delays will of elections will run from more than 4 months to close to 6 months. In these cases the new rule will be helpful in allowing the election to proceed and forcing the lawyers to argue later and limiting and consolidating the appeals, but….

Comparing the 2009 NLRB stats back to 1997 figures is sobering on several scores. Unions were winning more than 50% of elections filed in that period and won an astounding 66% of elections filed in 2009. Unfortunately despite winning two-thirds of our elections, we certified only a little more than 44,000 workers, and that likely means only at best half of those or about 22,000 ended up from this process under a collective bargaining agreement. The number of workers involved in elections filed is down to less than one-third of what it was in 1997: 224,262 then and 69,832 now! Elections are off correspondingly from 3261 filed in 97 and only 1304 in 09.

Gamely, labor spokespeople and other commentators argue that many more are being won in non-board organizing, and undoubtedly that’s true, but no one would argue that the winning significantly or at scale sufficiently to offset our steadily shrinking numbers. Even SEIU reported membership losses in recent years for the first time in decades. There are huge concerns that the AFL-CIO reported membership strength is wildly inflated.

Past all of the sound and fury about the modest nature of these rule changes and the continuing hope, no matter perhaps how unrealistic, that there may be more substantial changes in election rules shortening the time and giving unions more easy access to the workforce through telephone and emails, it seems impossible to deny that the biggest problem for unions besides the fierceness of employer opposition is our failure to continue to emphasize organizing. The numbers seem to indicate that we are on some kind of long, terrible organizing holiday.

We need to get back to organizing before it’s too late.

Labor Daze and Labor Waves

Chieforgasst — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 16:37:04 +0000

New Orleans On the eve of another ritual of picnicking and the last gasps of the summer that we celebrate as Labor Day, there will be the ritual mentioning of the value of labor and hard work, commentary on the recession, and even some mention about the value of unions in certain geographies where we are the ones flipping the burgers or pancakes in memoriam. Feels like labor daze though to me.

In generations past the kind of gnawing, persistent unemployment and jobs stagnation we are now experience would have seen angry union leaders knocking at the White House door demanding an audience with Nixon, Regan, Bush, or Carter. Fists would be banging on tables. I’m not saying that labor leaders are happy with this situation, but I’m not hearing it. Facebook postings, tweets, and press releases really are not the same.

Recently, some unions tried to turn the tables on some Congressional town hall meetings reversing the Tea-tactics of recent summers. Certainly it was about time, but as assuredly this was no movement igniting prairie fire. Worse, strategically, it all seemed partisan. The Tea Party is in some ways post-partisan. They are solid, salt-of-the-earth haters who can be as dangerous to some of the Republicans as they almost always are to the Democrats. If labor wants action in Congress, we need to understand and learn that our friends need to feel the heat as much as our foes. We don’t need to simply be the Seal 6 team in the Republican redoubts. We need to let all of them now we have had enough and are ready to rip the House down.

And, why not? Are we getting so much from the Obama Administration that we need to lower our voice to a whisper? Not that I can see.

There’s a heartbeat at the NLRB, but most of this is slight and symbolic so far. A notice that the law says workers can organize is nice as a reminder to all of us perhaps that we are forgetting to organize, but the notice won’t organize a single new worker. A different way of looking at nursing home units is swell, but it won’t change the economics or opportunities for organizing in that health care sector. A couple of items that give existing, certified bargaining units a little more breathing room is also smart, but won’t stem the tide. We are where we are, and it’s not good or getting better. The biggest election on the horizon is still the dénouement on the West Coast between the new SEIU and the old SEIU leadership of United Healthcare West. The NLRB gave the old team another shot claiming that Kaiser illegally aided the new team, but the damage is done and the relief is weak, and as is true in all elections, time and resources always favor the incumbent. Nothing will change the outcome here. SEIU will so clearly win that that they are trying to get a quick election just to deliver the final coup de gras to their old leadership and its new independent union.

Green jobs would be nice, but it is not clear how we get to scale. Recent news of critical bankruptcies for solar companies is discouraging. Alternative fuels are not producing jobs or much traction in the market. Administration incentives are insufficient. As good as it might be, there’s no silver bullet there.

We are at a funny intersection where there is more action around banks and foreclosures than there is around jobs, unemployment, and income.

We need a new wave of action and organizing, but this recession and the weakness of the hand we are playing seems to hang like a dark cloud over even the most ambitious of efforts. What used to be the new labor leadership is now the old labor leadership and the labor daze at Labor Day is down right depressing.

New NLRB Rules: Changing Post-Election Strategy

jstuart — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 13:23:41 +0000

New Orleans One result of the proposed new NLRB election rules, if and when adopted, may require a shift in post-election strategy.

