SEIU
On Jul 30, 2006, at 4:01 PM, Jim Straub wrote:
No offense intended, Doug! Perhaps I’m indulging in some strategic snideness. But the specific professors I jab at are Fitch— who
believes home health aides are not ‘really’ workers (in a way that, presumably, college profs are); and Yoshie, who’s made many offensive claims
that are baldly false about a great seiu local I used to work for which she
has lived down the street from for a decade and never met in any way.
First a clarification: Fitch is an adjunct and freelance writer who
lives on a poverty-level income. Yoshie is a grad student who lives
on roughly the same income. So these are not privileged people talking.
And Fitch’s point about home health aides is that organizing them is
very different from organizing workers with real private-sector
employers: in Calif and Illinois, they won recognition from
politicians who’d received campaign contributions from SEIU. This is
hardly a model for organizing the service sector.
SEIU is on the record as being for single payer.
You sure could have fooled me, given the nonsense that Stern has been
spewing lately. As Adolph Reed says, Stern’s vision of the labor
movement seems to be as one giant human resources department. And
before you denounce Adolph as some Ivy League professor, remember
that he’s spent much of the last decade trying to organize a Labor
Party, a thankless and very non-elite task.
I actually do not have a spare hour each day to devote to single-payer organizing.
No one expects you to. But how much money does SEIU have? And why is
it expending human and financial resources on pay or play schemes, if
time and money are so short?
To win something that big takes more than it polling well (many building blocks of socialism poll well, which could not
be won by any conceivable political alignment in the real world in the US
today). But if it is so imminently acheivable, surely evil Andy Stern’s truculence cannot slow down the existing left from winning it without the
purple hordes joining in?
Organized labor still has oodles of resources, so how they expend
them matters a lot. And if stuff polls well, it means you’re not
pissing in the wind trying to organize around it. If, instead, Stern
writes op-eds in the WSJ appealing to CEOs, he’s wasting his time,
and that of anyone who sympathizes with the working class. Given the
current balance of forces, CEOs don’t need to give Stern the time of
day, much less sign on to his program.
Doug