Andy Stern, president of the second-largest union in the United States, the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU), published a book in October last year (2) in which he presents himself and his views to the American public. Partly autobiographical, partly programmatic, the book was written “to help galvanize the forces for change”.
It is a strange book full of contradictions which raises far more questions than it answers. Stern denounces growing economic and social inequality but advocates making US corporations more competitive in the “global marketplace” by shifting the burden of health care and pension cost to workers. He sympathetically describes the plight of working class families who cannot make ends meet but wants workers to work harder to increase their employers’ competitiveness. He declares that “the world needs global unions” but the book is full of flag-waving America-First sloganeering. He denounces the dependence of unions on Democratic politicians, only to quote admiringly and at length some of the most reactionary leaders of the Republican party. His book reads as though he was running for political office, but barely mentions issues of national concern like the war in Iraq, international relations, trade, immigration – or, indeed, workers’ rights.
Stern wrote this book in his capacity as a union leader – indeed, according to George Will, the most significant U.S. union leader of his generation. His views on life and the world would be of little interest if he did not have the capacity to use his power as a union leader to further the cause of labor or to set it back. The core issue is therefore to understand clearly what his concept of trade unionism is all about. This becomes most clear when he discusses the relations he has established with the official unions in China, his views on labor/business partnerships and on international trade union work. This review focuses on these three issues.
The China Opening
A recent story in the Wall Street Journal (3) started with the paragraph: “As China imprisoned dozens of dissident labor activists after massive workers’ demonstrations in 2002, an American labor leader decided it was time to embrace China’s government-backed unions.”
Andy Stern counts the opening up of relations with the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) in 2002 as one of his major achievements. He was persuaded to begin building relation with the ACFTU by Chinese American and other U.S. labor activists who argued that the Chinese trade unions are legitimate workers organizations and that the American labor movement should begin to open a dialogue and cultivate relationships with them. (4) Last May Stern visited the ACFTU for the sixth time, leading a delegation of the Change to Win (CtW) coalition of U.S. unions which disaffiliated with the AFL-CIO in July 2005. Stern has also hosted ACFTU delegations to the United States and recently the Los Angeles Federation of Labor signed a co-operation agreement with the Shanghai Trade Union Council, the local ACFTU branch, the “first formal relationship between a U.S. central labor council and their equivalent in China”, according to the LACFL press release. It “pledges co-operation, regular exchange of labor leader delegations, and joint work on research and organizing, especially in addressing multinational corporations operating in both cities.”
These are important political developments not just for the U.S. labor movement but for the entire global independent trade union movement.. While he may not be the political brain behind them, Andy Stern is their leading public advocate.
The AFL-CIO of course does not recognize the ACFTU as a legitimate trade union organization. In 2002, when the South China Morning Post reported Andy Stern’s visit, an AFL-CIO spokesperson issued a statement that the delegation in no way represented the AFL-CIO: “the AFL-CIO shares the view of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions … that the ACFTU is not an independent trade union but rather part of the Chinese government and party structure.”
Stern is neither naïve nor uninformed. He describes the ACFTU as “government-controlled” (5) and “employer-oriented” (6). He knows that “there is no question that workers’ unrest is on the rise in China” and that, when protests follow, “Chinese authorities arrest the leaders, who can end up serving long prison sentences”. He wonders what will happen “if China’s rulers succeed in bottling a potion that mixes market capitalism and political authoritarianism” (7) He even pays tribute to the “brave man” who “stood still and faced seventeen approaching tanks in Tiananmen Square (actually Chang’an Avenue – dg), not knowing that his stance would become a worldwide symbol for the heroic fight for democracy in China.” (8)
So, given what he knows about the ACFTU, why did Stern engage with this “government controlled and employer-oriented” organization as if it were a genuine trade union body?
His description of his first visit to China gives no obvious answer. He sounds like a naïve tourist, awed by having been met at the airport by the head of the ACFTU International Department, and “whisked” into the diplomatic lounge. Then Stern and his delegation were received, to his “shock”, in the Great Hall of the People: “with much ceremony we were guided into the splendor of the Great Hall formal reception room and treated with the formality of visiting diplomats. As the highest-ranking union leader in the delegation, I was guided to a lavishly carved, formal chair opposite the president of the ACFTU, Wei Jianxing.”
He goes on to explain: “Mr. Wei was China’s highest-ranking labor leader, assigned by the Communist Party. More important, he served as one of eight powerful members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s highest governing body. Mr. Wei wielded enormous power over all the affairs of China, and his importance surpassed that of any union leader I had previously met.” (9)
A far cry indeed from Stern’s previous international labor travel, with “uneventful, private dinners with the host country’s union officials” (10). none of them, to be sure, wielding the “enormous power” that membership in the highest governing body of a one-party police state brings with it.
Already in 2001,the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU) and China Labour Bulletin (CLB) had warned that visits arranged under the auspices of the ACFTU were “directly harmful to those in China trying to promote labor rights in China, either within the parameters of the official “union” or outside it” because “the ACFTU leadership milks the publicity opportunities that engagement offers, using it to shore up its credibility, while clamping down on independent labor activists and silencing the reformers.” (11)
Here is how the ACFTU leadership milked the publicity opportunity of Stern’s 2002 visit, in Stern’s own words: after Wei “grandly welcomed” the delegation with a short speech and Stern spoke in reply, “Mr. Wei made a slight motion with his hand and, in what had obviously been prearranged, summoned the Chinese press corps. Several dozen reporters and photographers appeared and began taking notes, shooting pictures and video footage, and I later learned that our introductory remarks had been recorded, translated and broadcast to the press room.”
