CHAPTER ONE
“We Have to Destroy
this Union to Save It”In 2007, national leaders of the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) orchestrated a multi-fronted
all-out assault on its powerful, 150,000-member California
healthcare workers local union, United Healthcare Workers-
West (UHW). The attack was designed to break the union.SEIU is a large and infl uential union. It is the nation’s
second largest union and boasts that it is the fastestgrowing
union in the United States. Its President, Andy
Stern, U. Penn, ’71, is perhaps the best-known labor celebrity
in the country. He apparently has had more access to
the White House than any other individual—22 visits by
November 2009. The SEIU is one of the richest unions and
spends freely; it reportedly contributed nearly $85 million
to the 2008 Obama campaign. The returns for this generosity
remain unclear. SEIU’s intention in California was to
seize control of UHW, remove the elected leaders and relegate
its members to other jurisdictions or to altogether new
organizations. This goal, formally, was the “trusteeship” of
UHW, that is, a hostile take-over, an action that labor journalist
Steve Early has described as the trade-union equivalent
of “martial law.”SEIU expected resistance, so from the start the attack
was all-out, take-no-prisoners. It employed the language of war. In November 2007, top SEIU officials—including
Andy Stern and Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger—held a
“War Council,” where the plans were developed to dismantle
UHW—a “skunk team” was established to discredit UHW
and its leaders. The SEIU plan involved, literally, an invasion.
It set up a suite of offices, including a “war room” in a
“Green Zone” in Oakland. The first skirmish was September
18, 2008, when 70 UHW members overran the chamber, a
sign of things to come, chanting, “Whose Union? Our
Union!” Speaking at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, SEIU
Executive Vice President Mary Kay Henry referred to the
staff preparing the California invasion as “warriors.” Bill
Ragen, another top staffer, drew, with breathtaking brutality,
a parallel with the war in Iraq! “It’s like Iraq,” Ragen
advised SEIU on options, “easy to get in and then a slog”;
“implosion might be better,” he cautioned in the leaked
memo.“Implosion,” Iraq talk, was SEIU headquarters language
for breaking UHW up from the inside, in this case carving
it up—transferring 65,000 UHW members to a local
in Southern California. If trusteeship was pre-emptive,
“implosion,” in hindsight, seems to have been the long-haul
strategy, yet the very fact that it was proposed is an example
of the anything-goes mentality that prevails in SEIU. It is
also an example of the regard with which SEIU’s top leaders
holds its members. They showed no interest in the sentiments
of these tens of thousands of long-term care workers.
This forced transfer still remains on hold, but these options,
equally belligerent, were the only ones SEIU considered—
no others, no compromise, no mediation (despite offers),
no loyal opposition allowed, no “let a hundred flowers
bloom!”—instead, a fi ght to the finish.In 2007 UHW was SEIU’s third largest affi liate. It was
then California’s second largest SEIU local and the single
most powerful labor organization in the state. Taking it down would involve...
Cal Winslow (Author)
Cal Winslow is a PhD historian, co-author of Albion's Fatal Tree, and co-editor of Rebel Rank and File, Labor Militancy in the Long Seventies. He is a fellow in Environmental Politics at UC Berkeley and Director of the Mendocino Institute. He lives in Mendocino, California.