Melancholy reflections on the SEIU

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Months before it was denounced by John Wilhelm as a dangerous threat, and Andy Stern became persona non grata inside the AFL-CIO, the SEIU was losing esteem in the progressive public outside the labor movement. Beginning in 2008 when he first threatened to destroy Sal Rosselli by taking over the 150,000-member United Healthcare Workers local, Stern faced a mounting torrent of protest from the pro-union, civil liberties, academic community in California and around the country. First came a concerned letter from a hundred writers and educators imploring him to back off. He shrugged them off and bulled ahead to impose the trusteeship.

When the trusteeship was transformed from rumor to pending reality, a second group of 51 California educators and writers, including the presidents of two teacher local unions, wrote that the trusteeship would be a disaster. A week later, November 17, 2008, the same message came from 240 lawmakers and community leaders in the state. In July 2009, after the trusteeship had been imposed and the battle inside UNITE/HERE led Bruce Raynor to split off and form a rival union, 228 educators around the country protested against the SEIU role in backing the attack on UNITE-HERE.

Public disenchantment with SEIU's direction is now echoed in the labor movement. Four of his original Change to Win partners have distanced themselves from Stern's support of the attack on UNITE-HERE. John Sweeney and the AFL-CIO Executive Council welcome UNITE-HERE back into the AFL-CIO and receive with sympathy Wilhelm's emotional repudiation of the SEIU as a danger to the labor movement. Inside the SEIU, the big Local 1021 rejects a leadership imposed on them by Stern.

Added up, it's ground for reflection. The SEIU under Stern's leadership began with inspiration, a wave of hope. That inspiration and that encouragement brought into his new team an assemblage of idealists, young and old, some with experience in movements for social causes, civil rights, union democracy, freedom, liberty. They were drawn to the SEIU because it seemed on the road to building a new labor movement that would fight for social justice for all, for a new America of equality and democracy.

And now? Rejected by progressive intellectuals, by labor leaders, and then by increasing numbers of its own membership. Can it be that all these are repelled by the trumpet call for justice? Or is the SEIU doing something seriously wrong? Surely these are fair questions.

Andy Stern has proven himself a man endowed with a flexible imagination. He was able to shift quickly from an all out war with the California Nurses Association to a peace of reconciliation and close cooperation. Perhaps here too he will reflect and change course. He can do it. If not, he and his colleagues should remember: Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.