Stern goes on to write, apparently oblivious to the real significance of the public relations theater in which he is the star performer: “For the Chinese, the photograph of an American labor leader’s ‘historic’ arrival was worth a thousand words, and those pictures would soon appear in the China Daily News, in Russia’s Tass, and, back home, in Business Week.” (12)
In that context, Greg Tarpinian’s (Executive Director of CtW) comment last May that “engagement is not acceptance, engagement is not endorsement” (13) is beside the point. The ACFTU is not looking for acceptance or endorsement, it is looking for recognition and legitimacy, and it got what it wanted.
Stern, echoed by others, does eventually offer a number of arguments why engagement with the ACFTU supposedly advances the interests of Chinese and American workers. Some are remarkably shallow and ignorant of the experiences and views of many who have seriously dealt with similar issues, others deserve more serious consideration. Here are a few of them:
(1) China is Big and Everyone is Going There.
Andy Stern writes: “Most Fortune 500 companies have invested madly in China. Representatives of both American political parties have visited China. From around the world, professors, students, journalists, athletes, artists, musicians, tourists – and unions – travel to China in acknowledgement of its rapid emergence as a power player in all aspects of world affairs.” (14)
Later he writes: “I was stunned by China”. What follows is a wide-eyed description of urban development in Beijing and Shanghai. Stern concludes: “China is for real”.
It is not news that, as General de Gaulle memorably remarked, “China is a very big country inhabited by many Chinese”, nor is it news that China is a fascinating country that has excited the curiosity of foreigners over centuries and it is common knowledge that since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms starting in the late 1970s, industrial and urban development has been spectacular.
Obviously thousands of people, representing a wide range of institutions and organizations, keep visiting China, each for their own reasons: companies to make money, professors and students to do research, journalists to write reports, as they would anywhere, athletes to compete, artists and musicians to perform and tourists to satisfy their curiosity. Governments obviously maintain diplomatic relations and exchange visits, sometimes at the highest level, for reasons of State. This is why Nixon visited China in 1972 and Deng visited the US in 1979.
For trade unionists to visit China in their capacity as trade unionists, there would have to be a trade union reason, which assumes that there are legitimate counterparts – either real unions or incipient democratic worker organizations – to visit. Let us have a closer look.
(2) Time to End the Cold War.
Stern writes that “American unions had a policy dating back to the Cold War of refusing to interact with ‘government dominated’ unions and would not recognize the ACFTU or speak officially to its leaders. I found that policy counterproductive.” (15) As another American union leader put it: “The Cold War is over, the economy that they have in this country is essentially the same as we have in the United States” (16) (but not the political system, he forgets to add).
It is worth remembering that the Cold War was a period of worldwide conflict between two political blocs led respectively by two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, roughly from 1946 to 1990. This was a conflict between States and, after the Sino-Soviet split starting in the late 1950s, it was never principally about China, which had its own international policy with shifting alliances, including with the United States as in the case of Cambodia when both supported the murderous Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979.
As we all know, both superpowers tried to control the international labor movement and to turn it into an auxiliary in that contest. In the case of the USSR, the control was total in its sphere of influence. In the case of the US, despite the best efforts of the CIA, the control was far from total.
What was total, however, was the rejection of the Soviet system by trade unionists of all political tendencies other than Communist, not because the American government said so but because, since the rise of fascism and Stalinism in the 1920s and 1930s, no independent trade unionist would accept the idea that an organization which was part of the State machinery in a one-party police State, where workers were forcibly enrolled, could legitimately represent workers and be called a union.
This is why socialist, social-democratic, catholic, revolutionary syndicalist and conservative syndicalist unions, the AFofL, the CIO, the AFL-CIO and others refused to establish fraternal relations with the German Labor Front of the Nazis, the fascist corporations of Italy, Portugal and Spain, the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions of the USSR and similar organizations in the countries under its control, and of course the ACFTU. All of this started long before the Cold War and had nothing to do with China except insofar as the Chinese unions are state-controlled. In fact, some international trade union organizations, such as the IUF, also refused for the same reasons to entertain relations with the so-called trade unions in Taiwan when it was a one-party dictatorship of the Kuomintang, very much in contrast to the “Cold War policies” of the time.
Communists had of course always opposed union policies isolating the Soviet labor organization and, starting in the 1970s, others also started establishing and advocating contacts. The controversies that then developed followed exactly the same pattern as is now developing over China.
In order to build a case for engaging with organizations that were obviously and admittedly part of the State machinery, the advocates of engagement had to endorse a political operation which the HKCTU and CLB have called “conceptual embezzlement”, i.e. the hijacking of labor terminology to cover a reality reflecting the opposite of its original meaning, starting with the word “union” (17).
The original example of this “conceptual embezzlement” was the designation of the labor organizations of the USSR as “trade unions” and the designation as “trade unions” of all similar organizations established on that model, in all countries controlled by the USSR and in China, whereas in reality they were and, where they still exist, still are organs of the State for administering and controlling the labor force, if necessary by aiding repression.(18)
However, as long as the “conceptual embezzlement” is successful and unchallenged, the way is clear to muddy the waters by those who have a political agenda to do so, by those who choose to believe their own lies and by those who cannot tell the difference.
