-By Warner Todd Huston
A pattern has emerged concerning the expansion of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and that is one of rushed contracts that supposedly “give too much away” to the employers. Of course, I won’t comment of the supposed “giving too much away” aspect, but one thing that I will comment on is the propensity of the SEIU to get their contracts by hook or by crook.
This plan is of a piece with SEIU President Andy Stern’s quest to make the SEIU the biggest union in the nation. His has been a plan to simply glom onto as many new contracts and new members as possible no matter what else is going on. His avarice to gain new members and for adding locals by gobbling up lesser unions is so strong that he hasn’t paid much attention to the specifics of the contracts being signed. This sort of slipshod, barreling forward despite the specifics of the actual contracts has angered many of his membership.
The anger has grown quite a bit over the last year especially. Union members complain that they are being sold down the river and that the SEIU national is too cozy with management. And, since the SEIU is being operated as a top down concern, the local members have no power over themselves and their own contracts.
But, and I have said this before, it’s all a bait and switch. Who can doubt that Stern is operating in the long term here? His obvious intention is to give management favorable contracts now to cajole them into allowing their places of business to be unionized. And, as he placates businesses, he rampages across the country gobbling up smaller unions and killing them off by absorbing them gaining amazing size and growing power over the workforce as he grows. At some point, however, Stern has every intention to paralyze the businesses he now has sway over by holding over the heads of management the sheer size of his membership as newer contracts come up for negotiation. These businesses are signing their own death warrants by imagining that the SEIU has any long term interest in working with management.
The scariest thing about this plan is the fact that the SEIU is the largest employees union for workers in government. Eventually, we will have this outright socialist, Andy Stern in a position to utterly paralyze every state in the union by being able to control a walk out of the workers of every state at once. This man will be able to leverage any contract he wants from every government and it will be us, the taxpayers, forced to pay his King’s ransom!
In any case, a recent Market Watch article had a short list of some of the SEIUs ills that is interesting and worth repeating:
- Links to the corruption scandal involving Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. SEIU is Blagojevich’s top campaign contributor, with donations totaling over $1.8 million. Blagojevich helped SEIU by ordering the state to negotiate with SEIU to represent 49,000 in-home child care workers.
- Corruption charges involving leaders of major SEIU locals in Los Angeles and Michigan. The president of SEIU’s largest local was forced to resign after an expose by the Los Angeles Times found the local paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to firms owned by his wife and mother-in-law. Much of the money went to businesses suspended by the state tax board for failing to file tax returns and other public documents.
- That scandal has also led to the resignation of the head of SEIU’s California State Council over alleged financial improprieties involving her and a former boyfriend, and the head of SEIU’s largest Michigan local after reports that a nonprofit housing corporation he filed had been suspended for doing business for failing to file tax reports.
- Federal investigations of election rigging at SEIU locals in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The Las Vegas investigation resulted in preliminary findings by the Department of Labor that included illegal use of SEIU funds to help elect a slate favorable to SEIU International at the expense of local activists promoting greater union democracy.
- Deals with large corporate chains that undermine worker and public protections in exchange for sweetheart agreements to signup more dues-paying members. Under a pact with California nursing homes, for example, SEIU agreed to lobby against reforms to require better patient care conditions in nursing homes, and to give management the “exclusive right” to set pay, discipline employees, reassign or eliminate jobs, and outsource work.
- Alliances with controversial large corporate employers such as Wal-Mart which subvert genuine healthcare reform.
- Silencing dissent of its own members through lawsuits, sham elections, and physical intimidation.
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, Human Events Magazine, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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