A union will know the results of the election and whether or not the challenged ballots on any unit questions affect the outcome or are aggravations waiting for hearings. Either way this would mean that the long delays for hearings, decisions, and the potential for appeal to the Board in DC could mean lengthy waits for certification triggering collective bargaining.

Unions may now need to develop strategy and tactics for mounting post-election campaigns to try to do two things. First to firmly establish the union as a reality in the work, regardless of the NLRB, certification, or bargaining, by electing stewards, defining issues, and taking direct actions on the job around issues and interests, clearly demonstrating concerted, protected activity. Secondly, the union will have to apply these tactics and others to convince the employer to abandon or negotiate out the unit issues that are slated for hearings in the interest of obviating hearings and accelerating the process to bargaining. Some of this will be standard operating procedure in settling hearing issues at the 11^th hour before the hearing starts, similar to the practice now before representation hearings which are frequently delayed for last minute bargains or caucuses between the parties.

The more the union establishes itself and engages the employer on these issues in “campaign mode,” the more likelihood of a quicker and better settlement. Too often now post-election work means withdrawing the organizing staff, bringing in the union officers or reps to begin the preparation for collective bargaining and selecting the committee members. In the new regime with a quick election the campaign strategy should involve a “follow through campaign” of putting the pedal to the metal and pushing the employer to recognize any victory and abandon hearing and unit questions to the union’s interest PDQ…pretty damn quick.

Republicans Overreach in Wisconsin to Their Peril

dine — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 13:05:13 +0000

Washington The buzz in DC for a change was not about DC, but about Wisconsin. And, if not Wisconsin, then it was the 45,000 person crowd yesterday in Indiana that got some tongues wagging, and if not Wisconsin or Indiana, then Ohio for sure. The great Midwestern flyover zone was front and center in every conversation about labor, politics, and the hopes and fears for the future.

Not that anyone is sure what it means and what might be possible, but people are voting with their feet and there is a strong heartbeat and both of those change the game and demand to be taken seriously. The other thing that seems inarguable is that newly minted Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has pulled a tactical “Gingrich” and tried to play his hand so far past his base that it’s just a matter of time before the pendulum swings back and pops him hard. The 18-1 Republicans only evisceration of collective bargaining rights for public employees was too transparent, too roughshod, and just way too far over the top for the good people of Wisconsin. This was a kind of hardball politics played in a New York or a Louisiana or some other uncultured backwater, but not in the world of the nice Midwest for god’s sake! These are people that have worn cheese on their heads for cry eye!

Organizers are amazed at the polling results being seen from their own numbers as well as more public reports like those in the New York Times for collective bargaining (though not especially for unions unfortunately). The numbers are moving overwhelmingly in support of collective bargaining from the public, which is also shocking since with 1 of 8 covered by agreements in the United States so few people anymore have the faintest clue what the heck collective bargaining might be. Hearing about it for the first time in many cases thanks to the good people of Wisconsin, their gut response seems to be, “Hey, that doesn’t sound so bad?” Which is only a short distance away from “You betcha, let me have some of that,” and that should really worry the Republicans and the right.

This was the Gingrich fallacy when he and the Republicans got outmaneuvered by President Clinton in the budget standoff from which they never recovered. In a fuzzy world folks were all for the messaging that the “guvament” was wasting their money, but then when the spigot gets shutoff and the lights are turned off and folks are forced to reckon with the fact that parks are closed, social security offices don’t open, VA hospitals can’t accept them now, and the hundreds of other ways they interact with government, it’s a different story and payback is hell.

Wisconsin and Governor Walker are teaching the same lessons about collective bargaining and reminding people that their neighbor who is a teacher, city worker, or whatever is in a slap down not about money, but basic rights, like talking to the boss about your job, which is one way to define “collective bargaining,” and then it’s gone too damn far.

Walker is not alone either. In a rarity the New York Times sent a truth seeking missile at Governor Christie where it looked at what he says public workers, unions, and teachers versus the facts along with an accompanying chart that pretty much ticked off point by point of the old “liar, liar, you’re pants are on fire!”

Add to that the crash and burn of another Republican presidential candidate wannabe, Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana, being pulled down hard by an ethics scandal when he is preaching one sermon and living life another way by fronting for corporate contributions flooding into his wife’s foundation ostensibly for educational tools while 70% of the corporations are being regulated and doing business with the state, and, oh my, is their mud on his shoes and egg all over his face. Not that he has even recognized there’s a problem except with the fussbudgets at the New York Times who first broke the story, which is now being trumpeted loudly all over Louisiana. For all of their Biblical references, they probably overlooked the story about removing the “beam” from their own eyes, before they worry about the “mote” or speck in their neighbor’s eyes.