This brings us to the other arguments.
(3) Aiding the Reformers
The case for engagement is often made on the grounds that developing contacts with unions all over the world will help bring about positive changes even in State-controlled organizations.
Stern writes that “the ACFTU’s willingness to transform itself to effectively counter the impact of globalization has far-reaching implications for workers everywhere.” (19) and:
“I’ve continued my conversations with leaders of the ACFTU and have heard the frustrated voices of Chinese union officials trying to deal with foreign-owned enterprises. In 2005, I hosted the ACFTU’s delegation to the United States and sensed their evolving thinking in regard to the significant challenges of a capitalist economy and the urgent need to reevaluate their role in representing Chinese workers.” (20)
These comments echo the argument put forth by other American unionists and activists. For example, Kent Wong and Elaine Bernard argue that: “There is a wide range of political and philosophical perspectives among Chinese trade unionists. There is a major generational transition taking place in China, and a new emerging leadership within the government and within labor unions. Through engaging in more dialogue and exchange with Chinese workers and unions, the American labor movement could identify new leaders of China who embrace a similar perspective on global corporate domination and the need to defend human rights and labor rights.” (21)
This is an argument that must be taken seriously, inasmuch as in an organization as large as the ACFTU (and, for that matter, in a society as complex as China’s) there will inevitably be a “wide range of political and philosophical perspectives” and, no doubt, reflection and discussion about how to meet the challenges of capitalism and “market Stalinism”. (22)
Two questions, however, need to be asked: first, in a regime that exercises total control over the permissible limits of public debate, and enforces these limits by police measures, how far can views that deviate from the official Party line affect policies of organizations such as the ACFTU? Second, how far can foreign visitors affect the debate?
In their reply to Wong and Bernard, the HKCTU and the CLB (23) pointed out that there was nothing new in engagement: “According to the People’s Daily, the ACFTU reported that between 1994 and 1998 Chinese trade unions established ‘cooperative relations’ with 419 trade unions from 131 countries and regions. These included 267 trade union delegations to China and 200 ACFTU delegations sent abroad to 191 countries and regions. In addition, between 1996 and 1998, the ACFTU sent over 400 cadres on labor related study missions abroad. ACFTU Vice-Chair Zhang Dinghua made clear that such exchanges were not an attempt to build links in the international labor movement’s struggle to resist the increasing international power of capital and multinational companies. On the contrary, the exchanges were an integral part of the Chinese government’s foreign policy.”
There have been many more delegations since this was written and many, though not all, have raised human rights and labor rights issues, with nothing to show for.
Over decades, Western European and other trade union delegations visited what they took to be their counterpart unions in the USSR and other countries in the Soviet bloc, most of them arguing that such visits promoted democratic change, which would eventually lead to co-operation on basic trade union issues, such as a common front against corporate power. Actually, as long as the system remained in place, no relations with labor organizations in the Soviet bloc ever contributed to a single joint action against a transnational corporation and when democratic change finally happened, it had nothing to do with trade union exchange visits.
Rather, these so-called “unions” collapsed like a house of cards when the States that controlled them collapsed, without the workers they were supposed to represent lifting a finger to support them. The genuine unions that succeeded them, whether arising from “old” or “new” structures, have had to battle ever since against the discredit the defunct State organizations have brought to the concept of “union” and find it hard to overcome the skepticism and passivity of workers used to perceiving “unions” as tools of a repressive State bureaucracy.
Even if American trade unionists, through exchange visits (and, one assumes, aided by their own independent and trustworthy interpreters) might succeed in “identifying new leaders of China who embrace a similar perspective on global corporate domination and the need to defend human rights and labor rights” such new leaders cannot implement progressive change in the ACFTU as long as the system remains in place. For this to change, far larger forces than the trade union bureaucracy will have to start moving, and it is certainly not visiting foreign trade unionists who will influence the outcome of such political struggles.
The paradox is that Andy Stern and the other engagers are failing to see the forest for the trees. New leaders do exist and they are known, but they are ignored by Stern and the other engagers because of the political choice they have made.
A democratic trade union movement does exist in China: it is the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions. An independent and democratic trade union movement also exists in Taiwan. Han Dongfang, independent labor activist and editor of the China Labour Bulletin (24), is very well known and his expertise is unchallenged. Whatever their views may be, Stern has decided that the ACFTU was the only serious show in town. He met with the HKCTU last year, but only to tell its general secretary, after a lengthy conversation, that he (Stern) was older and therefore more experienced as a trade unionist.
Nowhere in his book is there any indication that he raised labor rights issues with his ACFTU hosts. Nor is there any indication in the statements of the CtW and the LACFL delegations that they raised such issues, or expressed any concern about the Chinese labor activists who are imprisoned because they engaged in independent labor action or tried to organize independent unions (25), contrary to many other trade union delegations visiting China. Clearly, the “heroic fight for democracy in China” is not on their agenda.
Robin Munro, research director of China Labour Bulletin, has pointed out that, contrary to the situation ten years ago, China now in effect has a labor movement, but it is not controlled by the ACFTU apparatus: “the scale of worker unrest nowadays is so great, you can go to almost any city in the country now and there will be several major collective worker protests going on at the same time. … So China now has a labor movement. This is an important point to just put there on the table and recognize. It is not organized. It is spontaneous, it is relatively inchoate. … We have basically a pre-union phase of labor movement development in China today. It also has great potential, I think, for becoming a proper labor movement.”
