-By Warner Todd Huston
We have talked numerous times about the current internal fight of the SEIU here on the blog. It is a titanic fight between old style, rank-and-file interests, and a sort of new-fangled, top heavy style of leadership more interested in national issues and less in the average member. It has left many members wondering what their union is for if not to actually service the members themselves?
A recent editorial by Nelson Lichtenstein in the L.A. Times has done a fair job to give a few hints at exactly what SEIU President Andy Stern has in store for the future of his union as well as the future of the labor movement itself.
The article, titled “The battle for labor’s future” and subtitled “The SEIU’s Andy Stern has an ambitious plan. Not everyone is on board,” is a sort of over view on what is going on with the SEIU. It contains some interesting observations that has ominous portent. He has announced plans to “raise wages and working conditions for everyone,” meaning not just his own concerns with the SEIU, but to meddle in the entire workforce the country wide.
Stern also has made it clear that he sees the U.S. economy as a single integrated system in which the status of labor is closely related to the structure of capitalism. This has led the SEIU to take great interest in issues that once would have been considered irrelevant to what went on at the bargaining table, such as how to regulate private equity firms, which now control companies that employ more than a million workers in industries the SEIU seeks to organize. Stern has sought to strike deals, or at least open negotiations, on a variety of employment-related issues with politicians and businessmen, including Wal-Mart’s H. Lee Scott and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who have often been hostile to unionism.
But Stern and his allies within the SEIU believe that with a Democratic Party landslide in the offing this November, unions are on the verge of an historic breakthrough. This is not the time for what they label “Just Us” unionism devoted to the advancement of the wages and working conditions of those already enrolled in a labor organization.
Here is what might be called mission creep in the military where the original mission keeps getting larger with added on goals. Only with the military it is usually an accidental occurrence. In this case, it is a purposeful attempt by Andy Stern to take over and install a socialist structure upon our nation’s economy.
For their part, his internal opponents think he is slighting his own members to gain personal power.
Andy Stern is an ambitious and dangerous man who will surely love to destroy the current system and to tear down the things that have made this country great. Lets hope that the internal fight in his union knocks him down… more hopefully out.
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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, 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