San Francisco One conversation after another with union organizers, organizing directors, and veteran labor activists in the Bay Area over a 24-hour period was enough to trigger a profound fog of depression over any hopes for labors near term revival. There were a long list of symptoms with no consensus on the full nature of the disease and even less feeling that any hopes for a cure were imminent.
No small consideration among the confusion and consternation still revolves around the bitter and enduring internecine struggle within the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its huge California healthcare local headquartered here. A rerun election is still pending between SEIU and the rump local headed by former SEIU official Sal Rosselli. Despite the quixotic odds of Rosselli, succeeding war drums are beating throughout the Bay and beyond. Rosselli has fashioned an amalgamation or affiliation with the International Association of Machinists (IAM) which not only provides them institutional cover within the AFL-CIO but some ballast from its ever quotable and brash President Buffenbarger. One knowledgeable source told me that the Machinists had committed the resources of 100 paid organizers to work for the Rosselli local, which will no doubt be doubled, tripled, or quadrupled by Mary Kay Henry at the SEIU International level and everything that Dave Regan and his SEIU incumbent local can throw at this as well.
If this wasn’t enough SEIU drama, I also repeatedly heard stories of fights between Regan’s local and the largely public employee members of SEIU 1021 in the Bay Area as well as over political candidates and other area strategic concerns. Political organizers I know well were claiming that the price tag on independent expenditures on a San Francisco County supervisors race is at the center of the dispute, and one in which the rest of labor including the central body and the building trades have joined, will likely register at $1 million, which is shocking for a local race at that level. Mediators, money, consultants, and others are sticking to this fracas like ants on honey with no resolution in sight it seems.
No doubt the message is already coming through the fog. While the house of labor is sliding into the Pacific, there are huge battle royals not for growth but to arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
How about the Walmart organizing campaign which some argue is the only really big effort being engaged anywhere by unions? I was shocked and surprised to find that the warehouse and distribution workers that are being targeted by the campaign in California are not the directly owned and operated distribution centers run by Walmart where they have huge investments and skin in the game, and where we had a lot of experience in Merced and elsewhere, but the contract warehouses and port breakdown centers which Walmart could abandon at the first hint of organizing. I could get no real confirmation that the overall and longterm commitment of UFCW to this campaign and organizing this company had measurably increased since the efforts we managed with WARN and the Walmart Workers’ Association in Florida. One wag talked about too many “Hegelian strategies” at the top of unions that were grand visions without no real world on the ground understanding of the work and workers that would move organizing progress.
At the point one organizer started talking about 50,000 unorganized garment workers in Los Angeles County and no one was clear whether HERE or SEIU was really the union for garment workers, but everyone was clear that no one was even vaguely thinking about organizing but a garment worker center in LA with less than 150 members, I knew it was time to change the subject to almost anything else other than whether or not the new hope for labor is coming out of California these days.