Starbucks Union

"The cases of retired Marine Engineer Paul Norman and EMS Helicopter Pilot Mike Cheek, who were banned from official union online forums, reflect the growing importance of the internet as a new space for member participation and the contrary efforts of union leaders to limit discussion to what they consider acceptable..."

"The CWA supports freedom from fear in representation elections. But what's going on in its internal union elections?"

Andy Stern has selected James R. Zazzali, a former New Jersey State judge, to preside over a new committee charged with the task of developing a code of ethics cogent enough to discourage SEIU representatives from misappropriating union money. Judge Zazzali is already occupied with his job as a staff member of the International Union of Operating Engineers...

"Is it permissible for a local union to set aside money, safe from seizure by the international, so that it can be guaranteed funds to mount a legal defense against trusteeship? That question has arisen before, not in the SEIU but in the Teamsters union..."

"We in California have, of course, a great deal at stake in the outcome of these disputes. The trusteeship fears of UHW seem to be very well-founded. While a clean-up of 6434 may require outside intervention, we believe that a simultaneous, unjustified take- over of 150,000 member UHW would be a disaster for the California labor movement (and SEIU nationally)." Read the letter on Benson's Union Democracy Blog.

AUD board member and leading union democracy legal scholar Michael Goldberg has written about the experiences and perspectives that led him to dedicate himself to union democracy. "Many important causes cry out for the moral, material, and legal support of public intellectuals, but few of those causes find their natural constituencies as isolated and vulnerable as union reformers often are..." Read excerpts from this article on the AUD website.

AUD supporter and longtime union activist and scholar Jeff Perry has written the biography of the "foremost Black organizer, agitator, and theoretician of the Socialist Party of New York, founder of the "New Negro" movement, editor of Negro World, and the principal radical influence on the Garvey movement." AUD advisor Bill Fletcher praises Perry's "thorough research and compelling analysis" and says the book "reads with a draw like that of a study of a long lost city, rediscovered and offering answers to an incomplete history." (11/13/08)

When the California State Employees Charitable Campaign begins, you will be asked to authorize payroll deductions to the non-profit organizations of your choice. The Association for Union Democracy is on the eligibility list, and we ask for your support. Look for us in the "Non Affiliate Organizations" section in the brochure of eligible organizations. New York State Employees: As part of the State Employees Federated Appeal (SEFA), state employees are being asked to authorize payroll deductions as donations to non-profit organizations of their choice. The Association for Union Democracy is on the eligibility list and we ask for your support. You can find us and our SEFA code in the SEFA campaign's directory of authorized organizations, under "Association for Union Democracy." We are listed within our umbrella federation, "Human and Civil Rights Organizations of America." AUD's SEFA code number will vary by region of the state.

This year's Combined Federal Campaign is about to begin. We hope that Federal Employees will choose the Association for Union Democracy (AUD) as one of the organizations to receive your donations under the payroll deduction plan. Please note our CFC Code Number: 11741. If you have chosen AUD before, accept our thanks for your continued support. We need you. We would be grateful if you would spread the word to your colleagues at work...

My oath on accepting appointive office To A... great and A...glorious Accept my pledge most meritorious I will obey your every word and note If not, you can cut my throat (with thanks to an unknown libertarian poet)

"The SEIU retained Ray Marshall, former secretary of labor, to preside over the hearings on President Stern's proposal to place the UHW-W under trusteeship. Marshall is assigned to the job so that the proceedings will presumably be impartial. But who really calls the shots? We ask this question because the OLMS office of the U.S. Labor Department wrote a request to Marshall (note: to Marshall not to the SEIU) in which it wrote: 'As you are aware, we requested that an OLMS investigator be present to observe the hearings. It is our understanding that after consultation with the SEIU International Union, you will not honor our request.'..."

The best way to track new developments is by checking AUD's bloglines page, which collects RSS and ATOM feeds from a variety of blogs and websites. Click on the title to the bloglines page, then click on "playlists" and choose the SEIU playlist.

