Miss Laura had a front page piece yesterday entitled, SEIU: The Fight Goes Past the Election. I am aware of the ongoing rivalry between SEIU and the California Nurses Association (CNA) in organizing Hospitals and Health Systems as well as strategic and tactical political positions put forth by both unions.
Though not an SEIU member, I know of SEIU's activism in Healthcare. I see Unions in Healthcare as a critical, counterveiling weight against an exploitive, moneymongering Healthcare system that has taken hold in the U.S. I thought I'd be in for a good, thought provoking read on the SEIU I know from experience shared with SEIU members I had seen throught the years during GOTV and social justice campaigns.Of course, despite being busy volunteering for Barack wherever possible, I do remember there was that recent beef I had heard and read about briefly regarding CNA and Ralph Nader charging SEIU and its President, Andy Stern with "thuggery" violence and intimidation following an SEIU protest of CNA at a Labor Notes meeting in Dearborn, MI...
There's going to be a winner and loser in my book regarding this.
Miss Laura certainly did well to get the conversation going regarding SEIU:
...continuing the fight for better Democrats is exactly what the SEIU is proposing for the months after November:.......That should keep Blue Dogs and spineless types on their toes.
Busy of late in my spare time as a volunteer calling and canvassing for Barack in the Primaries, I confess I, (like many folks I guess) have skimmed much of the media outside of breaking primary news. I saw the Nader piece on SEIU, heard the cry of "Foul" from CNA from skimming headers here and there, seeing pictures of what looked something like the rush to a hot dog stand at an average college football game. Definitely not your World Cup Soccer scene though. I had yawned and moved on.
Well some comments got me going after I said that I thought SEIU and Andy Stern "Rocked", that i saw them as can do while others dilly dally. I had neither judged CNA or SEIU. No "winner" or "loser" in my book at that point.
Reading the thread, I was promptly informed that Andy Stern was "resting on his laurels". That SEIU was "Thuggish". I couldn't help but ponder what thugs resting on laurels might look like. I then wondered where they kept the laurels or if they allowed the beflowered, alleged goons out in public as I hadn't seen any from SEIU over some years of Progressive activisism.
Gutsy? Yes. Flowers and "Resting" when it comes to SEIU? Naah.
Say it ain't so.
Then I was, ah, "informed" that
Andy Stern opposes Medicare for all.
So SEIU and Andy Stern are now elitists,too eh?
Seems I've heard that tag floating around, recently.
Clearly this must mean Stern and SEIU are either opposed to Medicare or support it only for a few.
My little brain then had to hit the books.
Then, to my amusement I was informed:
[Ed: Emphasis added]
[
new] Robert Davies, you have it all wrong ! (3+ / 0-)
Recommended by:
SEIU is the enemy of the people he would represent here. You should really read more, you know?
The California Nurseshave it exactly right: Medicare for All is the only way that we can fix the insurance boondoggle. I would call for nationalizing the entire U.S. health care operation on January 20th 2009, but then, I go naked, so I'm biased....
Insurance companies take 50 cents of every premium dollar for CEO and mgmt salaries and operations. MEDICARE COSTS 2.5 CENTS!
So maybe this is a little strong, but I'll say it: ARE YOU NUTS?
LOL. Taking the advise, I read more. Helps with the linkies that follow and actually shaped my opinion rather than, say, oh- I dunno, maybe just pulling it right out of my ass.
Here's what I've come up with.
This dispute between CNA and SEIU has everything to do with the efficacy of union organizing strategy and tactics and very little if anything to do with the desirability of Medicare for all. I'm Getting here late, but really, the incredibly embellished bullshit being thrown around on CNA vs Andy Stern and the SEIU deserved a response...In fact, I was going to post a response as a comment but it needed a diary to dismantle it all.
Heh. This comment really got me going.
Andy Stern opposes Medicare for all.
Admittedly, Invoking single payer now is great ideologically. Ideologically terrific.
And both a political and practical impossibility. Nothing political happens immediately.
Not even the stroke of a President Obama's pen reversing Bush Execcutive Orders. That instant of inking will have taken eight years in a democratic wilderness including two years of a Presidential campaign. Doing Healthcare? In one shot? Immediately? Involving Congress?
Draw your own reasonable conclusions.
Yet even if you accept that this is an immediate imperative of national policy -- still, only the most parochial of partisans would not concede this involves National Labor and Healthcare Policy as a subset of other national economic choices to be made.
