Stern, Burger lick their chops

Andy Stern Spreads Wings, SEIU Ruffles Feathers

Two thousand members of the Service Employees International Union are preparing to convene in Puerto Rico next month to set the group’s next four years of strategy and policy. But senior SEIU officials are applying most of their effort these days trying to press their influence on another big convention this summer, the Democratic gathering in Denver. Anna Burger, the hard-charging head of the union’s political operations, is managing a $75 million fund to help Barack Obama win the presidency and the Democrats expand their majorities in Congress.

Electioneering is just part of the union’s Washington agenda, however. Burger’s boss, Andy Stern, announced this month that the SEIU executive board had approved Stern’s 10-10-50 campaign — a post-election push for an overhaul of the nation’s health insurance system that provides universal coverage. The first number represents $10 million the union plans to spend pressuring reluctant members of Congress with advertising and lobbying. The next refers to the 10 million telephone calls the union plans to place encouraging like-minded voters to pressure their own House members and senators. The third figure represents the goal that 50 percent of the union staff become directly involved, by lobbying Congress or by advocating elsewhere in the political sphere.

Such ambitious plans reflect the determination of the SEIU — which represents 1.9 million public employees, nurses, hospital and nursing home workers, custodians and security guards — to be the premier source of labor advocacy in the nation’s capital. It’s the next logical move for a union that dramatically elevated its power profile three years ago when it took a leading role in engineering the departure of seven unions from the AFL-CIO to form a new coalition called Change to Win.

The consortium, claiming 5.9 million members at the start, sought to define a new mandate of growth and outreach for the labor movement, as union membership had plunged to 12.5 percent of the population from 35 percent in the 1950s. One leading reason union leaders cited for bolting the AFL-CIO was that president John J. Sweeney was spending too much money and staff time in lobbying and campaign efforts. Stern and Burger are mindful that they could be courting a certain boomerang effect should their political efforts come up short this fall — a worry that deepens as some SEIU members have lately complained that SEIU leaders are taking shortcuts in such basic tasks as organizing efforts and recruitment drives in order to bulk up their resumes as Democratic power players.

‘Too Cute by Half’

For now, the SEIU officials say there’s no conflict between their political work and such union-building enterprises. If anything, Burger argues, putting a firm union stamp on national health care would be an organizing boon as well as an end in itself. “We’ve been working on health care for years, advocating around it. We’ve been on the air and on the phones,” Burger said. “We think this is the time to get it done.”

There’s another reason SEIU leaders are feeling acute pressure to deliver on a political agenda this year: The surge in union membership that Change to Win set out to achieve hasn’t happened. The rolls of dues-paying members to the seven unions in the coalition have grown only about 3 percent in the two years after the split, to about 6 million, according to membership filings with the Labor Department. But nearly all of that growth is attributable to the biggest two unions in the group, the SEIU and the Teamsters. The AFL-CIO remains far ahead in membership, although its growth was even slower in the year after losing SEIU and the other Change to Win unions — 1.5 percent, to about 10 million members.

Stern and Co. have packaged some catchy campaigns. They worked with Democrats last year on an unsuccessful lobbying push, which the SEIU termed “Behind the Buyouts,” to increase taxes on private equity managers. And they created a political group called “They Work for Us” to go after a handful of Democrats in Congress seen as too friendly to business: The group worked heavily for the primary defeat in February of Maryland’s Albert R. Wynn .

Still, the SEIU is slowly picking up a reputation as a dilatory force in the lobbying and advocacy world, more interested in style than substance. “Stern is creative and smart but maybe too cute by half,” said Steven Law, the general counsel of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which regularly spars with the union. Law argues that Stern has created buzz for his union on Capitol Hill but failed to win any substantial victories there.

Rancor and File

Critics of Burger and Stern will likely make much the same argument in San Juan next month, as union delegates try to officiate a contentious showdown between SEIU leaders and local members. The main opponent of the Burger-Stern strategy is Sal Rosselli, the president of United Healthcare Workers-West, SEIU’s second-largest local, with 150,000 members. Rosselli says Stern cut sweetheart deals with nursing homes on the West Coast, under which the union was allowed to organize as long as it stayed mum on health and safety violations in the facilities. Rosselli also says SEIU leaders agreed to lobby jointly with nursing home managers to get the California Legislature to limit lawsuits by patients.

“Under Stern, it’s become a growth-at-all-costs model, leaving out participation of members,” Rosselli said. But the arrangements SEIU leaders have struck with their management counterparts undercut the union’s very reason for being, he argues: “The primary purpose of a union is for workers to gain a voice.”
SEIU Spreads Its Wings, Ruffles Some Feathers

Rosselli and Stern have launched dueling Web sites to spread their points of view in the debate, and the blizzard of charges and countercharges has now spawned dueling lawsuits. Last month, five members of United Healthcare Workers-West filed a claim in federal court in San Francisco, alleging that Stern had suppressed their free-speech rights. And last month, Stern filed a suit accusing Rosselli of setting up a slush fund to spend union dues without proper oversight. Rosselli labels that claim “a hoax” and says the SEIU has become so unhinged from its moorings that it might be better if it rejoined the AFL-CIO.

The AFL-CIO and the service union are also clashing over efforts to organize Midwestern health care workers. In March, the California Nurses Association — an AFL-CIO member — sent representatives to Ohio to disrupt an SEIU organizing drive at nine hospitals. The nurses’ union organizers allege that the SEIU struck a deal with management that excluded other unions, among them the California group, from vying to represent the hospitals’ employees. SEIU abandoned its drive but later sought to disrupt a speech by the head of the California Nurses, Rose Ann DeMoro, the nurses association said. It also says SEIU members have been harassing its board members at their California homes.

SEIU leaders contend that such charges are just sour grapes on the part of an old-guard union establishment. The nurses group is just “jealous of our unionizing,” Burger said.

Pressure and Patience

Given its growing troubles at the membership level, it would appear the SEIU cannot afford to slight its traditional organizing mandate even as it focuses more attention on the big political and legislative fights in Washington. Hence the frequent refrain from union officials that their political drive feeds into their organizing mandate. And once they are both humming along, Stern likes to say, unions will build “density,” a critical mass of workers in different industries. From that, real gains — both in salaries and benefits — will flow, along with increased political power, Stern argues.

To test that theory, the union will also be pressed to reverse its recent legislative setbacks — even in a Democratic Congress far more sympathetic to union issues than its recent GOP predecessors. Take last year’s promotion of legislation that would have increased the tax rate applied to the income of investment managers. Momentum for the proposal, which seemed strong in the summer, sputtered out when some Democratic senators objected to using the tax hike as a way to offset a reduction in the reach of the alternative minimum tax.

Or consider the SEIU’s Divided We Fail campaign of last year, which touted a new alliance with traditional management foes in the Business Roundtable to advance health care legislation. It, too, has yielded few specific gains, while earning Stern more attacks from some union leaders for collaborating with longtime anti-union CEOs such as Lee Scott of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. But Burger says that looking for legislative victories is only one way of measuring a campaign’s success. She contends that SEIU’s work with Wal-Mart and private equity firms has helped focus a critical light of public attention on issues that hadn’t previously taken center stage.

As for legislative victories, Burger again counsels patience. “We’re laying the groundwork for change. Our goal wasn’t to set legislative records,” she said. Wait, she suggests, until the first 100 days of the next president’s administration. “Elections are important,” she added. “But what’s really important happens after the election.”

(cqpolitics.com)