With New President Will SEIU Change?

http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2010/05/01/seiuchange/

Posted on May 1, 2010 by paulgarver

by Paul Garver

For once, there is agreement between the Andy Stern/Anna Burger leadership team and their harshest critics on the left of the labor movement. In an interview with Washington Post writer Alec MacGillis, Stern referred to both Mary Key Henry and Anna Burger as his “lifelong partners,” either of whom would make a good president for SEIU. Either will “build on what’s happened here, not tear it down and change it.”

Anna Burger agrees. In a gracious letter withdrawing her candidacy, she referred to Mary Key as her ‘union sister,” with whom she will remain a close working colleague for the benefit of SEIU members and all working people. She wrote that “The media is just wrong when they suggest that this contest represents a shift in SEIU’s priorities or a rejection of the Stern/Burger agenda.”

Labor Notes editorialized that the contest was merely about “which successor to Stern’s throne would best carry on its mission to quickly expand the union by offering value to corporations.” Steve Early, in a detailed and informative posting on the Working In these Times blog, outlined Mary Kay Henry’s history as a loyal staff officer with no rank-and-file experience in SEIU who played over the years such a prominent role in the conflicts within SEIU’s healthcare unions in California that would make it especially difficult for her to resolve SEIU’s disastrous civil war with the National Union of Healthcare Workers.

But other commentators find reasons to believe that SEIU might undertake a modest course correction in the near future. I recently outlined a minimal reform program for SEIU on this blog.

Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect hoped that the electoral contest between Burger and Henry would “yield some serious discussion about new directions for American labor.” He cites SEIU International Executive Vice-President Gerry Hudson’s call for labor to build a larger more transformative social movement for change and to abandon its Washington insider strategy which has failed so spectacularly in winning passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. David Moberg and Stephan Franklin, both on Working In These Times, cite the possibility that Henry’s leadership style will be more collegial and permit more decentralized decision-making within SEIU, and that she would be more open to settling the toxic internal battles within labor that led to the formation of the now foundering Change to Win breakaway and the bitter battle between SEIU and Unite Here.

The withdrawal of Anna Burger’s candidacy diminishes the chances for the kind of forthright debate within SEIU that Meyerson hopes for. However the decision of United Healthcare Workers-East (SEIU’s largest local, better known as 1199) to endorse Henry after both candidates addressed its board may have indicated a serious desire for change in SEIU’s direction. Other large locals in New York, California and Canada quickly followed suit. Some key arguments were those outlined by the four SEIU International Executive Vice-Presidents Hudson, Medina, Woodruff and Regan in their letter endorsing Henry (consensus building, team effort, respect for diversity, and above all re-establishing SEIU’s relationships with the rest of the labor and progressive communities). The other motivation appears to have been to focus more on the priority of organizing, viewing the exercise of political influence primarily as a tool for building a stronger voice for union members.

FULL story at link.

SEIU is up to there necks in debt and might have to merge with an other union,i am sure Andy the rat has a nice job lined up for himself...