New Orleans

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.

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)

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!

New Orleans

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.

New Orleans

• 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.

Philadelphia

I was not surprised because part of the reason I had agreed to support the great work in Philly lay at the footsteps of a good example of the potential of majority unionism.  For several years JwJ here under its director Fabricio Rodriguez had been involved in the long, arduous process of supporting the building of an organization among the 175 security workers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  After several years the organization had navigated the obstacles for security workers in organizing and recently had transitioned to an independent union, filed, and won a representation election handily, and not surprisingly having already proven the organization at the workplace long ago.  Now, they challenges of bargaining away, but that’s another story.

Majority unionism is what I have called the process of changing the labor organizing paradigm to allow workers first (not employers!) decide they want an organization, build strength through direct membership and direct action, and using that power along with community and political leverage to win recognition and advances regardless of any other obstacles in law or habit.  This kind of strategy led to the huge success in our generation among informal workers (home health and home day care) which have added more than a half-million members in the last 30 years to the ranks of organized labor.  This is also the heart of the successful pilot we led in Florida several years ago to prove that Wal-Mart workers could be organized a different way.

The hard question asked by several of the union lawyers and reps in the room, was how do you make the organization sustainable over the time frame necessary to win?  This question was particularly important because the examples from home health care and Wal-Mart were based on more modest dues levels (in some cases only $10/month) than what many of them were accustomed to seeing in existing unions.  Certainly this had also been our challenge as well, and led to our independent union becoming part of the SEIU, and kept us from continuing the Wal-Mart Workers Association as an independent entity.

The answer I was too well mannered to give was that this question lies at the heart of the dilemma between being a union movement and an institutional structure.  The efforts among farmworkers, home care workers, and others – including what we are doing with ragpickers and cartoneros now – are rooted in deep political, individual, and organizational commitments over long time frames of sacrifice and struggle until victory is achieved.  These are projects that don’t fit the normal box of excellent wages and benefits for union organizers, but will be driven by rare organizing zealots willing to pay the price for years in the conviction and passion that success will justify the climb long into the future.  There’s a crazy, courageous history to this, but my friends were right:  it’s not a model.

But it is a way to shift the paradigm and turn the tide, especially if we can convince unions and others to help balance the books while the work is done until what I, perhaps crazily, believe will be the inevitable victory.  The workers want organizations.  They want power on the job.  Eventually, we are going to have to pay the dues, and give them what they demand, even if it is harder than we like and different than what we know.

The papers were full of reports of possible compromises looking for a way to secure a vote here or there. Some of it was patently absurd. Workers just can’t seem to catch a break!

Good example: Chamber of Commerce. One story, I think by the Times’ Greenhouse said the Chamber was demanding 45 days between filing and an election – heck, the average now is less than than I think! These folks are obviously just obfuscating.

There is talk about “quick” elections in the 21 day or 3 week range, which would be about half the average now. Anything might be better than what we have, but one world of hurt can be administered to workers in 3 weeks by these lawyer and consultant goons, so it’s unclear whether that will solve the problem or any real problem at all?

Senator Diane Feinstein from California seemed to be shopping a compromise that would forego elections if a majority of workers mailed in their signed cards to the NLRB for cross checking. Frankly, that’s a hard one for me to follow. A business might want to challenge the demand for recognition if it is presented to the labor board, but would not if it were mailed to the labor board? Would the future rely on constant litigation trying to prove whether a worker personally went to the mailbox or had a friend or their local union representative go to the mailbox for them? Huh?

Why all of the grabbing at straws? This is broken. Fix it!