Month: May 2008

Toward Social Justice

One of the greatest revelations of the year for me was seeing Bill Fletcher Jr. speak at New York’s Left Forum this past March. For years I’ve been familiar with Fletcher, who is, perhaps, the most prominent left intellectual in the U.S. labor movement, who was a special assistant to John Sweeney in the early years of this administration and still a trusted figure in the mainstream labor movement despite his socialist barnstorming. But this was the first time I had heard him speak. I was so captivated by the way he could crystalize and articulate the challenges we face and the practical and realistic steps we could take to address them that I attended every panel at which he spoke, which I hadn’t intended when I got there. Fletcher has just published his first book, “Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice,” […]

Questions Over Union Neutrality

SEIU’s been facing an increasing amount of scrutiny from the press and from the left lately for its unconventional approach to bargaining to organize. This has been prompted in large part by the California Nurses Association’s controversial decision to intervene in a carefully negotiated and long-planned “neutrality” organizing campaign by SEIU in Ohio, and SEIU’s shockingly violent response at the 2008 Labor Notes conference. In the midst of this controversy, the Wall Street Journal reports details of some of these “secret organizing deals.” The website requires subscription, so I’ve posted relevant quotes below: Two of the nation’s largest labor unions have struck confidential agreements with large employers that give the companies the right to designate which of their locations, and how many workers, the unions can seek to organize. The agreements are raising questions about union transparency and workers’ rights. A summary document put together by the unions says it […]