That is where the real labor movement emerging in China, that Stern and the others have been missing because they wear blinders. They are screened from reality by the ACFTU and voluntarily submit to such screening.
How the international labor movement can most effectively assist this emerging real labor movement, in its “relatively inchoate” form, should be the issue up for debate.
(4) Organizing the Companies.
The ACFTU organizes transnational corporations. That is the main argument, which is supposed to override all objections, but it rests entirely on the assumption that Chinese trade unions in some sense represent workers’ interests and on the meaning of the word “organizing”.
Stern seems to believe that the ACFTU genuinely seeks to “reevaluate their role in representing Chinese workers” and he sees “the first sign of this reevaluation when the ACFTU resorted to traditional American tactics of ‘blacklisting’ foreign-owned enterprises that defied Chinese labor laws, including Wal-Mart, McDonalds’s, Dell, Samsung, and Kodak”.(26)
“We’re just dumbfounded about how they were able to organize Wal-Mart here” said Ray Familathe, director of international affairs of the ILWU and a member of the California delegation.(27). He well might be, if he thinks that “organizing” is what took place.
What actually happened with Wal-Mart should be perfectly clear for anyone who has read the newspapers. In 2004 an initially reluctant Wal-Mart, having been threatened with legal action by the ACFTU, accepted that “should associates request the formation of a union, Wal-Mart China would respect their wishes and honor its obligations under China’s Trade Union Law” (28).
Wal-Mart was still dragging its feet until Hu Jintao, president of China, in March 2006, ordered the ACFTU to “do a better job of building (Communist) Party organizations and trade unions” in foreign companies (29). The ACFTU then duly set up an office to target Wal-Mart in Quanzhou and the Wal-Mart “associates” duly requested the formation of a union there, which was established on July 29.
In August, Wal-Mart issued a statement saying that it would set up “trade unions” in all its outlets across China in collaboration with the ACFTU, “China’s union authority” (30). and an official of the ACFTU duly “acknowledged Wal-Mart’s ‘active attitude’ in helping set up union branches.”
Joe Hatfield, president of Wal-Mart Asia, thought that a good relationship with the ACFTU was good for business development: “We think it is in line with the Chinese government’s efforts to build a harmonious society.” (31)
Jonathan Dong, a spokesman for Wal-Mart China, when asked why the company agreed to allow unions in China while it resists them in other countries, said: “The union in China if fundamentally different from unions in the West … The union has made it clear that its goal is to work with employers, not promote confrontation.”32. He said details were still under discussion, in particular whether the 2 percent of wages that the ACFTU is authorized to take as dues would apply to all employees of a store or just to union members.
In other words, what we have here is a command performance, with the ACFTU perfectly happy to front as a company union for Wal-Mart as long as it collects its dues.
Han Dongfang who does not rule out that some day a genuine labor movement may emerge within the shell of the ACFTU, had the following comments:
“The biggest number of working people in China are those who are working in factories. They include foreign investment and privatized former State-owned enterprises. From a real union organizing strategy point of view, the Chinese trade union movement should focus more on organizing these workers in the factories in order to form a solid foundation of the trade union. Even in the ACFTU’s own interests, it should approach the factory workers rather than the department stores to compensate for its membership losses (after the privatization of the State-owned enterprises, the ACFTU’s branch unions disappeared). But, instead of following its own need of developing membership power, the ACFTU went to Wal-Mart. Yes, the ACFTU has won international attention from this big show but it has neither increased its membership nor its real power. Sixty-two store “unions” had been set up about a year ago but none of these “unions” approached the employer to open negotiations for the workers. It was very clear that the ACFTU approach to Wal-Mart was for international publicity more than for building the Chinese labor movement.” (33)
Just in case anyone might have any misapprehension about the nature of the Chinese Wal-Mart “unions”, any notion of possible trade union independence was dispelled when Communist Party and Communist Youth League branches were set up in the Wal-Mart stores in parallel with the ACFTU branches.
The first two branches, at Shenyang, were established in August 2006, followed by the Shenzhen Wal-Mart in December 2006. In April this year there were already six party branches, prompting Reuters to comment: “The world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, is now host to the world’s largest communist party.”
But never fear: according to Xinhua (34), the Chinese news agency, Chen Lie, head to the Organization Department of the Dongda District Committee of the CPC, was reassuring: the CPC and CYLC branches would not interfere with the business development strategy and internal management of the company. According to Chen, “the branches will encourage members to play an exemplary role in doing a good job and that will be helpful to business development.”
Xinhua also quotes Zhu Hui, vice president of the Party School of the Shenyang City Committee of the CPC: “The aim of the CPC is to boost economic development, which accords with the purpose of business development of Wal-Mart and other enterprises.”
