{"id":28105,"date":"2023-08-23T13:24:06","date_gmt":"2023-08-23T20:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=28105"},"modified":"2023-08-23T13:24:07","modified_gmt":"2023-08-23T20:24:07","slug":"seiu-the-carpenters-still-changing-to-win-or-changing-the-wrong-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/08\/23\/seiu-the-carpenters-still-changing-to-win-or-changing-the-wrong-way\/","title":{"rendered":"SEIU & THE CARPENTERS: STILL \u201cCHANGING TO WIN\u201d OR CHANGING THE WRONG WAY?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by\u00a0Steve Early<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0August 21, 2023 (BeyondChron.org)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Assessing the Labor Movement<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a recent conversation with an otherwise well-informed young labor activist, I made a passing reference to Change to Win, a national labor federation formed in 2005 by defectors from the AFL-CIO. \u201cChange to what?\u201d she asked. \u201cNever heard of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her response was not surprising, given the short shelf life of the organizational brand in question. Launched with much media fanfare, Change to Win initially represented 5.5 million workers, about one-fifth of the AFL\u2019s total membership.  Its founders\u2014the Service Employees, Teamsters, Carpenters, Laborers, United Farm Workers, Food and Commercial Workers, and UNITE-HERE\u2014saw themselves as the second coming of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CWA), the rival federation created in the mid-1930s to spearhead mass organizing in that era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To \u201cbuild power for workers\u201d seventy years later, key CTW strategist favored organizational consolidation\u2014in the form of more mergers between national unions and internal consolidation of members into larger regional or multi-state locals. One cheerleader for that approach, Professor Ruth Milkman, penned a NY Times<\/em> opinion piece hailing CTW as \u200b\u201clabor\u2019s best hope\u2009\u2014\u2009maybe it\u2019s only hope\u2009\u2014\u2009for revitalization.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

             CTW did not live up to such hype. It was soon wracked by internal conflict<\/a>, precipitated by then-SEIU President Andy Stern\u2019s controversial restructuring of healthcare locals in California and his disastrous meddling in the internal affairs of UNITE-HERE. That organizing-oriented union and two other founders of CTW\u2013 UFCW and the Laborers\u2013 returned to the AFL-CIO and were welcomed back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The United Brotherhood of Carpenters quit CTW but did not rejoin the federation. Instead, under the authoritarian rule of President Douglas McCarron,  jurisdictional battles<\/a> with AFL-CIO construction unions continued to rage. Rather than adding to any political shift for the better within organized labor, McCarron became President George W. Bush\u2019s biggest union supporter and endorsed other Republicans like Bush\u2019s brother Jeb when he was governor of Florida.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strategic Organizing?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year, under new and improved national leadership, the Teamsters finally quit CTW. This led SEIU, the still tiny Farm Workers, and my own union, the Communications Workers of America, an AFL-CIO affiliate which opposed the creation of CTW, to rebrand their current collaboration as a \u201cStrategic Organizing Center.\u201d  The SOC maintains a small staff to produce what it calls \u201ccutting edge research for innovative campaigns.\u201d On its modest new website,<\/a> Change to Win (and its original pledge to devote nearly a billion dollars to new organizing) is relegated to the memory hole, getting no mention at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         More than a decade after the rise, decline, and now official disappearance of CTW, labor activists interested in strategic thinking associated with two of its founding unions should check out some new titles from the University of Illinois Press.  In Purple Power: The History and Global Impact of SEIU<\/em>, co-editors Louis Aguiar and Joseph McCartin have assembled a collection of laudatory essays, by labor-oriented academics, on SEIU\u2019s history as a healthcare, public employee, and service sector union, how it developed signature campaigns among janitors and fast food workers, and then promoted its \u201corganizing model\u201d among labor federations abroad (even as CTW floundered back home).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, there is no Purple Power<\/em> report on the current Starbucks drive, backed by Workers United<\/a>, an SEIU affiliate acquired (at UNITE-HERE expense) during the Change to Win crack up. That more worker-led effort has gained far greater shop-floor traction\u2013via 250 representation election wins and an on-going first contract struggle\u2013than SEIU\u2019s past more community-based agitation for fast food wage increases (aka \u201cthe Fight for Fifteen\u201d).