As long as the Republicans are still so committed to self-destructing, maybe there’s hope for a progressive future in spite of our recent lackluster efforts and losses.

Bullseye on Public Sector Workers and Unions

jstuart — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:49:02 +0000

New Orleans For all the talk about the U.S. Congress and what it might do at the hands of the new majority, there’s still a couple of circuit breakers handling too much power surge when business has to go to the Senate or even face a Presidential veto. In the states rouge legislators could be much more frightening, especially as they move against public employees and therefore their unions in this last bastion of relative labor strength.

Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times wrote a scary piece this week detailing some of the draconian steps that legislatures and new governors are proposing to stick it to public employees and their unions, including in some situations outright withdrawal of recognition for the unions. There are few folks out there that have not seen this coming particularly given the last year of struggle in heavily unionized California around state and local employees and the drumbeating by New York’s new democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, and President Obama on wage freezes.

Part of the problem is the wide misperception that public employees are living high on the hog with better salaries and benefits, so now it’s time for them to share in the pain. There is little evidence that this is in fact the truth. The only traditional advantage that public employees have had historically is that their jobs were simply more stable and secure than in the private sector, and workers traded the security of a job certain for the ups and downs of the private sector business cycle. Unions in the public sector, rather than being greedy, simply enjoyed the same security as their members since they were not facing constant employee turnover and therefore costs were less to service and generated a stable dues base. The real crises could be the loss of that stability.

There may be some states and isolated cities where certain jobs between private and public sector are equivalent when one measures both pay and benefits, but this has been an exhaustively studied situation, and the notion that there is a significant public sector advantage is largely a politicians’ mirage. A good example often in the news is the mismatch of pay for public sector nurses compared to those in the private sector where devotion to the job is about all that holds the workers. Lower wage workers in the service sector have increasingly been contracted out in past economic crises and are tit for tat with the private sector if not below.

The advantages argued in the past for public sector pensions are also disappearing, especially as the reports of public underfunding build up in piles these days. In fact what is often ignored is that some of these same pensions substitute for social security, so that if they are degraded public workers could find themselves up a terrible creek.

Contrary to what the right wing is arguing, public employees are not pampered and over paid. The real issue is more likely “defunding” the unions which have been their protectors, especially the aggressive and politically powerful SEIU and AFSCME. Greenhouse makes this point as well arguing that tactically forcing unions to spent more in defense would defang them in terms of political spending for 2012 federally and at the local and state levels.

This is a bad time for this fight, but there’s no reason to “blame the victim” — public employees — when this is just brass knuckle political war. We might as well engage the battle on the real ground rather than the make believe world.

Brewer, Bankers, and Union Busters – Election Day!

dine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 14:12:29 +0000

Grizzly Mom voted!

New Orleans Yesterday was the first day of our future and from all reports it was much, much scarier than Halloween might have ever hoped to be. Look at the cases in point.

In the federal hearing on immigration madness in Arizona, Governor Brewer took time out of her campaign schedule (ok, that’s a lie; the hearing WAS her campaign schedule after all!) to rubberneck at the federal judges parsing the hate from the law in SB 1070. From NDLON tweets at the trial and the story, it seemed many of the questions went to the issue of exactly why the state should be doing the federal government’s job. With the Republican Tea Party explosion, how many pieces of anti-immigrant can we now expect? Certainly, the hope for reform needs a total retooling to mount a push back from our base in progressive cities and states to offset the madness.

Our friend, Joe McCartin, labor history professor at Georgetown, was quoted liberally in the New York Times, on the coming attacks against labor unions with Republican Tea Party ascendancy, but all that did was put a little sugar in the coffee, because it was a bitter drink to swallow. Card check has been dead, but

they intend to bury it to no one’s surprise. Prevailing wages for construction workers is on the chopping block, but the Republicans may not have gotten the word on how much that has been eviscerated in many communities already. They must be just positioning to take early credit for some of what they have already done. The only good news is that there may be a stalemate, but given the decline in labor strength, a stalemate is another nail in our coffin, unless we finally shift directions and change strategy.

There is a great scene and line in the new movie, Social Network, where then Harvard President and always arrogant Larry Summers, turns to an aide, while meeting with the whining crew roaring elitists, and says, “punch me in the face, now!” This is how I felt this morning reading the Times story on the bailout bankers positioning themselves after their economy collapsing performances of recent years and their disaster tour on foreclosures. These guys are coming back to power. They are exulting at the prospects of defunding regulation under the Frank bill, SEC, and other regulatory agencies. They are buying each other t-shirts to wear under their silk ties that say: “F**k you – We Have Learned NOTHING!”

