"We're ready to take the offense for organized labor. It's time we have a President who didn't choke saying the word 'union.' We need to strengthen our unions by letting them do what they do best --- organize our workers. If a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union. It's that simple. We need to stand up to the business lobby that's been getting their friends in Congress and in the White House to block card check. That's why I was one of the leaders fighting to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. That's why I'm fighting for it in the Senate. And that's why we'll make it the law of the land when I'm President."
Barack Obama, Dubuque, IA, November 13, 2007
I am conflicted. American Labor created the American Middle Class through the sacrifices made by Union Men and Women and Colle ctive Bargaining. American Labor is now identified as the sole property of SEIU's Andy Stern. The Media did that.
The Media helped create Andy Stern. Andy Stern is a Marxist who leads the largest union of no skill and low skill workers who bu sheer force of their numbers intimidate politicians. Labor helpe no skill and low skill workers on to a path that gave them the skills to fight their way into the Middle Class.
The Middle Class is the home of American labor - skilled tradesmen. That home is being assaulted by SEIU. SEIU needs Barack Obama in the White House.
Click my post title -SEIU and ACORN are all over Indiana!
Services Employee Internation Union (SEIU) ignores Collective Bargaining practices, which American Labor developed to give build the American Middle Class. SEIU mobilizes no-skill and low skill workers by the thousands to intimidate, agitate and effect legislation that Redistribute Wealth. SEIU is now identified in the American Media as Labor.
Here is SEIU in its own words:
SEIU History
» In 1921, members of seven small janitor unions dared to dream they could build their strength by forming a single organization, the Building Service Employees International Union. The BSEIU, a union of mostly immigrant workers chartered by the then-AFL, changed its name to Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in 1968. Chicago-based Local 1, SEIU's first local union, is still organizing janitors and security officers today.
» In the years during and following the Great Depression, the union was the first in the country to help other service workers like hospital caregivers and public employees unite together in a union, paving the way for the modern SEIU's three core industries: property and public services, and health care. In 1968, the union was renamed the Service Employees International Union to reflect its membership and key sectors.
» SEIU's membership has grown from 625,000 in 1980 to more than 1.8 million today. At a time when the majority of organized labor was shrinking, SEIU was aggressively uniting workers' strength - largely in the fast-growing service industries. In 2000, SEIU had united 1.4 million members, to became the largest and fastest growing union in North America.
» SEIU represents more immigrants than any other union, and its membership is among the most diverse in the labor movement. Since President Andy Stern took office 1996, over 900,000 workers have united with SEIU, many of them women and people of color. Also that year, SEIU officers also committed to diversify the union's leadership to reflect the membership, and today, more than 50 percent of SEIU members are in local unions led by a woman or person of color.
» Following the 2004 presidential elections, SEIU launched a widely publicized dialogue to help rebuild the labor movement following several decades of decline. Despite massive economic changes in our world today, the strategies, structure, and priorities of the AFL-CIO, and many unions, haven't changed much since the federation was founded 50 years ago - prompting SEIU and four major unions to disaffiliate from the AFL-CIO in the summer of 2005 and build something stronger to help unite the 90 percent of workers who have no union. ( emphasis my own)
» At a historic founding convention in St. Louis on September 27, 2005, SEIU, along with 6 other unions representing 5.5 million workers--the Teamsters, UNITE HERE, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Laborers, the Carpenters and the United Farm Workers--formed the Change to Win Federation to develop joint strategic organizing campaigns to help ensure that workers, not just executives and stockholders, benefit from today's global economy. With a key focus to unite non-union workers by industry, the new federation aims to empower working people in this country so that they can build the strength to make their voices heard in their jobs, their communities, and in Washington. The delegates elected SEIU's Anna Burger as CTW federation chair - making her the first woman in U.S. history to ever head a labor federation.
Here is What SEIU is all about:
"We're going to build the strongest grassroots political voice in North America," Stern told more than 3,000 SEIU delegates in his June 2004 convention address.
But Stern's ideological aim has nothing to do with empowering workers. On the contrary, he has pursued a policy of consolidating small SEIU-affiliated unions into larger unions, and of giving the national union total control over its locals, which are now to be prohibited from even having their own logo and symbols. All power and image is to be subsumed under the purple and gold logo of national SEIU and its supreme boss, Andrew Stern. Stern's current organizing approach, in fact, is to bypass workers altogether.
SEIU and its political, media and leftwing activist allies conspire to attack a company directly with what they call "Corporate Campaigns" or the "death of a thousand cuts." This cabal of attackers harasses and disrupts company activities, sends vicious emails and letters to stockholders, intimidates customers, stalks and frightens employees, files baseless lawsuits, plants false stories with media allies to smear the company's reputation, and uses hundreds of other tactics to injure the targeted company in every way they can imagine.