According to Liu, manager of the Shenyang outlet, Wal-Mart headquarters did not oppose the establishment of the CPC and CYLC branches (35). Xia Jinsheng, party secretary in Wal-Marts Tianjin store, who also heads Wal-Mart’s Tianjin public relations department, says that most members in Wal-Mart’s party cells are midlevel or senior executives.(36)
It is quite possible that those American trade unionists who do not have a political axe to grind and who trust their own judgment and experience, will eventually see through the charade. Maria Elena Durazo, who led the Los Angeles delegation, and who believes that American unions have something to learn from Chinese workers because they “organized” Wal-Mart, after sitting through a meeting where a company executive explained the union’s role, commented: “We come here and they’re talking about harmony. Harmony? With someone who’s just thinking about maximum profits? We just can’t think that way.” (37)
Seeking Harmony in the United States
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal (38) Stern was asked: “Do you think unions will ever be able to organize Wal-Mart in the US?” His reply: “The group SEIU’s part of, Wal-Mart Watch, has not been trying to organize them but to change their business model.” He goes on to say that a “traditional organizing drive” will not succeed because the odds are too strong against it. However: “I think Wal-Mart has the opportunity to create an entirely new American model of worker representation. The question is do they want partners or do they want to be held accountable in a much more public fashion?”
Stern’s book has attracted a lot of attention, not so much because of the China opening, but because of his proposals for new strategic labor-business partnerships on issues of national policy, such as immigration and health care. But they also involve patterns of union organization based on labor-management partnerships.
His principles for “effective twenty-first century unions” include: “Employees and employers need organizations that solve problems, not create them.” … ” Both employers and employees must begin with the presumption that all parties want a mutually beneficial relationship based on teamwork.” “To maximize success, employee organizations need to be aligned with employers’ market and industry structures and flexible enough to respond to ever-changing employer dynamics, and competent enough to be good partners.” (39)
As one example among others, Stern mentions the national labor-management committee established by the SEIU and nursing home owners and “new state-based relationships to promote quality and employer economic stability.”
These are essentially a trade-off by which the SEIU agrees to lobby for an increase in state funding for nursing homes in exchange for the companies’ agreement not to hinder the union’s organizing efforts.
“In California”, Stern writes, “the industry and union worked with the legislature on a plan to enhance quality in nursing homes, stabilize the workforce, and provide more resources for direct patient care. The alliance secured a $660 million state legislative appropriation, which dramatically altered the fundamentals of the industry.”(40)
However, this agreement with the Alliance group of nursing home operators, also involved “template” contracts, i.e. centrally pre-negotiated deals that would automatically apply to any newly organized unit and eliminate basic workers’ rights, such as the right to strike, local collective bargaining rights, the right to report violations of workers’ rights and patient’s rights in organized nursing homes to the authorities or to the media. Moreover, the choice of which units were to be organized was left to the nursing home owners; other units were not to be approached by the union even if the workers there wanted to become members.
Unsurprisingly, this deal met with wide spread opposition, both inside and outside the SEIU. On May 31, the SEIU was forced to end the partnership after the United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW), one of its two locals that were part of the original deal in 2003, launched a campaign to re-negotiate the agreement on a different basis: union democracy, the right to aggressively advocate for workers covered by partnership agreements and full union membership rights for these workers.
In an internal document (41) analyzing the 2003 agreement from a workers’ perspective, the UHW asked the question: “What kind of worker organizations are Alliance based template agreements creating, and, equally important, what are they laying the groundwork for?”.
The answer: “Alliance based template agreements do not allow workers to empower themselves, nor are they conceived out of a process in which workers are truly part of ‘winning’ the union.”
The “Lessons Learned” document goes on to say:
“Essentially the Alliance agreement gave SEIU the opportunity to organize facilities (that the Alliance employers chose) in exchange for SEIU’s political power to raise reimbursement rates. … Traditionally, for workers to organize they engage in struggle to win that right. Under the Alliance agreement this is absent. The contract that newly organized Alliance workers will have is worked out in advance with the ultimate terms of that agreement discouraging – and in some cases, preventing – workers from independently engaging in struggle to improve their working conditions. Prior to getting to the negotiating table not only are the rules of engagement worked out but the nature of the ‘deal’ itself. Is it any wonder that we have often heard from these workers that ‘the boss brought us the union’?
“Many workers who came into our union through the Alliance neutrality agreement found themselves with ‘template’ contracts that allowed for very little power on the shop floor with no right to strike and no clear path toward full collective bargaining rights. From UHW members’ experience it is safe to state that the template arrangement created a worker organization that restricts member empowerment. Those members covered by template agreements went to the table with the expectation that bargaining would be an opportunity to not only secure economic benefits, but to change labor relations within facilities where templates restricted their right to do so. Our members have made it very clear to us: re-negotiation of a new Alliance agreement must involve members – it must begin from the bottom up.”
The conclusion: “If the nature of the labor agreement defined in the current Alliance templates – which restrict members’ rights and ability to be empowered – is allowed to continue, what effect will this have on the fundamental nature of a union organization? What ultimately happens if we give up the right to strike as the means for workers to level the playing field with employers when needed? We would argue that it would adversely affect our mission and goal to advance and defend the interests of our members, and in fact, may come close to becoming what have historically been called ‘company’ unions. …”
Does this sound familiar? Does it not recall the situation of the Chinese unions that are supposed to have “organized” Wal-Mart? Is it any wonder that Andy Stern can find nothing wrong with the ACFTU? After all, what they are doing in China is not so different from what he is trying to do in California – except that in California, his members won’t let him get away with it. One can imagine Stern commiserating with the most powerful trade unionist on earth about the thankless task of keeping the rank-and-file in line to ensure harmony with the employers.
