The New Republic: Labor's Love Lost: Will Andy Stern save unions, or destroy them?

From the New Republic:

by Bradford Plumer, from the April 23, 2008 edition

[A]t the very moment when Stern's plans are at their most expansive and ambitious, he is facing a revolt from within his own union. This time, his opponent is no Gus Bevona. He is a man named Sal Rosselli, a lifelong progressive who heads SEIU's most powerful health care local in California, the 150,000 member United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW). Rosselli has launched a war against Stern that has spilled out into the open in recent months. His complaints -- that Stern has made the union too undemocratic, that he has cut secret deals with employers, that he cares more about enlarging the union than serving its existing members -- are resonating with at least some of SEIU's rank and file.

Stern argues that, in an age of multinational corporations, it's not always viable to have the workplace as the main site of union power--decisions often need to be made at a statewide or national level. "Stern has said he doesn't want to emphasize individual grievances," says Herman Benson of the Association for Union Democracy. "He's interested in the bigger stuff." Benson, whose group tracks complaints about whether unions are run democratically, says he hears more grumbling from SEIU members nowadays than those in any other organization.

... "It's top-down versus bottomup," Rosselli told me, laying out his differences with the SEIU leadership. "Stern's continuing to consolidate power in D.C., and we...we don't want to put limits on empowering workers to have a voice against their employer." ...

These fights get to the heart of the broader dispute between Stern and Rosselli. Stern believes that unions can't be strong in an industry until they have reached sufficient density, so the key is to add as many members as possible, no matter how it's done. ...

Rosselli and others counter that, in the course of trying to expand, Stern is weakening unions past the point where they can be effective advocates--nationalizing the power structure of unions so that workers end up with little say over their own fate, then agreeing to concessions in exchange for growth that the workers themselves would never have accepted. Some of Stern's critics fear that this philosophy is turning his union into an AARP-style organization, where members simply pay their dues and trust that others will look out for their interests. These critics aren't against growth: Rosselli's union, UHW, has been one of the fastest-growing locals within SEIU over the past six years. They simply argue that, when expansion comes at the expense of worker rights, it isn't much of a triumph at all. "In his zeal to grow faster, Andy is taking shortcuts that will have serious effects on the vitality of the institution," says Brown, the former SEIU leader from New England. "The members will look at the union leadership the way they look at the boss: The boss wants this, the union wants that, and I'm in the middle."

The feud between Stern and Rosselli finally boiled over late last year, during the legislative debate over universal health care in California. Stern had strongly supported a compromise bill that would require individuals to buy health insurance, while Rosselli had concerns about affordability. A series of e-mails and letters, beginning in October, show Stern maneuvering to sideline Rosselli from his spot at the head of SEIU's California Executive Council by dissolving the body and creating a new one. Then, in January--in response to an internal SEIU strategy document arguing that the union needed to further centralize resources in order to wage large-scale organizing campaigns--Rosselli fired off a critique charging that Washington headquarters had become unaccountable. In February, Rosselli resigned from the union's executive committee, so that he was no longer bound by its gag rules. In late March, Stern sent a letter to Rosselli raising questions about "unethical conduct" and "financial irregularities"; UHW officials charged that Stern was laying the groundwork to trustee their local. At SEIU's convention this June, Rosselli plans to put forward constitutional changes that would revamp the process for voting on bargaining issues and mergers, and provide for direct election of the president by union members. (Currently, the president is elected by delegates to SEIU's national convention.)

... Thomas Dewar, a former communications staffer at Local 1021 in California, told me that he attended a strategy meeting with SEIU officials about responding to Rosselli. "I actually asked them straight up, 'Why don't you co-opt [Rosselli's] platform?'" Dewar says. "They balked at that. ... Instead, the strategy was to personalize the attack against Sal."

Rosselli currently has few public allies outside of his local. "Right now, the environment is one of fear," Rosselli tells me. "UHW is the second-largest union in SEIU, with 150,000 members, almost 400 staff. You can imagine other people watching the retaliation against us--'If they can do that to UHW, we'll get killed if we speak out.'" Many SEIU members I talked to were torn between a genuine respect for Stern and a belief that certain problems needed to be addressed.