"Think of a town that's plagued by deaths, arson, and robberies, and yet the mayor and police don't seem to have the time or inclination to do anything about it because they are preoccupied by a campaign to stop residents from cluttering up the streets by passing out unauthorized handbills. That act of imagination could prepare you for these events in the International Union of Operating Engineers..."

"At the June convention, climaxing President Andy Stern's twelve years in office, a big majority of the 1,900 convention delegates endorsed his program and endowed him with increased power amounting to presidential authoritarianism couched in democratic verbiage...The union administration's rhetorical call for "justice for all" has enabled Stern to rally round him a troop of social idealists in whose eyes the SEIU has become an extension of civil rights campaigning and community organizing. On the other hand, its trend toward bureaucratic central control, and its justification of a kind of defanged hybrid unionism to be built in cooperation with big domestic and global corporations, has alienated a whole other cadre of social idealists who want the labor movement to be a democratic movement of workers, a movement that, they feel, can only be built in confrontation with big capital.

Two conceptions of the labor movement are counterposed. At some point even Stern's own followers are bound to ask, "What kind of labor movement are we building?" This is no crude battle for power. It is no conflict between so-called "business" and "social" unionism. Nor between a conservative "right" and a militant "left." Nor between crooks and honest unionists. It is a dispute over the meaning and nature of democracy in the labor movement..."

In each issue of Union Democracy Review we publish "shorts" -- stories that are too short for a feature, but too important to leave out. We put this issue's shorts online to give you a sample: ATU 1181, CWA 1034, release time, AFSCME 372, Legal Momentum, Interfaith Worker Justice. Read (9/3/08)

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is creating an Ethics Panel "in the wake of allegations of misspending by union officials at several big locals."

According to The New York Times, "the commission, expected to have 15 members, would consult anticorruption groups, including the Association for Union Democracy and Teamsters for a Democratic Union, to discuss what ethics rules to adopt and how best to enforce them."

From Benson's Union Democracy Blog.

"By imposing a trusteeship and a monitorship over two mega West Coast locals, Andy Stern, SEIU international president, subjects twenty percent of the entire international membership to his disciplinary domination. They make up almost half the union's membership in health care, the SEIU's most important area of concentration. Two locals, but how different their stories! In one, Stern initiates action against a rival and critic. In the other, he is forced to act against one of his own key supporters who stands accused of defrauding his local of around a million dollars. Disruption on this scale might normally reveal an international administration in disarray. Ironically, however, just three months before, Stern emerged from the union's convention with his program overwhelmingly endorsed and his presidential powers expanded..." Read more on Benson's Union Democracy Blog. (8/31/08)

From Benson's Union Democracy Blog.

"It was already clear before the recent SEIU convention. It obvious now...The SEIU does not have to invent the wheel. The United Auto Workers has had a public review board for fifty years. The board is a kind of Supreme Court within the union to guarantee due process. It has the authority to overturn disciplinary decisions of the union's top international executive board and president. Most important of all, it is composed of independent persons, pro-labor, civil libertarians, eminent in their own right in their own professions. And because they are independent and outside the union power structure, not beholden to the union establishment, the board and its members serve as an important deterrent to arbitrary authoritarianism..." Read more on Benson's Union Democracy Blog.

Association for Union Democracy, Inc.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 3, 2008
Media Contacts: Herman Benson, Kurt Richwerger (718) 564-1114 (AUD) info@uniondemocracy.org
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AUD Proposes Democracy as a Weapon Against Corruption

In today's New York Times, the Service Employees International Union announced plans for an internal ethics commission to address recent corruption charges facing several top union leaders. The union indicated that it would consult the Association for Union Democracy as part of its efforts.

The Association for Union Democracy is very willing to bring our forty years of experience to bear in assisting the SEIU, but what the SEIU faces is a moral crisis involving both democracy and corruption.

We believe it is essential to ensure protection for democracy and dissent within unions. Our experience shows that democracy is the linchpin for preventing corruption.

An internal panel of the kind proposed by SEIU President Andrew Stern would simply mull over the niceties of still another code and would be more than a waste of time; it would be an evasion. What the SEIU needs now is to establish a board composed of respected individuals, independent and completely outside the union power structure - a kind of supreme court endowed with the power, in defense of member rights, to overrule decisions of the international president and the international executive board in those circumstances in which members' democratic rights could be endangered.

The need is not to devise a code of ethics, the need is the genuine practice of democracy. The basic code of ethics was delivered on Mount Sinai in the commandment "Thou shall not steal." Everything else is a refinement. If the SEIU feels it needs an amplification of its own code to remind its officials of that commandment, it need only copy one of the many excellent codes already available. The problem in the SEIU is not that it lacks an ethical code, but that it has evolved a bureaucratic system of organization and, despite any code, has created an atmosphere of authoritarianism that obviously spawns corruption.

AUD and our message of union democracy are more relevant today than ever. Within the last year, a broad discussion on the future of the labor movement and the role of union democracy (there has been nothing like it for decades) has erupted out of the labor movement itself. With more than 40 years of campaigning for democratic rights, with our board members who are experts in union democracy, with our Union Democracy Review, with our website, with guidance we provide for hundreds of unionists each year, AUD can contribute to that discussion as no others can. But we need your help.

From the May-June Union Democracy Review.

Thomas Buffenbarger, Machinists international president, dispatched his deputy to Bath, Maine on March 17 to change the locks on the hall of Local S6, then put the local under trusteeship, ousted the local officers, and took over negotiating a new contract. It was the culminating act in a long campaign to try to get this independent local under control. Routine. At worst, Buffenbarger might have anticipated the usual ineffective protest; but he could not have expected what followed: continued mass protest picket lines, an unfavorable local press, and powerful resistance in federal court...

From the May-June Union Democracy Review.

The convention is old news, but this detailed analysis of the issues and players should continue to be useful as the struggles within SEIU evolve.

• Was the threat of a trusteeship of UHW-West real? What impact did open letters from labor intellectuals and student labor support groups have?
• Facing the imminent threat of a trusteeship, the UHW-W deposited $3,000,000 into a separate non-profit, tax-exempt fund [IRS code 501(c)(3)] independent of the regular local treasury but administered by local officers. What was that fund about? Why is the SEIU International pursuing legal claims against it?
• What were the rival platforms at the convention?
• What are the implications of the passage of the International's program?
• What are the implications for union democracy in SEIU?

From the May-June Union Democracy Review.

More than ten years ago, Cathy Hackett and Jim Hard were elected the top leaders of SEIU Local 1000. One of the early supporters of their democratic reform movement was Alex Hernandez. Since then, relations have changed drastically. In elections for the local's 61 delegates to the SEIU convention, an opposition group, led by Hernandez, contested 49 slots and won 33, a clear majority....Hackett and Hard are strong supporters of Andy Stern, SEIU president; Hernandez backs the opposition platform of Sal Rosselli's United Healthcare Workers-West...

From the May-June Union Democracy Review.

In each issue of Union Democracy Review we publish "shorts" -- stories that are too short for a feature, but too important to leave out. We put this issue's shorts online to give you a sample: Photocopying hiring hall records; "Harbor Herald" reformers win in ILA 333; Peace pipe for Nurses and SEIU?; Trouble in Philadelphia IBEW Local 98; and in Operating Engineers Local 825, Newark; Administration spies on challengers in Machinists District Lodge 751.

"...the problem is that Rosselli's critics go beyond denouncing him for criticizing. They would make his very right to criticize illicit. And, because they are armed with organizational power, they would resolve the dispute not simply by democratic decision but by suppression. The irony is that they wrap autocratic intentions in the flag of a democratic "majority"...