Labor’s Opening Shot: Andy Stern Video Blasts GOP For Blocking Solis
The big unions are preparing their first major public campaign of the year, an effort to target GOP Senators who are slowing the nomination of Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary, and here’s their opening shot.
A labor official sends me an advance copy of a new video featuring SEIU chief Andy Stern, to be blasted out later this afternoon with an email from Stern to some 280,000 members and non-members, in which he hammers the GOP for “obstruction” of Solis’ nomination:
Stern casts the actions of GOP Senators as a sign that they’re out of touch with ordinary Americans, whose hopes for economic relief are being stalled by the failure to move labor’s agenda. “I just don’t understand what they’re thinking at a time of such great crisis,” Stern says, asking members to sign a an online petition backing Solis.
The GOPers on the Senate Labor Committee had previously been slowing Solis’ nomination, apparently because of questions about her position on labor’s priority, the Employee Free Choice Act. Yesterday, things got worse, with the committee canceling a session to consider Solis after the news broke about some tax troubles afflicting her husband.
Last night, The Huffington Post reported that the unions were preparing a full out media and political blitz to get her confirmed.
Until now, the unions had largely held their fire on Solis, mainly because Obama aides had told them to stay quiet, as I reported recently. But now, the prospect of a second major cabinet pick going down is looming.
In Washington, it often seems as if the damage from such defeats multiplies exponentially. Taken together with the loss of Daschle, a major proponent of health care reform, a top labor priority, a defeat for Solis would add up to a bad loss for labor and, more broadly, a setback for labor’s and Obama’s agenda. Hence the newly aggressive campaign.
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Don’t the Democrats have a majority on the committee? Screw the Republicans and schedule a vote. Enough is enough.
solis’ advocates haven’t been able to figure out exactly where the logjam is.
Not QUITE the first shot–the UFCW wasn’t staying quiet. We put out a statement last week demanding Republican senators stop blocking Solis’ confirmation: http://www.ufcw.org/press_room/index.cfm?pressReleaseID=416
Now we’ve got an email going out in a few minutes to our members as well to ask them to contact their Senators and demand that Solis be confirmed immediately.
@CT Voter
I’ll second that – let’s not blame the Republicans here. If she goes down it will be because Dems did not support her. Simple. The Repubs did not put a hold or a block or anything on her – T Kennedy stopped the hearing. Why on earth is the SEIU wasting money blaming Republicans when they should be securing the votes of their natural born allies – Dems?
Andy should clean up his own mess in California. Here is an e-mail I got on what’s going on in SEIU:
Trusteed Workers In California Form Independent Union
As former UHW staff members, we’re writing to update you about the trusteeship of UHW as well as healthcare workers’ recent founding of a new union here in California.
First, a quick update: On January 27, President Andy Stern imposed a trusteeship on UHW, thereby removing UHW’s 100-member Executive Board, suspending its constitution, removing its officers, and appointing out-of-town trustees to run the union. An article from the Daily Labor Report offers more details and is especially interesting because it includes observations from labor analysts like Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University and Nelson Lichtenstein of the University of California Santa Barbara. Their comments underscore what’s been widely understood about the effort to seize control of UHW – that there are no legitimate grounds for trusteeing UHW and that the trusteeship is simply a move by Stern to eliminate his political opponents inside SEIU. In the article, Bronfenbrenner points to the profound contradictions in Stern’s stated rationale for the trusteeship. A second observer calls Stern’s action “the height of absurdity.” A third calls the former UHW “a model union in many ways… a big, vibrant democratic local which has a policy disagreement with the international.”
On January 28, the day after the trusteeship, UHW’s 100-member Executive Board voted unanimously to form a new union independent of SEIU – the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). Since then, tens of thousands of workers have flocked to the new union in an unprecedented exodus from SEIU. In just the first week after NUHW’s founding, a majority of the workers from more than 100 hospitals and nursing homes signed NLRB certification petitions requesting to leave SEIU so they can join NUHW. These petitions, which were filed with the NLRB, cover more than 25,000 workers and are the largest such filing in California’s history. Since then, petitions covering approximately 5,000 more workers have been filed. Workers accomplished this feat without the help of a single paid staff person. Currently, NUHW is an entirely volunteer organization that relies on thousands of dedicated rank-and-file leaders as well as more than 120 former UHW staff who quit their jobs and are volunteering to help build a democratic, member-led union.
The mass exodus of workers from SEIU is a totally predictable response to Stern’s actions. For months, UHW members pleaded with Stern to let them continue to govern their own union. More than 125,000 UHW members signed petitions telling Stern not to trustee their local. More than 8,000 protested at SEIU’s trusteeship hearings. Staffers assigned to the trusteeship team are now facing the predictable anger of UHW’s members. Members are refusing to let out-of-town organizers set foot in their facilities. International officials have had to hire off-duty cops to guard the offices that they forcibly seized from UHW members. SEIU officials hide behind office doors chained shut with heavy locks and guarded by gun-toting officers. For more reports about what’s happening inside the trusteeship, go to http://perezstern.blogspot.com (Today’s post includes a report from an SEIU staff person assigned to the trusteeship who quit her job.)
Meanwhile, SEIU officials have launched an aggressive campaign to stop workers from leaving SEIU. These SEIU leaders are working with some of California’s worst anti-union employers to threaten, suspend and even fire rank-and-file workers who circulate petitions to join NUHW. In the words of one UHW steward: “This is like a very bad marriage. We filed for a divorce. SEIU is like an abusive husband who’s trying to stop us from going.” Meanwhile, each day UHW members are filing more and more certification petitions and are insisting that SEIU officials respect their decision.
For more information, please go to http://www.nuhw.org.
The topic is quite hot in the net at the moment. What do you pay the most attention to when choosing what to write about?
Stern is an idiot. Typical union leader that is self centering and doesnt care about the people he is supposed to be helping. He will sell you out in a second and throw you under the bus if that will help him. In the long run he will cost alot of people their jobs!