By Kim Moody
Last year, US unions lost 771,000 members, enough to wipe out the slim gains of the previous two years. Simultaneously, organised labour’s political agenda, highly dependent on an Obama Administration in disarray and a crippled Congress, collapsed as big business put up $380,000 to undermine Obama’s already lame healthcare reform and $80 million to gut labour law changes that would make it easier to win union recognition. The escalation of the war in Afghanistan will drain further resources that might have gone to create real jobs or fund healthcare. None of this was helped by the ‘civil war’ (see Issue 25) among unions provoked by the incessant raiding of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
Yet, out of this chaos and defeat has come something new that holds promise for American unions should they chose to follow. This is not so much a trend as an experiment, one, like so many experiments, brought on by necessity. Last year as reported here, a new union of healthcare workers was formed when the SEIU tried to put its big California branch, the United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW), into trusteeship. The new National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) faced the daunting task of winning back its 150,000 members, who due the fact that the national SEIU legally held the agreements covering these workers could not switch to the new union without a new recognition election. There is little doubt that the vast majority of former UHW members feel loyal to the new NUHW, whose leaders had won some of the best agreements in the industry. But NUHW faces some 100 representation elections this year to win them for SEIU. The new union has already succeeded in winning an important unit of 2,300 professional employees at the giant Kaiser Permanente California healthcare chain, despite all manner of intimidations by SEIU officials.
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Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 11:31AM