It’s one thing to go to the polls holding your nose. It’s another when you have to make sure you have a bag packed by the time you come back from voting, so you are ready to roll and run at any moment!

Bet on SEIU in West Coast Family Feud

jstuart — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:43:42 +0000

New Orleans In about a month the biggest union election in 2010 will be counted once all of the mail ballots are in from over 40,000 Kaiser Permanente workers who are being polled. Unfortunately this not another milestone of successful union organizing, but hopefully the final major battle in the intense and long standing, bloody war between SEIU and what is left of its breakaway dissident local of many names, but most recently United Healthcare West, old Local 250. Elections even in the constrained settings undemocratic workplaces are never easy to predict, because when it’s all said and done, workers vote with their feet and they’ve been running all different directions at Kaiser in the last several years of this internecine war. Nonetheless without talking to any insiders and without being privy to any internal voter assessments or polling from either side, I’m pretty confident that it’s not too early to declare SEIU the winner now, way before the votes are counted.

Here’s why I believe they will win:

Delays Always Favor the Company: This decertification election has been on and off too long to allow the challenger to maintain the momentum against the incumbent. In regular organizing that means the company wins more than 2/3rds of the time that the election is over 60 days from the filing. In this case the “company” is SEIU, and its ability to tie up the challenger means just on the numbers, before any work was done, if normal odds prevailed their chances of winning were at 2/3rds.
Change the Boss: One of the standard pages in any law firm or company side labor relations manual holds that when you are caught behind, it’s best to change the boss or whomever the workers see as responsible for the problem. SEIU’s boss has changed. In this very personal struggle between Sal Rosselli from Oakland and SEIU’s Andy Stern from DC, too much of the dissident’s campaign always presumed it was safe to individualize the attack and target Stern as the problem. When Rosselli saw me in the Detroit hotel hallway and told me he had heard that Mary Kay Henry had the votes to become SEIU’s president, he chortled that it was “good news for the union, but bad news for me.” Had Anna Burger, Andy’s longtime leadership partner prevailed in the board election, the dissidents would have easily just said “same ol’ same ol’” but in Henry the workers would see a new leader from California harder to brand with the problems in Stern’s legacy, yet someone who had fought Rosselli for 20 years and had been the losing candidate as Secretary-Treasurer to Rosselli’s winning slate when he took over Local 250 after that trusteeship. I’m not saying that Stern left SEIU because of this election, but I will say that SEIU’s organizing expert, Tom Woodruff, has been in too many hard fought company/union elections, not to have calculated the impact on this election.

