Re: more on SEIU’s “pushing the comfort zone” with their partners
On Apr 15, 2007, at 4:06 PM, Jim Straub wrote:
and if its all just idle speculation from some labor geek labor notes intern two years out of amherst or whatever who’s
never worked in a nursing home, spent time in one, or organized with teh
workers of one, but is just offering a theoretical opinion derived from their arduous study of la botz and trotsky, well I would argue that that
person speaks without credibility.
The sources of the Seattle Times and SF Weekly articles are people
within SEIU who don’t like these contracts, and see them being
imposed from Washington, i.e., Stern & Co. The Labor Notes intern two
years out of Amherst crack is completely beside the point.
Did you read the articles before writing this post?
Workers voices muzzled? What on earth are you talking about?
This is from the SF Weekly article:
This is the new era of worker-employer collaboration touted in Stern’s book, and in articles that characterize him as a bold modernizer. Journalists, however, appear to have been so caught up in Stern’s tactic of getting weepy about his deceased daughter during interviews that they’ve failed to find out exactly what it is he’s talking about.
If they had, they would have discovered a monumental catch: workers who joined the union specifically as part of the 2003 agreement with nursing home chains, an agreement that is supposed to be a national model for corporate collaboration, get a severely stripped-down version of union representation. In important ways, the agreement causes workers to lose rights rather than gain them.
Under the 2003 lobbying pact, all nursing home workers entering the union under the auspices of the agreement would work under uniform, employer-friendly labor contracts called “template agreements.”
These agreements specify that the union is not allowed to report health care violations to state regulators, to other public officials, or to journalists, except in cases where the employees are required by law to report egregious cases of neglect and abuse to the state. The agreements also prohibit the unionized workers from picketing, and negotiating improvements in health care or other benefits. They prohibit the workers from having a say in their job conditions.
And this is from the Seattle Times article:
In a letter last December to SEIU’s national executive board, Jerome Brown, a former board member who served 27 years as president of a major SEIU local in New England, warned that such agreements could alienate workers and create “the very antithesis of true rank-and- file unionism.”
Brown, in a recent interview, acknowledged that heavily regulated nursing homes are a tough place to organize.
“Working with the industry to improve the fundamentals of the industry is a smart strategy,” Brown said.
But Brown said the Local 775 agreement, which he has read, “goes significantly further” than other labor-management pacts he has seen. He said he is especially troubled by provisions that take key organizing and bargaining decisions out of the hands of workers.
For instance, the draft agreement says nursing-home operators get to make the “final unilateral decision” on which homes the union can try to organize.
If workers at any other homes seek to organize with the SEIU, the union is required to disclaim the effort.
[…]
Brown and others also worry that workers will be muzzled by the “negative rhetoric” provision.
Under the draft agreement, workers would abide by laws that mandate reporting of abuse and neglect. But the union promises to not try to put pressure on management “through voluntary adverse reporting to any regulatory or other oversight agency.”
And what kind of horseshit remark is this for an SEIU spokesman to
make? “”We doWe don’t want to have a labon’t want to have a labor
movement in this country that’s primarily about protecting the
forklift operator who fell asleep on the job.”
These agreements are secret - does that mean that the workers can’t
see what their union has agreed to?
Critique of seiu is turning into a fetish of the left. Nobody is
interested in finding out details or names or facts or industrial realities.
Just read stern’s latest press release and fire off the appropriate labor notes article. Irrelevancy heaped on irrelevancy.
Again, Labor Notes has nothing to do with this. For an internal
critique by the UHW, check out http://media.sfweekly.com/789842.0.pdf.
Doug