Today's Stories

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Is Nancy Pelosi Really Against War Crimes?

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

Anthony DiMaggio
From Bush to Obama: Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Dennis Ross and Iran: the Fox and the Chicken Coop

Mischa Gaus
The Banks' War on Workers

Felice Pace
The Economy and the Big Picture

Mike Whitney
Is Free Market Capitalism Possible Without Accountability?

Lee Sustar
Blaming the Autoworkers

Peter Lee
The Other Side of the Coin in Afghanistan

Nicole Colson
Ruining Young Lives for Profit

Roger Burbach
Et Tu, Daniel? The Betrayal of the Sandinista Revolution

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah Has No Robes

Missy Beattie
Owning Disaster

Dave Lindorff
America's Stupid Health Care Debate

Robert David Steele Vivas
Intelligence for the President--and Everyone Else

John Ross
Teotihuacan Gets Mickey-Moused

Ralph Nader
Civic Heroism Awards

Yves Engler
Haiti's Harsh Realities

Alan Farago
The Story of Leonard Abess, Banker

Zulfikar Majid
Understanding Kashmir

David Yearsley
Don't Stay Up Too Late, Johan!

Charles R. Larson
Sleeping with Dogs

Kim Nicolini
Spitting at Dark Times: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Wanna Be a Garage Rock Star

Poets' Basement
Puthoff, Payne, Gaffney and Gray

Website of the Weekend
Sleep Now in the Fire

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

March 4, 2009

Andy Stern's SEIU vs. Breakaway Health Workers

Slugging It Out in California

By CAL WINSLOW

Healthcare workers have taken another giant step forward. At the same time, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) stands exposed as never before. Corporate unionism – Andy Stern’s contribution to the long decline of organized labor in the US – is up against the wall in California.

This contest is a fight with big implications. The prize is “a free choice” for workers, a right rarely enjoyed in late-imperial America, but with a California twist – it is “a free choice” in choosing a union – California healthcare workers are fighting for the right to have a union of their own, a union that they control and that works in their interests, not, in this case, the SEIU.

On Thursday afternoon ( February 26) the new National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) made an historic advance – it filed petitions asking that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) conduct decertification (rescind legal recognition)elections at Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest non-profit health care provider. These petitions were signed by more than 50 per cent, (that is, an absolute majority) of all California’s 50,000 of Kaiser’s SEIU represented healthcare workers. The petitions represent, starkly, the desire of these California healthcare workers to leave SEIU.

This petition campaign is the culmination of one phase in what has become the war to form the NUHW – yet it is an astonishing achievement. It is all the more impressive as it represents just the core of an ongoing drive in which, so far, workers at 380 California facilities (employing 80,000 workers – the majority of members of SEIU’s once flagship local, United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW) – have rejected SEIU and petitioned for recognition of NUHW as their union.  And this in less than one month! 10,000 home care workers will file Monday in Fresno.

Why? “We need stability, democracy, and a union we can trust,” said Bebs Nonato, a registered nurse at Kaiser’s Los Angeles Medical Center…  they /SEIU/ pushed us around like furniture, and ignored our voices and votes. We’re building a stronger union in NUHW, with healthcare workers in control.” Now, today, the very idea of “control” – control in one’s union, control at work, “workers’ control” in society, is considered archaic, certainly in the organized labor movement ( honorable exceptions aside). At best, it is replaced by the term “democracy”, very loosely defined.  In SEIU circles, however, even “democracy” has been shelved as of historic interest only; it has become, apparently, an obstacle in the desperate quest for central command, density and dues.

Not so with California healthcare workers. These are workers who say they will fight to control their union; more, says Mell Garcia, medical assistant at Kaiser-Hayward, membership power is the way to power at work: “We’re joining NUHW because it’s the only way to protect the gains that Kaiser workers have won over the past 65 years…”       

John Borsos, the fired elected administrative Vice President of SEIU-UHW, believes that this is the largest decertifcation drive ever.  It is all the more striking given that this campaign has been conducted entirely by healthcare workers themselves and the fired former elected staff of UHW.  This surely bears repeating. The signatures were collected in less than one month by working health care workers seeking recognition – aided by a handful of fired (some resigned in protest, out of loyalty, and for values, we might add), in an entirely volunteer project!

