Critics Raise Some Disturbing Questions
About SEIU’s New Giant Hospital Union

The Service Employees International Union. (SEIU), widely known as “the fastest-growing union in the labor movement,” has taken the surprising step of launching a new health care union, composed of about one million current SEIU members who work in hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities in the industry.

This new “union within a union,” called SEIU Healthcare, will have an annual budget of $120 million and a staff that will include 4,000 organizers, said Dennis Rivera, who will head the new organization. Rivera has for 18 years been president of the 300,000-member New York City-based 1199 SEIU.

In an interview with a reporter from the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA), Rivera explained the reason for creating the new entity. He said that each of the SEIU’s 38 locals previously had its own name and identity, with the result that SEIU was not seen as the union for health-care workers in the United States. Under the new union, health-care workers will be unified and the SEIU will have a national presence, Rivera said. (a pretty flimsy reason and largely untrue.)

A national council, which will meet every other month, will adopt strategies for organizing, politics and legislation for the entire union, Rivera said. The council will be made up of the presidents of each local.

Stern’s ‘Partnership’: Run by and for Employers

Many local SEIU leaders and members fear that the new union is designed to deprive them of a voice in policy-making. They suspect that Andy Stern, SEIU’s president, will use the new union to give him a free hand to promote his “partnership” strategy, in which the emphasis is to organize employers rather than workers by offering them a menu of concessions in return for signing a union contract.

Their suspicions were heightened by the revelation in the SF Weekly that SEIU had made a deal with a group of California nursing homes, in which the union agreed that workers would not speak out publicly against abuse of patients or health code violations and would lobby for limiting patients¹ right to sue. In exchange, the union could organize a certain number of nursing homes without employer interference. (SEIU has withdrawn the agreement, now that it has been made public.)

In Stern’s “partnership” concept, the role of the union is to serve the needs of the employer for their mutual benefit. In his book, “A Country That Works,” Stern says unions should strive to “add value” to companies and help “employers in overcoming unnecessary legislative and political obstacles to their success.”

It is not clear what functions remain for the 38 local unions, once the new union gets into high gear. What happens to their staffs? Will the locals’ organizers be assigned to the new union and under what terms? In recent years, Stern has used various means, including the use of trusteeships, to merge existing locals so that only 38 remain. Does the new union signify the further erosion of union democracy?

Critics foresee numerous problems from operating “a union within a union.” All that can be said at this point is that SEIU Healthcare is a strange creation‹-one of the first of its kind--and bears watching.

The first of five articles on “American Labor in Crisis” will be posted on Monday, July 9. Check our web site: http://www.laboreducator.org .

Our two weekly columns and their archives (LaborTalk and The World of Labor) can be viewed and downloaded at our website: www.laboreducator.org.