Thankfully, Stern does not have the Public Security Bureau to back him up, but he is trying to get rid of the opposition by merging it out of existence. Under a plan to merge the SEIU’s California locals, the national headquarters is pushing to merge the UHW with another local, more amenable to Stern’s “partnership” policies, a move the UHW has so far resisted. And, even as the California agreement was being re-negotiated under pressure from the membership, a similar agreement to the original was signed in Washington State – for ten years.
Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association (CNA) says that Stern is “organizing corporations, not workers”, and: “to him, the union is just a human resource department, or a temp agency.” (42)
DeMoro’s organization, with 80,000 members, is dwarfed by the SEIU’s 1.9m., but it is the fastest growing union in the US, having tripled in size in 13 years, since DeMoro became its leader. If the SEIU had grown at the same rate in the same period, since Stern became its leader, it should now have 4.5m. members. The CNA, a longtime independent union, and its offshoot, the National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC), joined the AFL-CIO earlier this year.
In his book, Stern says that “one of the first defining moments” of his presidency of the SEIU was his settlement with Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest health care employers in California. After a history of conflict, Stern in 1996 called the company CEO David Lawrence and told him: “we need to change our relationship” (his emphasis). His conversations with Lawrence led to the “largest labor-management partnership in the history of the service sector”, a “risky, colossal shift in approach.”
As Stern admits, “it wasn’t always easy for union members to hear that their elected leader … was talking peaceably with the CEO of their company and promoting new relationships.” However, Stern says, the members eventually accepted “a new approach to collective bargaining that emphasized problem solving”. Joint committees were formed, an “amazing experience”: “As hard as I tried, I could not distinguish the union representatives from the management representatives.” (43)
This “groundbreaking relationship” produced one of the best contracts in the health care industry, Stern maintains, adding that “not every union agrees with our approach: To this day, the California Nurses Association still criticizes SEIU’s arrangement with Kaiser and has chosen not to join us in the process.” (44)
Clearly, the CNA remains the pea under the mattress of the SEIU princess. It also secured a contract with Kaiser Permanente, but with entirely different methods:
“When Kaiser Permanente began laying off 1,600 union nurses and demanded wage concessions, patients started to suffer. The union set up a (free call) number so people could report instances of patients dying from neglect and mistakes at Kaiser and other facilities. CNA posted those tales on its Web site, which attracted so much national attention that the health care giant not only settled with the union, it agreed to work with nurses to solve those problems as part of its labor contract. “These improvements have forged a more solid relationship”, said a Kaiser spokeswoman.” (45)
Global Unions
When this writer first met him, Andy Stern did not think much of international unionism. This was at a meeting of US trade union leaders and International Trade Secretariats (renamed Global Union Federations in 2002), which the AFL-CIO had convened in Washington D.C. about twenty years ago. The idea was to introduce American unionists, especially those who had no experience of ITS activities, to the practical work of ITSs in confronting transnational corporations. Stern, at that time organizing director of the SEIU, visibly impatient with what he was hearing, grumbled that international trade union organizations were a waste of time and left the meeting early.
Today, Andy Stern says: “The world needs global unions” (46). He has discovered international trade unionism in the form of “the world’s largest global union federation, (47) Union Network International (UNI), with 15.5 million members”, which held its last congress in Chicago in August 2005, under the banner “Imagine a Global Union”.
Much of what he writes amounts to re-inventing the wheel: it is hardly news that unions have to adapt to a world without borders, or that workers in different countries who share the same employer need to co-ordinate internationally to face that employer together. These are insights and principles that have been written about and acted upon, sometimes with success, for decades. Walter Reuther introduced the concept of international coalition bargaining in the International Metalworkers Federation about fifty years ago, the first international strike in the post-war period was organized by Charles Levinson, general secretary of the International Chemical Workers’ Federation, nearly forty years ago and the first international agreement in the post-war period with a transnational corporation was signed in the food industry nearly twenty years ago.
The idea of a “convergence of global movements concerned with the environment, social responsibility, human rights, child labor, gender equality and workers’ rights” (48) is not new either. This kind of international coalition building has been advocated by trade unionists and social movement activists since the 1980s, mainly as a response to the disappearance of the socialist movement as a coherent international force in most of the industrialized world. It is now sometimes described as the emerging “global social justice movement” and it is essentially political in nature. The slogan of today’s social movements, “another world is possible”, is what the labor movement always stood for.
The important point here is that all concepts of international labor solidarity, of the structures established to give it a practical expression, and of the political alliances that the labor movement needs to advance its agenda, have been based on the recognition of a reality: the fundamental conflict of interest between capital and labor, national at the outset, transnational today. Of necessity, this involves power struggles at every level, and conflict.
Stern is developing a different agenda. It comes through most clearly in his interview in The McKinsey Quarterly last year (49). The interviewer asks where the movement is going, and Stern replies: “what we’re going to see happen in the next ten years, if not sooner, is a convergence of a global labor movement, a global corporate responsibility movement, and nongovernmental organizations. … We need to build new organizations that can help people, and on the global level that will require joint efforts by unions, NGOs and corporate responsibility groups.”
What if the employers are not convinced? Stern has figured out an international strike strategy that is cost-effective: “If workers are ready to go on strike in the United States, and we are ready to pay them to strike, it would be very costly. But paying workers in Indonesia or India or other places to go on strike against the same global employer isn’t particularly expensive.”