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Purple Power<\/em> most interesting feature is its focus on the career of SEIU\u2019s best known organizer, Stephen Lerner, the key strategist behind its multi-city Justice for Janitors campaign in the mid-1980s and later. Lerner got his start in labor, like many others<\/a>, as a UFW volunteer, then organized factory workers and public employees.  Within SEIU, he eventually became its building services division director and a national executive board member, before being pushed out of the union after Mary Kay Henry replaced Stern as president in 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lerner is now a research fellow at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, directed by Purple Power <\/em>co-editor McCartin, a Georgetown University Professor. In McCartin\u2019s view, as a labor historian, 1.8 million workers have greatly benefited from the work that Stern, Lerner, former AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and many others did to make SEIU \u201cthe most successful union in North America, and one of the most influential in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/strong>Restoring Dignity<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In The Way We Build: Restoring Dignity to Construction Work<\/em>, Mark Erlich, a now-retired regional leader of the Carpenters, provides a detailed account of the daunting challenges facing U.S. construction workers. A graduate of Columbia University, the author is a rare Sixties\u2019 radical who joined the conservative building trades, rather than \u201ccolonizing\u201d<\/a> in white-collar or industrial union workplaces where left-wing labor traditions, however tattered, seemed easier to invoke and uphold fifty years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Erlich worked 13-years as a rank-and-file carpenter in Massachusetts. He was employed, for the next three decades, by either his state Building Trades Council or his own affiliated union. He was elected business manager of a small Carpenters local in Boston, before becoming a creative and energetic regional organizer for the union. In 2005, he won a contested election for Executive Secretary-Treasurer of a New England-wide Carpenters Council with 24,000 members and an appointed staff of 100.  In that leadership role, he became one of the highest paid<\/a> building trades officials in eastern Massachusetts. During his full-time union career, he penned two earlier books and, after retirement, returned to the Ivy League as a research fellow at the Center for Labor and A Just Economy at Harvard Law School.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         Both Purple Power<\/em> and The Way We Build<\/em> include valuable studies of industries where workers once had bargaining clout and then de-unionization occurred, which required new membership recruitment strategies in response. In SEIU, this open shop trend hit its traditional core jurisdiction\u2014building services. As Lerner recounts, \u201cthe original roots of the union were dying\u2014cities were going non-union. The industry was getting contracted out [and SEIU] was accepting concessions in an attempt to protect union contractors from lower-paying non-union contractors.\u201d As documented in Purple Power<\/em> (and previous books or films like Bread and Roses,<\/em><\/a>SEIU organizers succeeded in mobilizing a now largely immigrant workforce through strikes, building occupations, protest vigils, and civil disobedience which sought union recognition and master contracts in more than 30 cities in the U.S. and Canada. At its peak, JfJ activity helped win improvements for several hundred thousand janitors by making their plight a much-publicized labor cause celebre, locally and nationally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lost Market Share<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

         Since 1971 in the building trades, Erlich reports, \u201creal wages have plummeted by an astonishing 15%, a function of the decline in union density and the corresponding growth of the lower-waged, non-union sector.\u201d The resulting two-tier workforce included union members\u2013on big projects with public or private funding in regional union strongholds\u2013who have apprentice programs, good wages and benefits, along with workplace safety protections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But a much larger pool of construction workers, particularly in the South, Southwest, and Rocky Mountain states, have \u201clower pay, unsafe conditions, no benefits, no collective voice, and periodic wage theft.\u201d  One key management tool for union-busting and lowering labor standards has been the widespread mis-classification of workers as \u201cindependent contractors.\u201d In the race to the bottom in construction, nothing gets you there quicker than shedding normal employer responsibilities for providing group health insurance or workers\u2019 comp coverage and paying payroll taxes for Social Security, Medicare, or state-level unemployment benefits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Erlich notes, the resulting loss of \u201cunion market share\u201d led the Carpenters to \u201cstreamline and reduce the number of struggling locals.