Men and women who mop the floors or clean the bed pans—those who do the dirty, unpleasant work that enables other workers to do their jobs—are workers whose conditions of employment put them in a weak bargaining position. Often working more than one part-time or temporary job, often employed by subcontractors in intense competition with each other, holding job skills that can be learned relatively quickly; service industry workers have faced enormous obstacles in the path of obtaining decent wages, benefits, working conditions. A further obstacle lies in management’s willingness to use the weapon of fear to stifle a workforce disproportionately immigrant and subject to police harassment or deportation.

Responding to these realities the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has developed a strategy that emphasizes industrial organizing, relying on numbers for strength just as manufacturing workers did to overcome their vulnerabilities in the 1930’s. Yet this is the union that in May sent hundreds of staffers and members to attack the annual Labor Notes conference of union activists to forcibly prevent Rose Ann DeMoro, California Nurses Association (CNA) executive director, from speaking. SEIU has also had staff members follow CNA leaders at their homes and workplaces. The two unions have had conflicts over organizing and over health care reform legislation, but to explain why the nearly 2-million member SEIU feels so threatened by the 80,000 member CNA to resort to violence means taking a deeper look at how strategies to overcome bargaining weaknesses have been implemented.

SEIU’s initial solution was embodied in its “Justice for Janitors” campaigns – city-wide organizing drives designed to pressure local political and corporate figures to recognize building maintenance workers organization. Campaigns involved direct action and civil disobedience, generally led by young union staff for whom the consequence of frequent arrest is less costly than for the workers themselves. On-the-job organizing does take place, empowering workers to take militant action, as demonstrated the year before last by a strike of 5,000 newly-unionized janitors in Houston. Nonetheless, it’s been fundamentally a top-down process, organizing targets, strategy and tactics developed by union leadership, not the workforce. Although SEIU continues this form of organizing, lately it has sought more rapid success using methods that bypass the workforce altogether.

The result has been agreements such as the one reached with the Nursing Home Alliance in 2003, which allows SEIU to organize without employer opposition at selected sites—and disallows organizing at all other facilities. Organized units base negotiations on a multi-year framework agreement banning strikes, limiting collective bargaining rights on job classification issues and prohibiting almost all public criticism by the union of nursing home management. An agreement signed this year with the industrial catering companies Sodexho and Compass are similar, but with the added feature of confidentiality – its terms will not be disclosed to union members.

SEIU President Andrew Stern justifies these agreements by claiming that the “old ways [of organizing] aren’t working and we’re trying to find different relationships with employers that guarantee workers a voice,” and dismisses charges that they are undemocratic, stating, “these workers have no union, that’s where we start from.”

But a union in which workers are not party to their “own” agreement still leaves them voiceless. The trigger setting off SEIU’s attack against CNA took place after an analogous agreement was reached with the Ohio-based Catholic Health Care Partners, providing for a management-sponsored union representation election. CNA leafletted hospitals urging a “no-union” vote, fearing that an SEIU victory would lead to contracts allowing for deskilling/loss of nursing jobs. SEIU cancelled the election and denounced CNA’s action as anti-union and as showing contempt for poorly-paid hospital workers. These are serious issues that unfortunately too often cause disputes between U.S. unions. SEIU’s over-reaction, however, points to a more basic, unstated, concern.

When agreements are signed without worker participation, a union begins to become dangerously dependent on employer goodwill. If the purpose of such agreements is to rapidly increase union size by delivering labor peace, that danger grows ten-fold—for any independent union, independent rank-and-file action threatens the possibility of reaching future agreements. This is the dilemma SEIU is creating for itself, one which violence won’t resolve.

SEIU continues to do important work organizing and representing some of the country’s most vulnerable workers—but strategies for organizing without worker input, initiative or voice are counterproductive. Like a house of cards, successes gained that way will fall with the first breeze.

Kurt Stand
Junge Welt
June 24, 2008