The New Kaiser Contract Helps: The other thing that SEIU’s legal team bought the International and their folks in the bunkers of Northern California was enough time to negotiate a new contract with the employer, Kaiser Permanent, and its chain of hospitals and clinics in the state. NLRB lawyers are maddening to union organizers and have driven many to drink and screaming as they argue from their training manuals that the contract ratification vote is a bellwether for a decertification vote, so “why do you care if there’s a decert; you ratified the contract?” The dissidents needed to bleed the new contract, make the ratification close, or block the ratification entirely and for whatever and a number of reasons, they were unable to do this. In fact the published reports indicate that the new contract was wildly popular with the Kaiser members and approved by 80%+, as I recall. The tactical advantage lay heavily with the incumbent, and SEIU seized the advantage and powered it home, but this also hurt the dissident campaign, since much of Rosselli’s framing has been that SEIU’s merger-mania in California would “reduce standards.” People like Dave Reagan (originally from SEIU Local 1199 WV/OH/KY, Woodruff’s old local) and Hal Ruddick (who worked at my SEIU Local 100 for 10 years) know how to negotiate a contract and made the most out of it.
Majority Signs SEIU Election Support Petition: Another classic tactic that all of us have used in elections with the company focuses on rebuilding the majority during the election campaign. This is a huge barometer and seeks to restore the momentum that usually falls off at the point of filing for the election, which is usually the union’s strongest moment against the company. The 30%+ showing of interest that Rosselli’s forces mustered both before and during the original chaos and rage at the SEIU trusteeship has long dissipated, and the ability of the current SEIU ground forces to produce and show a “public” majority that workers at the hospitals and centers will see sends a huge blinking message to the full Kaiser workforce that SEIU has the majority and is going to win. Workers like it or not, vote overwhelmingly with whichever side they believe is going to win. That’s why companies are willing to break the law, coerce, intimidate, and fire leaders to send a message of power to back off workers and convince them that struggle is futile and victory impossible. Workers have to survive. Individual bosses and union leaders come and go. A majority on a petition within 2 months of the vote count should make SEIU the heavy voting favorite.
SEIU Ready for the Ground War on GOTV: In the last huge test in this blood battle SEIU proved it was willing to do what was necessary in the Fresno home health care challenge and eked out a narrow victory after pouring in millions and moving thousands of people into the Fresno get out the vote effort. The dissidents and their supporters took some comfort and counted some coup, because they were able to keep the margin down with SEIU only narrowly holding the unit. That was then, and this is now. Time has traveled and other benchmarks have been set, but SEIU will spend millions again and every indication is that they will once again put a thousand or more people on the streets in the GOTV effort. The dissidents are in less of position to match this effort now than they were.
SEIU Has Crippled the Dissidents Financially: One thing I have learned as a union organizer over the last 30 years is that when the company really wants to beat you, they can absolutely beat you: it comes down to will. The real story financially in the SEIU battle is their willingness to barter their future and “play for anything” stakes in this internal fight. They isolated the dissidents financially by cutting off the critical outside sources of money and organizing talent. Stern did this first by making peace with what used to be called the California Nurses Association, now an AFL affiliate, and essentially giving up the fight that SEIU had made for nurses jurisdiction for years, helping his cause first within Kaiser where they would have been a formidable problem and inside the workplace voice against SEIU had he not neutralized them. The price was high and included walking away from thousands of workers that SEIU had everything but won in Ohio and elsewhere, but this is part of the “below the line” calculus on this deal. Mary Kay Henry finished the job with Stern’s departure by making peace, also at a huge price, with John Wilhelm of Unite HERE and his former co-president Bruce Raynor, now an SEIU VP with Workers United. A couple of months ago when I was in northern California briefly it was clear that HERE’s interjection of money and organizers into this family feud was effective and was hurting SEIU. This was not a deal that Stern turned out to have been able to make, but Henry made it job #1 and got it done, and done in time to impact this election. Wilhelm didn’t have many cards but he played what he had, particularly his strength in Local 2 with Mike Casey and his ability to leverage Maria Elena Durazo in Los Angeles with the county federation, perfectly. Oh, yeah, they lost a lawsuit, too, but who cares that was just garnish and no money has changed hands. With these two deals, SEIU cut off the outside bankers and made the fight totally uneven in terms of resources.
Mail Ballots Favor GOTV Outside the Workplace: We love mail ballots. We never lose them. We’ll do almost anything to get one in an election. Clearly, a unit of 40,000+ had to have a mail ballot, and with such a ballot the odds roll over to whichever side can get to the voters where they are voting and in this case that means at home, not at work. The dissidents can’t match the home field advantage here. What they have is at the workplaces where they still have committed workers in place. I don’t need to talk to anybody to know that SEIU’s willingness to gear up a huge GOTV operation means that their assessments and polling indicate that the more that people vote; the more likely they are to win. They obviously feel now that their real campaign is against apathy and not Rosselli, and that they can only lose if they get a light turnout and the diehards are both sides are left to decide.

Anyway you look at it, this is life or death for both sides, and SEIU knew it and has taken advantage of it powerfully to paint the dissidents into an impossible tactical bind, regardless of the support and sympathy they have in California and in much of what passes for a chattering class in the rickety house of labor. I’m not saying that Stern’s sudden and still largely inexplicable resignation from SEIU was motivated by this election, since by all accounts much credibility should be given to the fact that he was “tired” as he’s said publically, and winning the health care vote at least left the rationalization of leaving well, but no one will ever convince me that all of these factors didn’t come to play in the decision and all of its aftermaths. If he was going to leave mid-term anyway, then the spring was the perfect time so that all of this business could get done the way SEIU needed it to be done.

SEIU will retain its support among Kaiser workers and keep this unit. I would bet they will get more than 65% support when all the votes are tallied.

I could be wrong, but I sure would be surprised if it turned out any differently than all of these signs are pointing.

Geography of Decline in USA Jobs

dine — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:35:58 +0000

New Orleans This slideshow was sent to me by a friend from Hamilton, Montana. It vividly and graphically shows the more than doubling of the unemployment rate, county by county, state by state, over a little more than two years from January 2007 when unemployment was 4.6% to June 2010 when we were at 9.7%.

Worth a look to understand the dilemma faced as the fall comes upon us and political fortunes and weighed by the impact of the recession.

Double click below to see the trends unfold for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P__6W7bJVRQ&feature=related

Updated 08.5.10, The Decline: The Geography of a Recession by LaToya Egwuekwe (OFFICIAL)

Pols Pimping for Sodexho

dine — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 02:17:52 +0000

Phoenix I’m not shocked, just disgusted. A couple of days ago the story came out that the giant, French-based minimal wage, international labor contractor, Sodexho, had hired on Dick Gephardt, who in another life was a lion for labor as the one-time minority leader for the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives, who often drew standing ovations telling about his father, the Teamsters mild truck driver from St. Louis. Those were the days of course: the days when he needed labor’s support and wanted to run for President. Now his relationships with labor seemed to have sweated down to being just another angle to make a buck.

