Gavin Newsom has dropped out of the Governor’s race. In part his decision must have been influenced by union support for Jerry Brown and by opposition from the SEIU union.
(You can read about it here: Bay Gaurdian Article.)
Personally I am very disappointed by this development. On critical issues of our time Newsom was not just on the right side but he was a motivation force pushing the rest of us in the right direction. Where previous mayors could only study the healthcare availability for city residents, Newsom implemented a universal healthcare system. When the State passed an initiative that limited the definition of marriage as between men and women only, Newsom married thousands of same sex relations pushing the issue to the national forefront. Our polar ice caps are melting at a rate not thought possible just a few years ago, and Newsom has turned San Francisco into the greenest large city in the country.
We are living in a time where the Democrats elected to office remind me of those Depression era graphics of a man with his pockets turned inside out. Democrats are getting elected promoting issues that effect all aspects of our lives then turn around like the empty pocket guy and say we have nothing for you because… Needless to say there are lots of excuses, but the real reason is the singular lack of backbone of folks who want to keep their jobs.
It’s a tough time to balance a budget. Proposition 13 has hamstrung means of increasing revenue in many ways. I can’t say that I am familiar enough with the SF budget process to know whether or not the SEIU workers could have been given a better deal. Let me say something about myself and how I was raised before you get the wrong idea. I think we need to promote unionization of all American workers. I grew up knowing that my grandfather participated in the 1934 San Francisco General Strike that had a great impact on national legislation allowing workers to organize. My parents raised us to never cross a picket line. In our family of five kids only my little sister who was allergic to all other forms of fruit got to eat grapes because of the farm workers boycott. Whenever I was presented with the opportunity to join a union at work I did. Union wages help to distribute the wealth created by our economy more equally. I haven’t forgotten that Jerry Brown had been in office for nearly four years when Proposition 13 passed. And it passed because the Democratic Party that controlled the state at the time was completely ineffective in providing for the needs of Californians.
My first encounter with SEIU was on the streets of San Francisco. They had organized many hotel and restaurant workers. Many of these folk came from Central America and I was organizing against US support of the dictatorships oppressing the people of these countries. I had been a carpenter and in the union but I dropped out when the union not only supported building on environmentally sensitive ground but were asking all building trade members to help bulldoze San Bruno Mountain. I was surprised and pleased that SEIU could take a socially important stance.
Much had happened in the union movement from the 30’s and 40’s to the 60’s and 70’s. US unions were involved in subverting union movements in third world countries. Some had openly campaigned for Nixon and Reagan. Unions had become big business, the providers of labor. They functioned much like material providers for big business. They focused narrowly on their own trade or area of work and not on the creation of a broad unified working. They were successful in dividing the working class by focusing their membership’s attention narrowly solely on their own economic interests. Solidarity of the working class was treated as a subversive and traitorous idea. In the 70’s and 80’s the SEIU seemed to be going against that trend by organizing some of the least privileged of the working class. It represented to me a re-democratization of the working class. This was a much different culture than existed in the building trades where keeping folks out to protect the jobs of those who were already in seemed to be the rule.
The SEIU has changed much since the 1980’s. Recently after they negotiated a contract with Sonoma County the supervisors had to protest the bullying of the union members by their own union. SEIU negotiated wage cuts and other give-backs and prevented the union members from knowing the terms of the contract prior to voting for it. The SEIU henchmen prevented union members who were known NO votes from participating. It is no wonder that the SEIU is preventing the workers at Santa Rosa’s Memorial Hospital from voting for a union after a four year battle to get the hospital to agree to a vote. The Memorial workers would surely vote to join the National Union of Healthcare Workers. Candy Andy, Andrew Stern president of the SEIU, is just another big business man, another dictator that needs to be taken down. Except his business is selling out the democratic process of uniting workers. I am not surprised that SEIU helped stop the Newsom campaign.
I believe that union wages uplift all wages. Thom Hartman is a proponent of the idea. And he tells it much more elegantly than I can. However I believe that he has confused the cause with the effect when it comes to understanding how a community with strong unions is a strong community. Unionization of the workforce is a tool that energized communities can use to distribute wealth and power democratically. All the previous thoughts and explanations were necessary for me to understand this point. And it needs to be developed. The community of the working class needs to use unionization to retake our democracy. When the union movement focuses its efforts on the narrow economic interests of its limited membership it divides the working class. It does the work of the anti-democratic owner class.
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