The interviewer, who probably cannot believe what he is hearing, insists: “So a global federation or union might decide, in effect, to outsource a strike to the lowest-cost area because the amount needed for the strike fund would be lower, and thus put pressure on one wing of a global employers’ operations?”
Stern’s reply: “Yes, absolutely.”
This is extraordinary. In the past, when a strike was “outsourced”, it was the other way around: strong unions would put pressure on transnational corporations, including through industrial action, to defend weaker unions that were unable to defend themselves because, for example, they would face extreme repression. Stern is aware of this possibility, since he mentions “outsourcing strikes to countries where strikes are legal and will not provoke government retaliation” (50) but what he is now proposing, is that unions in rich countries, specifically the United States, should in effect hire unions in low-wage countries as cannon fodder to fight their battles.
It is hard to imagine a more cynical and manipulative approach. It is also totally unrealistic. No union anywhere, except for maybe the usual, useless clients, is going to sign on to Stern’s outsourced mercenary army.
In his book, Stern points out that: “With a mandate from the SEIU’s 2004 convention delegates to build a global union, followed by UNI’s adoption of global unionism, SEIU assigned staff to Australia, Poland, England, India, France, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, South America and, soon, Africa.” (51)
It is not clear why Stern believes that building a “global union” requires assigning SEIU staff to nineteen countries or more. What is the task of these emissaries, and how are they planning to go about building a “global union”? And what would that “global union” look like? Is this too sensitive and important a project to be entrusted to existing international trade union structures? Those structures of course involve mutual democratic accountability. Stern seems to have decided on a short-cut:, create his own labor International, where he would be accountable to no one but himself.
His “global partnerships” appear to be run by staffers deliberately chosen for their lack of experience of the international labor world. One of them, expected to co-ordinate “the activities of unions that represent workers of international corporations in other countries”, and who had just spent two-and-a-half weeks traveling to India, Australia and Canada, explained: “This is all brand new and everybody is figuring it out as we go. When Andy Stern asked me to do this, he said: ‘I don’t know what it’s going to be. You are going to have to figure it out.’ And that was one of the interesting parts of it. Not only do I get an interesting job, but I get to help figure our what it’s about.” (52)
Other staff, embedded in the SEIU’s partner unions, supervise teams of organizers targeting an enterprise, working independently, without co-ordination or reference to existing union structures. Nor does there seem to be any follow-up in the event the enterprise is organized in terms of collective bargaining or lasting local organization.
This type of slash-and-burn organizing has a history: it was one of the reasons why the Industrial Workers of the World were unable to establish a lasting presence in many of the industries they organized in the early 20th century. History repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce.
What happens when his “global partnership” organizers run up against reality and understand that they are not, after all, expected to “figure out what it’s all about”? Or, having figured it out, start talking back? Or realize that others have figured it out a long time ago, but differently from the way their boss sees it? And how long until the partner unions start resenting the embedded hit teams, regardless of the money Stern is able to throw around?
And what about the general orientation of the entire exercise? Stern takes sideswipes at the “class struggle mentality” of unions, which he attributes to “an earlier, rough area of industrial unions” (53) and he tells the McKinsey interviewer that “confrontational models are very slow and not a relationship-building orientation to have.” The interviewer then asks how Stern thinks one can “get past the traditional confrontation between management and labor”, and Stern replies that one way “is for unions to change their role to that of service provider, outsourcer of training, and benefits provider.”
How does this translate into global terms? Does the SEIU plan to build “global service providers”, “global outsourcers of training” or “global benefits providers” all over the world? Does Stern see it as his mission to spread the gospel of global corporatism? If that is the case, he is unlikely to retain many allies in the world trade union movement, although he will retain some. It is not impossible that Stern’s neo-corporatist wisdom will surface in some form at one of the next sessions of the World Economic Forum or other international gatherings where advancing union/management co-operation is on the agenda.
Stern is not a patient man. He is always looking for the short-cut, the quick fix. Organizing a real labor movement in China takes too long? Deal with the fake. Can’t convince a majority of AFL-CIO unions? Pull out, create your own federation. Organizing workers takes too long? Organize through the company.
It is a safe bet that the difficult, complex and often thankless task of building global unionism will soon outrun his patience. Building global unionism cannot be done by smoke and mirrors and by branding exercises, but only in the way genuine trade unionism is built anywhere: by education and organization from the bottom up, by organizations that are accountable to their membership.
It also requires the recognition of a reality: that the labor movement is facing powerful interests that are opposed to everything it stands for, and that it has real enemies. Their agenda is the destruction of the labor movement. It is futile to try to disarm that opposition by pretending that trade unions are something else than they are, or that they can defend interests other than those of their members and the general interest of society.
Stern often dismisses progressive policies on the grounds that they will encounter too strong an opposition, meaning that they are not acceptable to transnational capital and to the right-wing politicians at its service. The would-be realism of his partnerships with employers is ultimately based on the principle of: if you can’t beat’em, join’em. But politics is not “the art of the possible”, as opportunists always tell us, it is the art of making possible what is necessary.
Building global unionism takes more than just organizing: it takes organizing inspired by an alternative social and economic perspective. The roots of the labor movement, and the source of its enduring strength and resiliency, is a mission of social change, to bring about a social order based on the general interest of society. Others than Stern will move this agenda forward.