"Paul Garver is disappointed because I did not respond more positively to reports that Andy Stern's ethics commission might request my comments for proposals to strengthen the SEIU ethics code. He writes, "Why don't we accept Andy Stern's offer ...in the spirit of giving this process a genuine test?" See the exchange between Garver and Herman Benson, and Garver's subsequent pieces on the Talking Union website.

From Benson's Union Democracy Blog. "Surely dozens of good unionists must have known or suspected. Why did these leaders have to wait for exposures by the press? Why did no one in the leadership at any level speak out boldly and demand action? There's the nub of the problem... The problem is not what Stern couldn't do because of his many responsibilities and tasks. The real problem is what he did do. He undermined the spirit of democracy in the SEIU..."

"Think of a town that's plagued by deaths, arson, and robberies, and yet the mayor and police don't seem to have the time or inclination to do anything about it because they are preoccupied by a campaign to stop residents from cluttering up the streets by passing out unauthorized handbills. That act of imagination could prepare you for these events in the International Union of Operating Engineers..."

"At the June convention, climaxing President Andy Stern's twelve years in office, a big majority of the 1,900 convention delegates endorsed his program and endowed him with increased power amounting to presidential authoritarianism couched in democratic verbiage...The union administration's rhetorical call for "justice for all" has enabled Stern to rally round him a troop of social idealists in whose eyes the SEIU has become an extension of civil rights campaigning and community organizing. On the other hand, its trend toward bureaucratic central control, and its justification of a kind of defanged hybrid unionism to be built in cooperation with big domestic and global corporations, has alienated a whole other cadre of social idealists who want the labor movement to be a democratic movement of workers, a movement that, they feel, can only be built in confrontation with big capital. Two conceptions of the labor movement are counterposed. At some point even Stern's own followers are bound to ask, "What kind of labor movement are we building?" This is no crude battle for power. It is no conflict between so-called "business" and "social" unionism. Nor between a conservative "right" and a militant "left." Nor between crooks and honest unionists. It is a dispute over the meaning and nature of democracy in the labor movement..."

In each issue of Union Democracy Review we publish "shorts" -- stories that are too short for a feature, but too important to leave out. We put this issue's shorts online to give you a sample: ATU 1181, CWA 1034, release time, AFSCME 372, Legal Momentum, Interfaith Worker Justice. Read (9/3/08)

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is creating an Ethics Panel "in the wake of allegations of misspending by union officials at several big locals."According to The New York Times, "the commission, expected to have 15 members, would consult anticorruption groups, including the Association for Union Democracy and Teamsters for a Democratic Union, to discuss what ethics rules to adopt and how best to enforce them."

From Benson's Union Democracy Blog. "By imposing a trusteeship and a monitorship over two mega West Coast locals, Andy Stern, SEIU international president, subjects twenty percent of the entire international membership to his disciplinary domination. They make up almost half the union's membership in health care, the SEIU's most important area of concentration. Two locals, but how different their stories! In one, Stern initiates action against a rival and critic. In the other, he is forced to act against one of his own key supporters who stands accused of defrauding his local of around a million dollars. Disruption on this scale might normally reveal an international administration in disarray. Ironically, however, just three months before, Stern emerged from the union's convention with his program overwhelmingly endorsed and his presidential powers expanded..." Read more on Benson's Union Democracy Blog. (8/31/08)

From Benson's Union Democracy Blog. "It was already clear before the recent SEIU convention. It obvious now...The SEIU does not have to invent the wheel. The United Auto Workers has had a public review board for fifty years. The board is a kind of Supreme Court within the union to guarantee due process. It has the authority to overturn disciplinary decisions of the union's top international executive board and president. Most important of all, it is composed of independent persons, pro-labor, civil libertarians, eminent in their own right in their own professions. And because they are independent and outside the union power structure, not beholden to the union establishment, the board and its members serve as an important deterrent to arbitrary authoritarianism..." Read more on Benson's Union Democracy Blog.