Consequently, In honesty and essence, This CNA vs. SEIU flap is a dispute over union organizing strategy and tactics within the subset of possible National Labor and Healthcare Policies. And THEY are weighed against competing agendas in Domestic and Foreign Policy. Accept that or not, and You, the California Nurses Association (CNA), or anybody else are welcome to lay down the grand ideological marker to stake your agenda, but a marker it is nonetheless.
Looking into the charges CNA has leveled against SEIU and Andy Stern, while loosely cloaked in grand ideals, the rhetoric is at odds with the record, let alone SEIU and Stern's results.. That's a nice way of saying I think the charges are bullshit.
So Let's talk about position, record, strategy, tactics, and yes - results.
Unless you've been living under a rock, Andy Stern and 1.8 million member SEIU is and has been a leading proponent of union membership for ALL. [And no, unfortunately, I am not a member of SEIU. ]
Now with regards to long standing SEIU organizing efforts in Health Care,
that ultimately means ALL Nurses, All Health Care Technicians All Health Care Workers not only
throughout each and every hospital,
throughout each and every health system, but
throughout workplaces in the entire country.
And its been SEIU that has supported every Democratic candidate I've ever rooted for right up to and including Barack Obama.
So I don't buy the crap about 1.8 million member SEIU or
Andy Stern being less than what measures up to what CNA, or
Ralph "Pissed-at-SEIU - Among Others" Nader holds up as a bar.
In addition to being familiar with SEIU's ardent support of largely Progressive Democratic candidates over the years, I have indeed done a bit of reading and review of the CNA charges leveled against SEIU that are floating around.
Are there both satisfied and disastisfied members in the California Nurses Association and in SEIU? Sure there are - in BOTH unions, as in all organizations.
But in the Labor Movement in general, and Unions in particular, dis-unity is the antithesis of their very being over time.
So what is the deal?
I've concluded that The real sweetheart deals being sought here are by the less-than-effectual Leadership of a significantly less than soundly positioned CNA whose record now seems a lot less stellar than its reputation and rhetoric.
After looking into this whole flap with CNA vs SEIU, it is clear to me (and cited below) that CNA recently attempted to hijack, then deliberately wrecked an SEIU organizing campaign in a non-union Ohio hospital in its last week prior to a vote that SEIU had invested YEARS in the making.
This occurred AFTER SEIU had invested enormous amounts of organizing resources and nurses and staff had put their hard work and courage on the line into standing up for themselves, their patients, and a better union system-wide. SEIU did all the work underwriting the campaign for three years in a non union facility only to have it scuttled by CNA.
THIS WAS NOT
Vote Yes for us (CNA) because we've done three years work of research, strategy, organizing and negotiations to bring a non union facility into the Union fold and can lay a contract on the table
...
Backed by the kind of smear campaign that can clearly be demonstrated by the videos below, it WAS plain and simple a
Vote NO to SEIU's contract. SEIU sucks. CNA will be Back atcha later.
That's NOT a simple turf battle between unions within an already unionized facility. It's nothing short of destructive scorched earth policy and tactics on the part of CNA. Ironically, In checking into this, one finds much exclamation of high minded ideals by California Nurses Association leadership: universal coverage and better standards of care for patients.
But Let's look at some results given some questions at the crux of the matter.
From a National Healthcare and Labor Policy viewpoint, What serves Nurses, Health Care Workers and Patients alike?
Is that possible in some approaches while perhaps being precluded in others?
And as for Union matters, particularly an organizing model --
Does Worker Unity account for anything in the Labor movement?
Is strength in numbers and depth of organizing reach an advantage in dealing with profiteering rather than patient and care-provider centered health care systems? Or does CNA's lean mean fightin' machine model deliver the goods? Let's see...
Hypothetically speaking, down the road, when those Health Systems simply fire CNA's union nurses and the smattering of Allied Health and Service Workers on its rolls -- knowing full well they can hire-in the strike breaking temp replacement companies that CNA has come to know all too well, and the CNA nurses have no leverage among the passed over non-union nurses and staff left out or peeled off in other critical service departments within the hospital / health system - what can be said then? Does it serve the nurses or health care workers, let alone - Hello? - the very patients CNA Leadership claims to be so concerned about....
It not surprising that Hospital Management has a "no worries" spin on Labor Disputes since concepts like continuity of care or building a care-provider / patient relationship have long been dumped like so many patients on the street. Here's Why :
And it's not hypothetical with CNA:
One of the largest of these [ stike-breaking] organizations is U.S. Nursing Corp. based in Denver, with offices on the East and West coasts. The company was established 12 years ago after it successfully supplied many of the replacement nurses for a major strike affecting at least seven San Francisco hospitals.