The crisis in California SEIU came to a head on January 27, 2009, when Andy Stern the International President of SEIU placed UHW in trusteeship. He replaced  the entire elected leadership of UHW  - at that time the 150,000 California local was known as a militant, democratic and progressive union, in fact SEIU’s fastest growing local. He hijacked 65,000 UHW long-term care members – workers who, as far as I can work out, may be headed for some new organizational home but remain lost in SEIU space, yet required, of course, to pay their dues. SEIU seized UHW assets and replaced its 100 member elected executive board (the great majority of whom were working members) with two appointed trustees , Eliseo Medina and Dave Regan, both ($200,000+ a year) SEIU Executive Vice Presidents. They have been joined by scores of SEIU staff members, “warriors” organized by Stern lieutenant and SEIU Vice President ($200,000+) Mary Kay Henry, a collection of carpetbaggers collected from SEIU’s bureaucratic  baronies across the country. (The popular new website Perezstern.blogspot.com  highlights the trials and tribulations of these hapless individuals.

NUHW was formed when UHW’s deposed 100 member Executive Board proposed to form a new union, backing the demands of 5,000 stewards who met the weekend before. NUHW set out to rebuild a healthcare workers union – with  no budget, no office, no paid staff. SEIU insisted everything belonged to it. Organizers were ordered to return phones, blackberries, everything and anything.     

The Kaiser decertification campaign is the heart of this drive: Kaiser has 32 medical centers and 200 clinics in California. Kaiser has its origins, like UHW, in the 1930s. Today it is today the largest non-profit health plan in the US. It is the largest healthcare employer in California. It is by far the largest single bargaining unit represented by UHW, nearly 50,000 healthcare workers – dwarfing the next biggest California bargaining unit, Catholic Healthcare West (CHW) that employs 14,000. Fortune magazine reports that Kaiser’s revenues last year at $37.8 billion; it is the fifth largest private company in the US, serving 8.7 million members.

The Kaiser contract – the product of years of struggle – is considered the “gold standard” for hospital workers. UHW’s Kaiser members enjoyed the best wages and benefits in the country. Moreover, the Kaiser contract was used to leverage up other contracts, not just in hospitals but also in nursing home and for home care workers. Kaiser was the rock on which UHW, until it was wrecked (and its predecessors SEIU locals 250 and 399), was built.

The decertification petitions drive are, however, just a start, it is one thing to petition the NLRB, it is another to force the agency to act responsibly  and offer rank-and-file workers a fair hearing and fair elections – “a free choice.”

The NLRB is the agency within the United States government charged with conducting elections for labor union representation and with investigating charges of unfair labor practices. It has a five-person board and a general counsel, all appointed by the President; they oversee regional offices and staff. The agency’s origins, in the 1930s, lie in the National Labor Relations Act (the New Deal Wagner Act, 1935) that made trade unionism legal, though it has rarely lived up to its pro-labor reputation, particularly since passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1948. It does, however, offer procedures for representation, fair bargaining and appeals for workers and their unions. At best it has offered a cumbersome and time-consuming process for defending workers’ rights; at worst it has reflected the politics of the party in power and certainly this has been the case in the Reagan-Bush era.

The NLRB is contested terrain. Unions can petition for elections. Employers can oppose them. They wheel in the lawyers, the specialists and consultants, the delays, the appeals – then the war at home, on the job. While workers await the opportunity to vote, often delayed, the employers are free to intimidate, harass, often terminate the workers who sought protection in the first place. Union organizers are all too familiar with the law firms and the private agencies that specialize in this, as well as with the countless “dirty tricks” within the employers arsenals.

Today EFCA, “the Employee Free Choice Act”, now before Congress, is organized labor’s attempt to remedy these failings by amending  the NLRA - in the hope of making it easier for workers to form, join or assist labor organizations and to provide for penalties for unfair labor practices, particularly in organizing efforts. EFCA would require, for example, the NLRB to certify a bargaining representative without directing an election if a majority of the bargaining unit employees signed cards, the card check process. EFCA is of course vehemently opposed by  business because it would simplify efforts by workers to unionize and negotiate first contracts.