He’s not alone of course, god no! His former chief of staff signed on with him, as did veterans of other labor backed candidates like Al Gore, John Kerry, and John Edwards. But, what makes this so treacherous is the fact that former Congressman Gephardt signed on with Sodexho deliberately to help catch flack for them and offset the pressure being applied by SEIU in trying to get justice for Sodexho workers here and abroad. That’s disgusting!

But lucrative! According to the Hill blog Sodexho has been busy:

The company has also hired Jeff Trammell, a former senior adviser to ex-Vice President Al Gore, to lobby for the firm.

The contracts with Gephardt’s lobbying group and Trammell and Co. represent the first time the food-services company has turned to outside lobbyists to work in Washington, according to a review of records by The Hill. Overall, the group has spent more than $5.6 million on internally hired lobbyists since 2002.

“We have hired those two groups for general business purposes,” said Jaya Bohlman, Sodexo’s vice president for public relations, in a voice mail to The Hill. Sodexo representatives did not respond to requests to elaborate further on the two lobbying contracts.

Gephardt Group Government Affairs has been lobbying for Sodexo since May 5, according to lobbying records, while Trammell and Co. has been lobbying for the company since May 3. Mike Shaffer, a former deputy director for constituent outreach for the 2004 presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and then-Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), is also lobbying for Sodexo at Trammell and Co.

We knew him when turns out to be when he still stood up for the working man, rather than just being another flack for a another union busting company.

Sad, but true! His father’s probably rolling over in his grave!

Mary Kay Henry Surprise SEIU Leader

jstuart — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 18:08:26 +0000

Detroit For a week I had been hearing that Mary Kay Henry, an old friend and currently one of several SEIU Executive Vice Presidents, was a dark horse candidate as the new SEIU International President to succeed the suddenly resigned Andy Stern. Certainly, Mary Kay would be an fantastic choice, but it was hard to believe that the current and long time Stern partner and Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger did not have her ducks in a row before the resignation. Even leaving the Puerto Rico convention two years ago, I was already hearing that Burger was trying in an almost unseemly way to buttonhole commitments from big locals to take Stern’s place on the assumption he would not finish the current term. When Sal Rosselli stopped me in the hallway of a Labor Notes Conference almost chortling to tell me the news, I was more than a little suspicious. Despite my respect for Sal, he and I go back many years with some hills and valleys along that highway, beginning with our standing all day in the driving rain only 10 feet from each other at an Oakland polling station, when he was elected president of old SEIU Local 250, and Mark Splain, the candidate Mary Kay and I supported was defeated.

The more I backtracked and talked to others, the more it made sense. Probably the most able leader in SEIU with Stern out of the picture would have been Dennis Rivera, the charismatic and wildly effective 1199 veteran, who played critical, early behind the scenes work in assembling the coalition to win health care reform. At the same time Rivera is person who sucks up all of the air in the room, and there seemed to have been “stern exhaustion.” The big locals created top down over the last decade and more all owed their existence and in most cases, other than Rosselli, their very positions to Stern often as appointed trustees or beneficiaries of master marriages. On a successor question they were going to get a voice, and they seem to have wanted a voice. Anna Burger is nothing if not able, but she is also prickly to work with, brusque to some, and having been a Stern wannabe would have been trying to out-Stern Stern in molding herself to a chance at president. The big locals would not have felt they owed her much of anything, and would have chafed at the prospect.

I would bet the farm a huge mover and shaker in the emergence of Mary Kay Henry as a compromise candidate is the old organizing director and longtime EVP, Tom Woodruff. People can argue about Tom’s skills and philosophy as an organizer, but he is indisputably second to none as an internal political organizer with a 6^th sense for maneuvering behind the scenes and emerging on the winning side of internal conflict. I say that with total admiration, since it is a critical organizing skill, and Tom is unparalleled there. With a vacuum at the top, Tom would have been looking for an alternative to Anna and would have been fearless in moving quickly in this area and would have been impossible for Stern to slowdown if he had wanted him to. And, Tom had some scores to settle, quite rightly.