\u201d Beginning in the 1990s\u2014and with greater impact during Doug McCarron\u2019s 28-year reign\u2014the union \u201cestablished regional councils as intermediary bodies to reflect changing dynamics in the industry, to mirror an increasingly regionalized group of employer counter-parts, and to replace the chaos of decentralized and sometimes contradictory decision-making by autonomous local unions with a more uniform set of policies and guidelines across multiple states.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         According to Erlich, \u201cmanaging the tension between the efficiencies of a streamlined operation and the democratic nature of local grassroots activity\u201d can be a challenge. However, as the author points out (without citing a single illustrative example), \u201ccentralization can come at a cost\u201d because \u201ccentralized power can and has been abused.\u201d As the Association for Union Democracy<\/a> has documented for the past half century, top-down control in the building trades remains a major obstacle to their revitalization because it breeds organizational corruption, involving pay-offs from employers or rip-offs of union treasuries and benefit plans by officials already collecting outlandish salaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite having only 430,000 dues-payers, the Carpenters Union pays 73-year old McCarron more than $600,000 a year\u2014an amount twice Mary Kay Henry\u2019s pay for presiding over a membership four times larger. Convention election of top Carpenters\u2019 officers is tightly controlled and internal restructuring has deprived rank-and-filers of the ability to directly elect key officers in the union\u2019s regional councils. (After Erlich retired, his own 6-state council was subsumed into a new North Atlantic States Regional Council that includes members from New York.)  Under McCarron\u2014like SEIU\u2019s Andy Stern\u2014dissident locals were put under trusteeship and members seeking more democratic internal structures were forced to disaffiliate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2007, for example, thousands of British Columbia carpenters won a decade long struggle to create an independent union called the Construction Maintenance and Allied Workers. CMAW<\/a> followed a trajectory similar to that of the 15,000-member National  Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). The latter was formed in 2009 after Stern seized control over SEIU\u2019s third largest affiliate<\/a> United Healthcare Workers-West because the elected leaders of its 150,000 members had questioned his healthcare organizing and bargaining strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Mega-Local Mistake?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

         In Purple Power<\/em>, an Andy Stern loyalist heavily involved in that California fiasco<\/a>, now seems to have developed second thoughts about top-down restructuring elsewhere in SEIU. In a chapter entitled \u201cThe legacy of Justice of Janitors and SEIU for the Labor Movement,\u201d Stephen Lerner recalls his original advocacy of \u201ccreating larger locals within geographic areas that mirrored how the [building services] industry was structured\u201d and could better coordinate organizing and bargaining involving common employers. But, when SEIU headquarters continued this consolidation trend\u2014over Lerner\u2019s objections, he reports\u2013 the result was multi-state entities like NYC-based Local 32BJ which now boasts 150,000 members from Boston to Miami.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Lerner, this restructuring was \u201ca mistake which cut the heart out of Justice for Janitors\u201d because such \u201cmega locals\u201d<\/a> began operating \u201cas<\/p>\n\n\n\n

regional fiefdoms, focused on negotiating and organizing regionally [thereby] undercutting a national industry wide strategy.\u201d Worse yet, SEIU now has giant affiliates \u201cthat in some ways mirror building trades locals in that they align with the industry and oppose ideas like rent control because the industry opposes it.\u201d With great hind-sight, Lerner faults Stern and his SEIU e-board allies for believing they \u201ccould have a different kind of relationship with the industry that no longer required pitched battles.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe [in Justice for Janitors] believed in using our base and power to build a mass movement and exponential growth. They [Lerner\u2019s bureaucratic foes] believed in incremental gains and finding ways to show employers the union could be a good partner. It was often called \u2018peace plus.\u201d Meaning SEIU needed to convince employers that not only did settling with the union bring \u2018peace\u2019\u2014no strikes\u2014but the settling with the union also meant we would be their ally on issues like zoning, rent control, etc.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

