-By Warner Todd Huston
More happenings at the SEIU convention today…
It looks like Andy Stern is steamrolling the internal SEIU dissenters in San Juan this week as his rubber stamp convention has thus far easily passed his extreme agenda.
For instance, his plan to bleed the Strike and Defense fund to pay for his inaptly named “Justice for all” program was easily approved. This takes money from being used to help the members with strikes, etc., and diverts it to Stern’s pet project.
An amendment was also offered to firmly assert that the SEIU is against the Federal government instituting any guest worker programs now or in the future, changing language that allowed for guest worker programs in the past. As Michael Rivera reports in his convention notes today, “SEIU also rejects initiatives that expand or create guest-worker programs.” This amendment also adds to the meddling that the SEIU intends to continue on the National immigration issues.
Once again, we see Andy Stern’s capacity for taking his business far beyond where he belongs. Why one would expect a labor union to be making pronouncements on Federal immigration policy, or to decide to meddle in that field is definitely a question. Stern and his cohorts seem to imagine THEY have been elected not just to offices inside the labor union, but to Congress as well.
At about 10:30 or so, Barack Obama spoke to the convention via video conferencing, too. The SEIU has announced that they are lining up behind the most leftist Senator in the country, to be sure.
And to recap what happened to the folks in the UHW branch of the union… well, they’ve been sliced, diced, and cooked by Stern’s culinary arts. The insurgent UHWers are very unhappy that their democratic rights have been summarily eliminated.
UHW member Anita Wiltz has expressed her bitter disappointment over the whole thing.
Delegates to the convention voted to split me and 65,000 other California nursing home workers and homecare workers away from our local union. This will divide us from our brothers and sisters that work in hospitals and clinics, and put us into a different local union in California. That’s going to make us weaker, not stronger.
Sadly, the UHW members had no say in the matter.
Splitting us up will make us weaker, and that will make it harder to win the justice we’re all fighting for. That doesn’t seem to me like “justice for all.”
Standing in the way of the Stern juggernaut certainly explains why your union has been sliced and diced, Mrs. Wiltz. Keep that in mind next time you go thinking that there is such a thing as democracy in the SEIU!
____________
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