Several years ago while I was still at SEIU, rumors that there was trouble in paradise within the team on the 8^th floor started to seep down that there had been a battle of the titans at the top of the leadership rungs. The way I eventually heard it from a half-dozen or more folks from secretaries to organizers, was that Woodruff had come within a hair of resigning and at the last minute pulled back because he “had work undone.” The issue was more Change to Win than SEIU, but Tom had been detailed over to build C2W and had some of the relationships with HERE and UNITE that made it work, when it worked. An unusual anti-AFL-CIO rule that governed C2W had been the creation of a revolving chair of C2W which would rotate to all of the heads of the big unions in turn. Anna Burger was to be the first president, but then at the end of her term, others would step in and assume the mantle. As the end of Anna’s first term approached for whatever and various reasons, Anna began moving with others to amend the C2W constitution to allow her to continue to serve multiple terms as president. When Woodruff caught wind of this, he went ballistic! This was treachery in his view. A line had been breached even in Tom’s organizing principles. After confronting Anna and demanding that she back off of this amendment and allow leadership change and failing to convince her, the contest then became whether or not Stern would step in and get Anna to do right or not. Woodruff threatened Stern that he would resign if Stern did not honor the original C2W governance provisions and direct Anna to step back from this power grab. Caught in the crossfire between Anna, his old comrade back to his earliest days in Pennsylvania and Tom Woodruff, who had been the architect of much of Andy’s vaunted organizing successes, Stern backed Burger effectively calling Woodruff’s bluff. My buddies in the secretarial pool described the atmosphere as icy on the floor with weeks going by and top leaders clearly not speaking

Anna should have known then that if Tom stayed she now had a mortal enemy. With this leadership shift, Woodruff undoubtedly had been organizing an “anybody but Anna” coalition for the last two years as well. He also knows something that even the most disciplined of unions sometimes forget: unions are political institutions and union leaders are fundamentally all politicians. It’s all about tending the base and counting the votes. Anna was efficient, tough, and managerial. She is not charismatic, she always speaks so quickly even from the dais that she can often not be understood, and she did not have a long term, loyal base of followers on her team, despite her years of effective and totally committed service. Woodruff would never have been a candidate, but he has always been a kingmaker, and I would bet money he shopped one candidate after another until he found one that would hold weight, and he knew all the issues he could use in organizing against Anna and had the reasons, motivations, and commitment to make it happen.

May Kay Henry is an excellent and competent union leader. She did yeoman’s work in putting together the behind the scenes work and relationships to bring organization with the Catholic hospital chains. She is not divisive, and there is huge pushback within SEIU now, growing over recent years, that some of the bare knuckles moves led by Stern, and often orchestrated by many, including Woodruff leading to C2W, and since then with UNITE-HERE and many internal messes, have heard the brand of the union that should be heralded as one of the few modern labor success stories. May Kay may not always deliver for you, but always makes you happy to see her, always has a hug for you, always a good word and a question about your partners and children. It is hard to believe that she was not the perfect compromise candidate.

For years I have felt the “president-in-waiting” is Dave Regan. I still think that, but he is young enough to wait and Mary Kay Henry will do just fine over the next 6 to 10 years (she’s only 52), and will surprise a lot of people both inside and outside SEIU with how good a job she will do. This may be Tom’s revenge, but she will not be anyone’s puppet.

This is going to be interesting for all of us who care about labor and may just help unite SEIU again and eventually the entire labor movement.

Pink Sheeting One on Ones

jstuart — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:42:12 +0000

New Orleans Obviously an article in the Times by Steven Greenhouse entitled, “Some Organizers Protest Their Union’s Tactics,” would catch my eye. One reads it with some peril given the bricks still being thrown from one glass window or another between SEIU and UNITE HERE, but despite that caveat, it’s worth serious attention. The article looks at the complaint from former UNITE HERE organizers about “pink sheeting,” which seem to have been a practice of recording highly personal information on pink sheets (they are now a different color) and allowing supervisory access to such information and using it to direct and drive organizers in a way that some find manipulative. Now in one of the rare articles we have about internal union business we get to read about tawdry internal affairs and psycho-babble mind games: kill me now!

The story gives way too much information about the internal conflicts lying in the back story of individual union organizers from broken families to weight issues to presumably everything else that they share with the life history of many in modern America. John Wilhelm, the head of UNITE HERE, said many of these practices have been reformed, and I’m confident that this will be done at the human resources and personnel management level.

Having talked with a lot of UNITE HERE organizers though, I actually think the issue is deeper and perhaps more serious and lies at the heart of the fundamental interchange that organizers are trained to have with workers based on the construction of “one-on-ones” which are common in some forms of organizing methodology. “One-on-ones” are commonly used by community organizers, especially in the faith based practice found in the Industrial Areas Foundation and other operations, as a basic construct for doing the hundreds of leadership visits to assemble a project. They are designed to achieve many goals, but one of them is establishing a connection between the organizer and the community leader by deliberately sharing some personal experience to establish a common bond.