By Tim Simmers / Bay Area News Group
Hundreds of Peninsula nurses with Sutter Health-affiliated hospitals returned to work Monday after a 10-day strike.
The strike affected about 700 registered nurses at Mills-Peninsula Health Services, which operates Mills Health Center in San Mateo and Peninsula Medical Center in Burlingame.
The local hospital management brought in 192 replacement nurses during the strike. Hospital officials maintained that the Peninsula hospitals ran smoothly and safely during the walkout.
"There were no surgeries or procedures canceled during the strike, and we had a full house," said Dolores Gomez, vice president of Acute Care Services at Mills-Peninsula.
Gomez noted that part of the reason things went well was that more than 50 percent of the replacement nurses had worked at the hospitals during two strikes staged last fall by the regular nurses, who are represented by the California Nurses Association.
So much for the much-vaunted Leadership of CNA that I had heard about.
Despite the activist rhetoric, Status Quo confirmed.
...
Regarding CNA vs. SEIU, prior to SEIU's protest against CNA in Michigan, what happened in Cincinatti, Ohio, is outrageous. It's outrageous that the California Nurses Association Leadership ran a Vote No! campaign against SEIU to scuttle a Union vote in a Johnny-come-lately effort to cherry-pick the contract. This, after three years of organizing work by SEIU had already been there. Yes, what follows below is outrageous, an outrage that had been done TO SEIU and yes, SHOULD BE met with vigorous protest by SEIU. SEIU is justified in its protestations upon CNA, given the pattern of distortion and lies that comes clearly into view. There's a few things that need to be said re the CNA strategy and tactics.
Or links like these two below
showing enedited, real-time footage of the "thuggery" you speak of?
How about some real time enedited tape rather than BS?
The Real-time, Unedited footage speak for itself. The CNA Propoganda doesn't do the same:
You disagree with SEIU's strategy? Fine.
You dig Ralph Nader's take on it? Fine.
When Ralph gets elected with CNA backing, we'll talk.
You like to think SEIU doesn't have the activist commitment,
the track record or the staying power in the Labor movement?
Fine. You are entitled to your delusion.
What you are not entitled to is trying to bullshit others without being called on it.
Note well that no arrests were made whatsoever in Michigan despite CNA's outrageous claims of "violence". Yeh it was a real riot right there in front of the Dearborn Police, I see. The drum, the kazoos, the ubiquitous chants of "Hey Hey Ho ho..." to go along with the perfunctory pushing and shoving. Tales of violence? Not even close. Give me a break. Ever been to a protest?
Sorry, but hostility to Unionization didn't just surface with Reagan, the Nursing crisis, or Big Medicine. Anti - unionization has always been with us. That climate being a given, Anti - unionization isn't soley the province of management, either.
The last thing needed amidst pervasive Anti-Union sentiment is is the kind of reckless, narrow-interest union strategies now deployed by CNA, the kind that did so much to nearly kill off Organized Labor in this country, turning the leadership of one-time activist unions into pension fund money managers at best. The short sighted, narrow-interest strategies sold by some unions to their members or prospective members ultimately sunk into the weak, self-serving bullshit of their leadership that, lacking both courage and judgement, ultimately sold its members down the river, taking broader prospects for Organized Labor along with them.
There are numerous reasons why the California Nurses Association will ultimately fail to command the leading role in implementing Health Care Unionization that is so sorely needed to counterbalance the Profiteers. Ideological Orthodoxy and tactical inflexibility coupled with a lack of both depth and breadth in its workplace and political organizing model will not serve the organization, its members, or the Labor Movement in general. Coupled to Messianic Leadership, these factors bear enormous costs, the least of which are near term economic or political opportunities lost.
Even given a rising Democratic Majority, failure to move quickly and united in mass on the Health Care vultures will result in health, wellness, and social justice costs that are immeasurable. We have seen this dynamic of politically dysfunctional Messianic Leadership coupled to inflexible tactics. We have seen it time and again by the Bush Regime, with Nader and in Democratic politics with the likes of Mark Penn and the Clinton campaign that would rather bring its own house down upon themselves than admit fundamental errors in their ways.
I know, I know.
CNA thinks SEIU, Obama, and everybody else are stiffs.
Nader loves 'em. I get it... Do you?
