Union's tactics are a bust
The Service Employees International Union, one of the nation's largest and fastest-growing unions, has become a powerful political force under president Andrew Stern. Like plenty of others, the SEIU picked the wrong horse to back in the race for the Democratic nomination -- Howard who? -- but you can bet the union will do all it can to get its 1.6 million members to the polls and George W. Bush to his Texas ranch.
Democracy is a wonderful thing -- just not too much of it too close to home. By now the SEIU's M.O. is well established all over the country: Find an excuse to take over an SEIU local and force it into trusteeship. Install new leadership from the International, and delay elections until you can delay no longer to ensure your handpicked puppets can run as incumbents. Talk about grass-roots organizing and hope no one notices that everything runs from the top down. If local issues matter, they don't matter nearly as much as Andy Stern's ambitious social agenda.
In Boston, the janitors' union gave us an intimate look at how SEIU does business. After mobilizing public support for a strike in 2002, SEIU then did all it could to delay elections and all it could to squash organizers of its own in-house union. As local SEIU organizer Aaron Bartley put it in a private rant to friends after the strike: "The International designed, implemented, and settled this strike without really [caring] about what workers, or the staff for that matter, had to say."
Now those same concerns are creating a split in another SEIU unit here, this one at Local 888 representing about 12,000 public sector employees. "The philosophy of the local's current leadership -- especially regarding democracy and member empowerment -- is so at odds with my own philosophy and longstanding practice that I believe a change in leadership is a prerequisite for the local's potential to be realized," SEIU organizer Ferd Wulkan wrote friends on Saturday, explaining why he is walking away from the local he helped build over the past 15 years at the University of Massachusetts.
Wulkan, 55, is the institutional memory for the union at the Boston and Amherst campuses, where he helped organize the first professional workers and was the chief negotiator for six contracts. He supported SEIU's reorganization of the locals along industry lines, but he does not support what he has seen since Local 888 was formed in August and Susana Segat was installed as president. Wulkan would not comment, but his letter speaks for him: "The local's leadership . . . acts as if it believes that members are incapable of intelligent decision-making and activity without almost total direction from staff. Both my experience and philosophy tell me otherwise."
What SEIU needs here and around the country is more fair, well-contested elections. Democracy is messy, but it has a way of airing out the issues, surfacing new leaders, and getting people involved, top to bottom. Segat, who spent a decade as the SEIU's state political director, says members will get their election in June. "I have no problem with the democratic process," she says. "I think we are right on track with this process." She won't discuss Wulkan's resignation, calling it a personnel matter.
In Philadelphia, SEIU members recently ousted the International's handpicked trustee. (Predictably, the International's candidate is challenging the election.) Local 888, where the 2,500 union members at UMass represent the local's largest bloc and have a fiercely independent tradition, offers another chance to test the democratically challenged SEIU.
No matter who wins, a real election will be good for the SEIU, and more important, the working stiffs who count on their union.
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at 617-929-2902 or at bailey@globe
.com.