Andy Stern, SEIU International President, explained to USA Today that this is all abc. “Union members can opt out of unions by checking a card so they should be able to opt in that way as well.” There we have it! Let the workers decide.  Why not a free election for Kaiser workers? No one doubts the outcome. Shayne Silva, a psychiatric technician at Alta Bates Summit in Oakland, says, “We hope Andy Stern and SEIU will walk away and leave us alone.”

No such luck. Dave Regan told the LA Times he will fight NUHW “every step of the way.”  The challenges commence. Michelle Ringuette, national spokesperson for SEIU, charges the petitions are not valid. She says members don’t understand the issues. She says workers are being coerced. NUMW, she says, is guilty of “raiding” (she would know). The lawyers get to work, the NLRB announces it must investigate. At the same time Dave Regan is said to be proposing concessionary  bargaining with Kaiser, and Andy Stern has announced a new SEIU- wide committee that will bargain with Kaiser – a stacked committee where California’s members can be outvoted by representatives from Colorado and Oregon – state organizations that together represent only 4000 members.

This, of course, is just what the employers do – don’t let the workers choose!. It is the reason that unions are pressing for passage of EFCA. I was warned that this is exactly what would happen – also that SEIU would be good at it. As predicted the stall has begun - the clock runs and back home on the job, intimidation, harassment, threats.

Here are four examples, I’ve seen dozens:

*On February 1, Inez Moreno, a shop steward at 269-bed Mercy Hospital in Bakersfield, received a phone call from an SEIU organizer. Moreno was told not to circulate petitions. If she refused, the organizer would call the hospital’s Human Resources Department on Monday and have her terminated. “She said I had been stripped of my stewardship… She thinks she can call me and treat me like nothing…”

*On February 9th, Maria Garcia, a Certified Nursing Assistant and elected shop steward at 99-bed Bay Point Healthcare Center in Hayward, was fired for circulating a petition to join NUHW. Her boss phoned SEIU Trustee Eliseo Medina and told her that if Medina didn’t approve of the petition, she would be fired. Days later, he terminated Garcia, who is an immigrant from Mexico and a single mother of three children.

*On February 11th, Angelica Valerio, a Certified Nursing Assistant and member of the elected Windsor Healthcare bargaining committee, was suspended from her job and nine others received written warnings for refusing to let an SEIU staffer bargain their contract. A majority of Windsor workers had already petitioned to disaffiliate from SEIU. With 29 nursing homes, for-profit Windsor Healthcare is one of the largest nursing home chains in California.

*On February 23rd, three SEIU organizers arrived at 1,049-bed California Pacific Medical Center, Sutter Health’s flagship hospital located in San Francisco. Two of the facility’s elected rank-and-file leaders, Helen York-Jones and Porfirio Quintano, asked the SEIU organizers to leave their hospital. York-Jones is a Cashier and 40-year employee who is the facility's Rep Chair and a former elected member of SEIU-UHW's Executive Board. Quintano, a Housekeeper with 10 years on the job, is a steward and an elected member of the union's bargaining committee. The two leaders told the SEIU staffers that a majority of the hospital’s workers had already submitted petitions to disaffiliate from SEIU, and they did not want SEIU organizers in their facility. The SEIU organizers reported them to the hospital's Human Resources Department. Two days later, York-Jones and Quintano received calls from Sutter management announcing that they had been placed on unpaid investigatory leave.

So much for protected activity! But no one said it would be easy.

I must confess here that this is exactly what I was told would happen – many times over. SEIU would go, full speed ahead, into corporate mode. Never mind the cost. Never mind the damage to the union, to its elected representatives, to the movement, to the workers and their families.

I must also confess that I am not at all surprised to learn of the incidents summarized above. This is the union, after all, that last April organized a physical assault on the Labor Notes conference in Dearborn. This is the union that, last June, held its national convention in Puerto Rica behind by jack-booted San Juan riot police. This is the union of Tyronne Freeman and Rickman Jackson and Annelle Grajeda, all now removed and facing charges of corruption, all California SEIU (appointed by Stern) leaders. And this is the union that, even amidst the wreckage of UHW, continues its war on the California Nurses  Association.