October 24, 2007
1 Dan Gallin is the Chair of the Global Labour Institute in Geneva, Switzerland (www.global-labour.org)
2 Andy Stern: A Country That Works – Getting America Back on Track, Free Press (Simon & Schuster), New York, 2006, 212 p. Further references to the book will be noted as “Stern 2006”
3 U.S. Labor Leader Aided China’s Wal-Mart Coup – Unlikely Alliance Helps Beijing-Backed Union Organize at Retailer, by Mei Fong and Kris Maher, The Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2007, page A1.
4 See e.g. “Rethinking the China Campaign”, by Kent Wong and Elaine Bernard, New Labor Forum, Queens College, NY, Fall/Winter 2000.
5 Stern 2006, p. 23
6 Stern 2006, p. 28
7 Stern 2006, pp. 27 and 28
8 There are conflicting reports about the identity and fate of the “brave man”. He may have been Wang Weilin, a 19-yer old student, He was arrested on the spot by the Public Security Bureau and, according to some reports, executed fourteen days later.
9 Stern 2006, p. 25
10 Stern 2006, p. 24
11 Rethinking the Rethink – The Chinese Working Class, the ACFTU and Engagement, by the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and China Labour Bulletin, January 18, 2001
12 Stern 2006, pp. 25 and 26
13 quoted in: Global Labor Strategies, June 8, 2007
14 Stern 2006,p. 24. There is another mention of the “Cold War” in Stern’s book when he writes that “Lech Walensa and other brave trade unionists helped win the Cold War, destroying all obstacles to market capitalism.” What Walensa and the other brave trade unionists actually thought they were doing was destroying all obstacles to democracy. The return to unfettered market capitalism was not on their agenda: it can only be regarded as collateral damage and a national tragedy. But Stern doesn’t know the difference, or doesn’t care.
15 Stern 2006, p. 24
16 Dave Arian, former president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Association, quoted in: “L.A. delegation seeks brotherhood in China,” by Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times, July 4, 2007.
17 Similar instances of “conceptual embezzlement” occurred with the words “soviet”, “democracy” and “socialist”, but that is another story.
18 The Public Security Bureau (PSB), which is the Chinese political police, in 1996 issued guidelines on maintaining social order which include the following guidelines for the unions:
“Trade unions must emphasise their work on politics and ideology in the work-force as well as propaganda education. Contradictions among employees and labour disputes must also be handled in an efficient manner and the union must assist the enterprise directors and party and government leaders to formulate all necessary measures to promote public security systems. The union must also co-ordinate with the PSB, organise “public order and prevention teams” to protect the internal security and order of the enterprises, as well as social order. Staff and workers should be mobilised to struggle against all forms of criminal and illegal behaviour. The union must also assist the relevant authorities to deal adequately with the education and employment of dismissed employees, workers who have committed errors and those who have completed sentences and been released.”
19 Stern 2006, p. 28
20 Stern 2006, p. 27
21 Wong/Bernard 2000
22The term was coined by Boris Kagarlitsky, in: The Importance of Being Marxist, New Left Review, Nov.-Dec. 1989
23 HKCTU/CLB 2001
24 Han Dongfang was also the spokesman of an independent union, the Workers’ Autonomous Federation of Beijing, which was suppressed, together with the students, at Tiananmen in 1989
25 There are twenty-six documented cases of imprisoned labor activists in China as of June 2007. The list is not exhaustive. (IHLO, Hong Kong: www.ihlo.org)
26 Stern 2006, p. 27
27 quoted in LA Times, July 4, 2007)
28 quoted in Financial Times, November 23, 2004: Wal-Mart Gives in to China’s Union Federation, by Richard McGregor
29 China Daily, quoting AP, August 17, 2006
30 China Daily, quoting Xinhua, August 15, 2006
31 China Daily, quoting Xinhua, August 25, 2006
32 China Daily, quoting Reuters, August 11, 2006
33 Interview in Pages de Gauche (Lausanne), May 2007
34 Xinhua report, in China Daily, August 25, 2006. Xinhua is the official Chinese news service.
35 China Daily (Xinhua), August 25, 2006
36 Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2006
37 quoted in the Los Angeles Times, July 4, 2007
38 quoted in Wal-Mart Watch, January 22, 2007
39 Stern 2006, pp. 105-106
40 Stern 2006, p. 107
41 The California Alliance Agreement:: Lessons Learned in Moving Forward in Organizing California’s Nursing Home Industry, UHW, 2007, 20 p.
42 quoted in: Andy Stern: Savior or Sellout? by Liza Featherstone, The Nation, July 16, 2007
43 Stern 2006, pp. 69-70
44 Stern 2006, p.70
45 The Rabble-rouser, by Kathleen Sharp, SFGate.com, May 6, 2007
46 Stern 2006, p. 111
47 Actually the fourth-largest, after the Education International (30m.), the International Metalworkers’ Federation (25m.) and the International Chemical, Energy and Mine Workers’ Federation (20m.).
48 Stern 2006, p. 113
49 Shaking up the labor movement: An interview with the head of the Service Employees International Union, by Lenny T. Mendonca, The McKinsey Quarterly, Number 1, 2006
50 Stern 2006, p. 113
51 Stern 2006, p. 112
52 quoted in Kennebee Journal, Augusta, Maine, May 4, 2005: Union ex-leader goes global, by Gary Rumal
53 Stern 2006, pp. 70-71