The aim of this concerted swarming attack is to bully and pressure a targeted company into signing an agreement making SEIU the representative of its employees. When this happens, employees who might have voted "No" to SEIU representation in an election will get no vote at all. The union yoke is simply locked around each worker's neck - and paycheck. SEIU prefers this because, in a large percentage of past cases, workers who were given a choice voted against joining this thug union.
"He ticked off a number of reasons why union elections have their drawbacks," Chicago Tribune reporter Stephen Franklin wrote in a story headlined "Democracy Dream Still Eludes Union" after interviewing SEIU President Stern a few years ago. "They politicize the union's staff, they are costly, they are distracting from the union's business…. 'It is hard to make the argument that unions with direct elections better represent their members,' said Stern, whose membership takes in a large number of low-wage hospital workers, janitors and factory help."
"Some SEIU staff say straight up, 'This isn't a workers' organization. If it was left to the workers there wouldn't be an organization,'" wrote labor reporter JoAnn Wypijewski in October 2003 in the magazine CounterPunch. She is former Managing Editor of The Nation.
In its arrogance, organized labor now demands that workers should not be permitted any say in how their dues may be spent on politics. And the current SEIU approach is to deny workers any vote whatsoever on whether or not they must join this union, and no control over the local conglomerated SEIU union to which they must be members. Stern and the national union control everything. This is what Stern, blind to its irony, describes as "Union Democracy."
SEIU perfectly embodies the values of the New Labor Movement in America. To understand what it is, consider this 1997 analysis by Los Angeles Democrat, longtime fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, activist and author Joel Kotkin: "The public-sector unions have pushed the entire labor movement to the left. The Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, has embraced organizations with a New Left origin, such as ACORN and Cleveland's Nine to Five, and has even set up its own gay and lesbian caucus. 'Most of the radicals who went into labor ended up in the public employee unions,' observes one labor official."
"The rise of these unions led to the elevation of SEIU's boss, John Sweeney, to head of the labor federation," wrote Kotkin. "No George Meaney-style bread-and-butter unionist, Sweeney is an advocate of European-style democratic socialism. He has opened the AFL-CIO to participation by delegates openly linked to the Communist Party, which enthusiastically backed his ascent. The U.S. Communist Party says it is now 'in complete accord' with the AFL-CIO's program. 'The radical shift in both leadership and policy is a very positive, even historic change,' wrote CPUSA National Chairman Gus Hall in 1996 after the AFL-CIO convention. That alone is enough to send shivers down the spines of many labor activists, particularly those old enough to remember the earlier struggles against the totalitarian left. 'All those people we thought we got rid of 40 years ago are back in there,' complains one Detroit area labor lawyer close to the United Auto Workers. 'It's like the 1930s all over again.'"
Some SEIU activists boast that they are the "new CIO," referring to the radical, class-warfare Congress of Industrial Organizations before Walter Reuther purged it of its most toxic Communist leaders as a condition of merging with the more moderate, boost-worker-wages-oriented American Federation of Labor to create the AFL-CIO in 1955. Today's SEIU "leaders tend to be radical, even socialist," wrote Ryan Lizza, Associate Editor of The New Republic in 2003.
Such leftwing ideology was on display at the June 2004 SEIU convention, whose agendas moved far beyond workplace-and-wages issues by passing a resolution calling for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. SEIU and AFSCME contributed $2.6 million of their members' dues to Democrat Howard Dean's quixotic, losing anti-war run for the Iowa presidential caucuses, precisely because he was more passionately radical than the more reliable organized labor sock puppet, Rep. Dick Gephardt. (Many observers have likened Dean in that regard to SEIU President Stern.)
This New Labor movement is no longer focused just on workaday concerns. Many of its leaders are now 1960s radicals like Stern. SEIU's allies in waging mass attacks on targeted companies are not only politicians, the media and trial lawyers, but also leftwing environmental, health and community activist groups. John Sweeney marched arm-in-arm with such activists in protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle while radicals around him smashed store windows.
But although the SEIU objects to importing goods from international companies, it supports importing workers via easy immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens. One reason is that SEIU finds it easy to organize low-income, low-education workers who do not talk back to or question their SEIU union bosses. Another potential reason, as the Communist Party USA has proposed, is that Marxist-style revolution requires a disaffected proletariat, but American workers are generally too satisfied to function as this revolutionary class. The CPUSA answer: import poor immigrants, who, with proper union brainwashing, can become the soon-to-be-discontented proletariat that the U.S. has not produced in its own native population.
As Ben Johnson reported in FrontPageMagazine.com on March 2, 2004, SEIU's Andy Stern is on the Executive Committee of the Democratic Party auxiliary America Coming Together (ACT), along with the head of the Sierra Club and other radicals, ACT being funded by international money-manipulator George Soros.