It is SEIU, the union of the deal! Stern continues to work the politicians. Stern, remember, was a supporter of the illustrious former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and despite the fact that SEIU will be involved with a federal corruption investigation, Stern said he has "no reason to believe anyone did anything wrong." He also said that while he is sorry about the way Blagojevich's career ended, he is not sorry about past SEIU support for him.

As for the role of unions in the deepening recession – California’s official unemployment rate now tops 10 per cent - Stern stubbornly repeats that workers should be “partners” with their employers in both good times and bad. As an example of the latter, he cites California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as a man he can work with – forget, please, the draconian state budget, short work weeks, fierce cuts in health , welfare and education.

The issue then is stark and simple – have workers a right to a union of their own choice? SEIU says “No!” Alas, SEIU has supporters, even in the universities and amongst the so-called experts of the country’s academic labor centers. There, a ten year debate, often with SEIU at the center, has undermined fundamental beliefs, even in the very value of democracy within the workers’ movement. Steve Fraser, a cynical apologist if ever there was one, argued from the start that democracy was a non-issue - a fetish of an insignificant left, when not a weapon of the right. Approvingly, he told us “many labor leaders secretly believe and practice what one of them openly confessed back in the 1920s: ‘As a democracy no union would last six months.’”

More than any other union, SEIU has flaunted its denigration of internal union democracy. It has belittled membership rights and election of representatives at all levels and denied workers’ participation, let alone control in bargaining. An example of SEIU member rights, perhaps extreme, is this: the SEIU Constitution says that any seven  members can block a disaffiliation vote – for example in the 150,000 member UHW! That is, as Steve Early has shown, there’s no checking out. Others unions  share this distaste for democracy, but few with the effrontery of SEIU. And few with a chorus of academics cheering them on. All this has taken its toll on the movement – as has the SEIU checkbook. But this will change. Stanley Aronowitz replied to Fraser in the 90s debate and his answer still stands: “When unions deprive the rank and file of choice, when leaders favor mobilization but not participation, they succeed only in driving a deeper nail in labor’s coffin.” Sal Rosselli, the fired elected President of UHW, now a NUHW volunteer, offers this contrast, and, we hope, a forecast for the future of the new union: “We believe there can be no limit to the empowerment of workers.”

I think SEIU’s time has run out, but the fight has just begun. Change to Win (CTW – the Stern federation that split from the AFL-CIO) is on the rocks. Stern’s arch-enemies, the California Nurses, are now part of a national nurses’ movement, the National United American Nurses. And in this conflict with NUHW, SEIU is driving off a California cliff. 

Thus far, UHW, now NUHW, while highly regarded in California, has fought alone. Observers have most often restricted themselves to lamenting the SEIU-NUHW conflict as a regrettable diversion – in particular from the fight for EFCA. Or they have worried about a divided labor movement in a time of extreme economic peril. Certainly there are dangers. However, is there any evidence that today’s organized labor movement can take us forward? Does anyone really believe that the AFL-CIO can produce, for example, a new Congress of Industrial Organizations  (CIO)? With or without its flaws? CTW, pathetically in retreat, reapplying for ALC-CIO credentials? “We didn’t pick this fight,” says Paul Kumar, fired elected Vice President of UHW, “but it’s a privilege to wage it.”  Of course it’s a cliché to say that the times demand change, fundamental change, but they do. There will be no change, however, without struggle –remember Frederick Douglas “no progress without struggle, no crops without plowing. No rain without thunder and lightning.” Perhaps this week’s wild Pacific storms are setting the stage. Within the month the NUHW will meet in San Francisco for its founding convention.

United Healthcare Workers-West was the kind of union we need in California – more, it was in historian Nelson Lichtenstein’s words a “model.” The SEIU assault on UHW has indeed – as so many warned – been a tragedy. Nevertheless, someone had to stand up to Andy Stern’s SEIU. Now is the time for us to stand up with NUHW – we need a new beginning.

Cal Winslow is co-editor, with Aaron Brenner and Robert Brenner, of Rebel Rank and File, Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below in the Long Seventies (forthcoming, Verso.) He is author of the CounterPunch piece, “Stern’s Gang Seizes UHW Union Hall.” He is a Fellow in Environmental Politics at UC Berkeley and Director of the Mendocino Institute. He can be reached at cwinslow@berkeley.edu

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