I should disclose quickly that although I understand “one-on-ones” as a methodology, I have never been comfortable with their practice or their claims, largely because in my view they inappropriately elevated the role of the organizer in a way that both create a false mutuality with potential leadership and a distortion of the roles that would most effectively build the organization particularly around the issues of organizer-dependency and a conflation of organizers and leaders making them almost synonymous. It is neither the way I have trained or supervised organizers nor the way I have been involved in building organizations or organizing models. Nonetheless, I have always been respectful of the practice, despite my reservations, because I was confident that the best practices in the craft probably protected against some of these potential problems. In organizers’ shoptalk we used to kid about talking to organizers from other “schools” and having the conversation turn creepy when they started “one-on-one-ing” us and crossing boundaries on a personal level. But, realistically in doing leadership visits and building leadership relationships over time, all of us understood that real personal friendships would emerge and rigid protocols would evaporate over years of work and mutual understandings.

As the use of “one-on-ones” from community organizing morphed into some labor organizing, I think the adaptation got even more bent. In looking under the hood with HERE UNITE organizers, part of the construction of the “one-on-one” was more deliberately an effort to pull out of the organizers a core motivation for why they did the work that was deeply rooted in explaining their motivations, angers, and sense of powerless they shared with the workers based on intensely personal experiences in the organizer’s life. Divorces, family issues, dependencies, addictions, and whatever else frequently emerged as core issues for sharing in the one-on-one. Staff meetings and training sessions described to me were sometimes too eerily reminiscent of some of the old, hugely discredited Synanon sessions so notorious from the last years of the United Farm Workers under Caesar Chavez.

It’s easy to see how the fruit can start rolling from that tree and end up being stored away an allowed to rot when used inappropriately.

Wilhelm will stop abuse from the supervisors. I’m confident in that.

Might be harder, though frankly way more important, to take a harder look at the core organizing model of UNITE HERE and whether or not the ways and means of using “one-on-ones” doesn’t need a total review and reworking right at the foundation level.

Election Lessons on the Hudson

jstuart — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:17:58 +0000

New Orleans It’s a small sample, but the Virginia bellwether and the deeply blue state New Jersey went hard Republican and in Jersey tossed a Democratic governor looking for a second shot. Across the river, New York City voters surprised the chattering political classes by almost moving Mayor Bloomberg to his next career as a philanthropist and out of his current posting as a semi-politician. A couple of thoughts crossed my mind.

Voter slaps at Corzine and Bloomberg have a populist anti-Wall Street and decidedly, “money-can’t-buy-my-vote” cast to them for two rich guys willing to spend whatever it takes, particularly the record setting $90M outlay by Mayor Bloomberg in his very close race.
Unions need to listen to their members more and to political pros and consultants less. It’s embarrassing to know that two huge NYC political players, SEIU and UFT/AFT, took a walk on this election. Their members didn’t. Controller Thompson, the challenger, romped with African-Americans and voters making less than $100,000 both of which are heavily represented by those two unions. Had they not been twiddling thumbs on the sidelines, this race would have been even closer and might have sent a message against big money politics that could reverberate around the country.

The Working Families Party of New York is once again a HUGE winner this election! WFP was vocal from the first blush against the 3^rd term effort and said so unabashedly. They refused Bloomberg access to their line, despite persistent pressure. Not having the WFP doing turnout hurt the Mayor, and having them do turnout for Thompson dramatically helped him bring the race close. Big, WOW, here with props for Danny Cantor and all of the WFP team!

What are the progressive forces going to do without the GOTV and registration work in the community which ACORN has indicated it is unlikely to play in 2010 and beyond? It was wild to read the pre-election right turnout scare tactics using ACORN as the boogieman. A DC spokesperson for ACORN said they were not even involved anywhere in this race in New Jersey, and despite all of the strum and dang, ACORN had no base or operations in the NY-23^rd race. Turnout was low and decidedly down among minorities and youth. The more one reads and studies this rightwing ideological attack the smarter and more effective it seems, if its main purpose was to help level the playing field by successfully pushing one of the players off the field.

And, yes, none of this was about Obama, but all politics is local and the President will get the message. According to the New York Times, Bloomberg was effective in putting the President and his people to the sidelines with a head fake and some bluster, and Thompson’s work as the standard bearer for the Democrats could seen a different storyline with real White House help rather the shrinking back, timidity that came with riding the donkey in New York. What’s up with that?!?

If I were in one of the President’s men, I would be getting an apology together (and maybe offering my resignation!), because this is a huge wakeup call from the base, and it needs to be heard clearly without putting more sugar in this sad cup of coffee.