LA Times: The battle for labor's future

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-lichtenstein22-2008may22,0,3126404.story

The SEIU's Andy Stern has an ambitious plan. Not everyone is on board.
By Nelson Lichtenstein
May 22, 2008

When an internal fight at a trade union erupts into the news, American culture has a ready frame. It's Marlon Brando versus Lee J. Cobb in "On the Waterfront" once again, perhaps updated by a recent episode of "The Wire," set among the corrupt and gritty longshoremen of the Baltimore docks. Or it's a modern-day retelling of the Jimmy Hoffa/Teamsters story, destined to end in another mysterious gangland murder.

But there are no shiny suits or pinkie rings in the conflict at the Service Employees International Union, the big, fast-growing organization of janitors, hospital workers and public employees that has more than 650,000 members in California alone. All the dramatis personae are idealists who came out of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and although turf battles and dues money are certainly on the agenda, the real question they are debating is the road forward for the American trade union movement.

Leading the cast is Andy Stern, the SEIU's national president since 1996. A Pennsylvania SEIU activist in the 1970s, Stern was put in charge of union organizing efforts in the 1980s, just as President Reagan and other resurgent Republicans helped stiffen corporate management's hostility to trade unionism. The SEIU was one of the few unions that continued to grow in those difficult times, sparked by militant organizing campaigns such as the Justice for Janitors movement, which had its epicenter in Los Angeles.

Stern, now 57, has been a bold, impatient leader, which has earned him a spot on the cover of almost every mass circulation magazine, including Business Week under the query "Can This Man Save Labor?"

Stern's ambition is to transform and revive American unionism. In 2005, he led several big unions, including the SEIU, the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers, out of the AFL-CIO. In their new coalition, known as Change to Win, Stern pushed each of the unions to devote a qualitatively large proportion of their resources to organizing, even if it meant reducing the number of staff who "serviced" existing members. He insisted that unless unions such as the SEIU achieved a far higher degree of "density" in specific industries, such as healthcare, they wouldn't be strong enough to raise wages and working conditions for everyone.

Stern also has made it clear that he sees the U.S. economy as a single integrated system in which the status of labor is closely related to the structure of capitalism. This has led the SEIU to take great interest in issues that once would have been considered irrelevant to what went on at the bargaining table, such as how to regulate private equity firms, which now control companies that employ more than a million workers in industries the SEIU seeks to organize. Stern has sought to strike deals, or at least open negotiations, on a variety of employment-related issues with politicians and businessmen, including Wal-Mart's H. Lee Scott and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who have often been hostile to unionism.


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