SEIU & health care
[A friend deeply involved in single-payer agitation writes in answer
to my question about what SEIU is up to…]
I think the people who you’re talking to are either drinking Andy
Stern’s koolaid, lying to themselves, lying to you or some
combination of the three. SEIU has been actively involved in
undercutting single-payer activism since before Stern took over.
After he became president, he cut the deal with Kaiser, which put
them directly in bed with the corporate health care industry, and
they’ve fought against single-payer, or any other form of real
national health care, everywhere ever since. And all this crap about
how we can incrementally reform our way to social democracy with
corporate partnerships has the stench of Bernstein and more cynical
strains of class collaborationism all over it (to which the smart,
Ivy League union staffers respond that that was then, this is now,
and produce charts to show how the transition is going to come about
if we can just increase “union density” a couple of percentage points
by the next election and get a few more Dems elected). The pageantry
of mobilization — the carefully orchestrated Potemkin demos
featuring spirited crowds of black and brown workers in purple
jackets and t-shirts is a perfume over that stench. This is exactly
what I’ve been saying about Stern all along. I used to think that his
model of the union is One Big Company Union; in the last couple of
years I’ve decided that it’s more One Big Collective Human Resource
Dept. It’s telling that Stern/SEIU remain the darlings of the left;
it’s a measure of the left’s dilettantishness, insularity and
stupidity; the pathology of identity politics; and the Yuppieization
of that wing of the labor movement. A few years ago I was struck to
come away from a meeting with a young union official thinking that
she reminded me of a combination of Alexandra Kollontai and an Ivy
League-trained corporate lawyer. This is a longer conversation but
one I’d love to have. Have you seen Steve Early’s review of Stern’s
book?