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OpenLeft has hosted discussions in the past about SEIU and its threatened take-over of Oakland-based United Healthcare Workers (UHW), the leading force for reform in the union.
For a very current and detailed review of the spreading corruption scandal in SEIU, check out Steve Early and Cal Winslow's piece in Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/ea...
Monthly Review has also posted it online at http://mrzine.monthlyreview.or...
Here's a sample:
"How did a national union culture, long touted as one of labor's most dynamic and progressive, engender such a mess? How did SEIU produce a Tyrone Freeman and the kind of press coverage he's been getting lately (which hurts all unions, not just SEIU)? In Pringle's Los Angeles Times reporting, this "rising star in local labor circles" is depicted, accurately, by all accounts (except his own), as a free-spending 21st century SEIU version of Jackie Presser, the biggest Teamster boodler of the 1970s and 80s. As other observers have noted, there's a steady drift, in too many SEIU' locals, toward Presser's brand of plain old "business unionism." First, SEIU operatives at the Labor Notes conference last Spring resort to the same kind of thuggish behavior once common in the Teamsters during the Presser era. Now, like purple shades of Jackie, SEIU leaders collect inflated salaries, tolerate executive board double-dipping, and ignore casual looting of local treasuries, until membership or media whistle-blowing forces them to announce a "clean-up."
The authors welcome feedback on the piece and further debate about the questions of union corruption/democracy/and reform that it raises! Steve Early can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com
and Cal Winslow at cwinslow@mcn.org
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