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:: Tuesday, November 04, 2003 ::

Woodruff and Wypijewski: Debating the New Unity Partnership full text at CounterPunch

New Unity for Labor: Time to Get Started By TOM WOODRUFF

It's great to see that efforts to rebuild workers' strength in America that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and other unions are engaged in are provoking a much needed debate, including the recent article in CounterPunch by Joann Wypijewski, 'The New Unity Partnership, A Manifest Destiny for Labor.'

As for Wypijewski's article itself, some of the legitimate questions she raises are a little hard to find in the barrage of personal invective (and even ethnic slurs like the epithet 'oily' directed toward a Greek-American activist) she directs at a long list of people she doesn't like. It is bizarre, for example, to see SEIU criticized as a union with an 'all-consuming dedication' that 'has signed up half a million new members in the past few years and that is not content simply to weigh union revenues against expenses and leave it at that. SEIU seems to be on a mission from God, and that is part of the problem.'

JoAnn Wypijewski Replies

I did not criticize SEIU for its dedication (that was a compliment) but for, as I said, its mission-from-God attitude, the certainty that its way is the way ("Leading the way", as the union's slogan has it). SEIU's "United We Win" discussion paper has indeed been floating around and been published in various forms since last year. It is not the document to which I was referring, which had a secret life until recently and which is available to general readers courtesy of Carpenters for a Democratic Union. While the latter document was heavily influenced by the former, it also includes some important new features, such as the drafters' agenda for a remade AFL-CIO, eliminating, among other things, elected leadership and independent initiative at the state and local levels. That feature is undoubtedly less discomfiting to the most backward AFL affiliate leaders than are the NUP fantasies that would erase their identities and their jobs by collapsing the federation's 65 unions into 12 or 15, but it is perhaps the most telling. It indicates the trade-off the reformers are prepared to make, sacrificing democratic processes and structures capable of autonomous grass-roots action on the altar of centralized control.

posted 2:38 PM :: reference link :: 0 comments ::

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