RSSUnions a-Hatin’ on Unions
Warner Todd Huston | February 28, 2009
-By Warner Todd Huston
Ben Smith of Politico reports on some interesting union-on-union hatin’ this week.
HERE responds: ‘Tactics of anti-union bosses’
A official in the the HERE wing of the feuding UNITE HERE union responded just now to mailings from the union’s other wing casting its leaders as examples of labor corruption.
“This is an example of Bruce Raynor’s take-no-prisoners tactics,” the official, Pilar Weiss, told me, referring to UNITE HERE’s president. “They are no different from the the mail from the most anti-union employers.”
Weiss dismissed a UNITE leader’s charge that HERE has a history of corruption – such questions were “way in our past,” she said, and raised questions about spending at UNITE and the Amalgamated Bank, which it controls.
“It’s disappointing that people who call themselves labor leaders would resort to the tactics of anti-union bosses,” she said.
One footnote on the wider ramifications of the battle: Weiss said a prominent labor operative, Steve Rosenthal, had been running the campaign, and Rosenthal confirmed in an email that he’s an advisor to Raynor. Rosenthal is also a close advisor to SEIU President Andy Stern, who backs Raynor’s call for splitting the union.
The last bit, the “footnote,” is of special interest. Here we see again the heavy handed, take no prisoners version of SEIU President Andy Stern’s brand of unionization.
Stern has been dividing and conquering unions for a few years now. His method is to undermine the locals, do away with their leadership, then glide in as the Union saviour and take over the collapsing union. This is an effort to destroy as many smaller unions as possible and have them all rolled into the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organization all under his iron-fisted leadership.
With this sneaky style of enlarging his union, Stern has become one of the most powerful union chiefs in the country. Plainly, he is the man behind the man in this fight Politico’s Smith is talking of here.
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