         Similar labor-management partnering and transactional politics have long been the conservative MO of construction unions\u2013with the mixed results described by Erlich. Conspicuously missing from his argument for craft union innovation in the 21st<\/sup> century is much discussion of who can propel the trades in a better direction?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Painters Union gets a shout out for electing its first African-American president, Ken Rigmaiden. Before his recent retirement, Rigmaiden took the enlightened stance that \u201cwe need to support our current members but also support those workers who want to do the same work we do\u2014people of color and newly arrived workers in this country.\u201d Just as SEIU, in its Justice for Janitors heyday, formed coalitions with immigrant rights organizations, some building trades affiliates have linked up with community-based groups fighting wage and hour law violations, worker misclassification, unsafe working conditions, and other exploitation of the undocumented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agents of Change?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 In other parts of organized labor, institutional change of the sort favored by Erlich has required membership activity, inspired or led by reform movements operating at the local or national level. That\u2019s not an \u201cinternal organizing\u201d model that either Erlich, Lerner, or other contributors to Purple Power<\/em> pay much attention to. Instead, they downplay or ignore the importance of union democracy in ousting entrenched leadership and making labor bureaucracies more effective vehicles for new organizing, effective contract campaigns and strikes, and greater membership participation in legislative\/political fights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, Lerner\u2019s catalytic role in rallying immigrant janitors didn\u2019t later deter him from helping to crush a nascent network of SEIU members in California, who favored reforms like direct election of top SEIU officers and board members. Lerner\u2019s reward for that 2008-9 UHW trusteeship work was getting purged himself not long afterwards, when he lost his \u201cpolitical fight\u201d with Andy Stern\u2019s successor over union strategy, a parting of ways obliquely referenced in Purple Power.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Mark Erlich kept his head down in the domain of Doug McCarron, a key building trades CEO never mentioned once in The Way We Build<\/em>. Erlich was able to leave the Carpenters without any publicly embarrassing push out the door, like Lerner got. And they are both now free to promote \u201cbest practices\u201d for labor in books, articles, interviews, or campus-based consulting work.  But any blue-prints for union revitalization\u2013based on newly- articulated critiques of SEIU or the building trades\u2013aren\u2019t worth much if workers have little decision-making power within those unions and few structural mechanisms to improve their organizational functioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Labor campaigns for dignity and justice on the job are great. But they would have far more social impact if the democratic rights of rank-and-file members were more widely respected and restored, rather than curtailed in the name of union modernization and consolidation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steve Early was a CWA International Union Representative and Organizer for nearly 30 years. Since retiring, he has remained active in union reform campaigns, involving the NewsGuild\/CWA and its parent organization. His past labor-related books include The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor<\/em> (Haymarket Books, 2011), which recounts the unravelling of Change to Win amid multiple SEIU-instigated conflicts with other unions and its own members. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com<\/a>).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steve Early<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Steve Early is a longtime labor journalist and author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress (Monthly Review Press, 2013), The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor (Haymarket Books, 2011) and Embedded With Organized Labor (MRP, 2009)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Steve Early\u00a0on\u00a0August 21, 2023 (BeyondChron.org) Assessing the Labor Movement In a recent conversation with an otherwise well-informed young labor activist, I made a passing reference to Change to Win, a national labor federation formed in 2005 by defectors from the AFL-CIO. \u201cChange to what?\u201d she asked. \u201cNever heard of it.\u201d… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[986],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28105"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28105"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28106,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28105\/revisions\/28106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}