The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor by Steve Early

Author:Steve Early
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2011-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Ivy League Amigos No More

“When you look at SEIU’s body of work in recent years it’s terrifying. If that’s where the labor movement is headed, we’re finished.”

—UNITE HERE president John Wilhelm, January 15, 20101

Right after April Fools’ Day in 2009, Andy Stern ventured into what Bob Dylan once called “the green pastures of Harvard University.” Andy was, no doubt, expecting a bigger audience than the seventy-five to a hundred people who came to hear him at the Kennedy School of Government. After all, even John Sweeney, the aging president of the AFL-CIO, attracted a crowd twice that size in the same venue a year earlier. Unfortunately, there was a very big name appearing simultaneously on the other side of town. Massachusetts’s own Noam Chomsky—always a huge draw at home and abroad—was speaking at a forum on student-labor action over at Northeastern University. Plus, SEIU Local 615 was hosting an annual “Labor Seder” at its union hall in downtown Boston.

So, on this particular Passover evening, those welcoming their national president tended to be dutiful SEIU functionaries rather than working members. Among them I spotted Joe Buckley, the portly, red-faced SEIU international rep who so helpfully arranged my brief audience with Andy’s predecessor, George Hardy, more than three decades before. Buckley, SEIU board member Celia Wcislo, and a few other Stern loyalists were joined by local Change to Win staffers, Harvard students and professors, and a smattering of Boston-area labor activists, including campus workers who belong to AFSCME. Since I live just fifteen minutes away from Harvard Square myself, I arrived early in order to make the most of this rare opportunity to reconnect with the union leader I hadn’t seen since SEIU’s convention in San Juan. Stern’s talk was titled “A Country That Works” and drew on his 2006 book by the same name, which touted CTW as a bright new departure from the dreary dysfunction of Sweeney’s AFL-CIO.

In the run-up to this Harvard visit, there had been an embarrassing falling out among the Ivy League graduates who formed CTW. Its founding fathers included Stern, who attended the University of Pennsylvania, Bruce Raynor, a Cornell man, and John Wilhelm from Yale. When the “three amigos” forged their “New Unity Partnership” in 2004, as a prelude to the seven-union CTW defection from the AFL a year later, it was an article of faith among them that “size matters.” Raynor insisted that the AFL-CIO’s fifty-plus affiliates should consolidate into just ten to fifteen mega-unions, with less overlapping jurisdiction and a better focus on “core industries.” He dismissed union democracy as a troublesome impediment to this visionary restructuring.2 To demonstrate how progressive unions could supersize themselves overnight and grow faster, Raynor and Wilhelm formed UNITE HERE. This “marriage of equals,” with 440,000 members overall, was wildly applauded by labor-oriented academics who had been steering students toward one union or the other for years.

Always a contrarian, I found the celebration a bit premature. In my own experience, as a veteran “M&A” guy for CWA,

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