Unions are far more vital to the long term success of the Democratic Party than the Valerie Plame case will ever be.  But no one here pays attention to this story, while Plame posts get dozens of replies.  These same people then get angry and point fingers when we lose, and have no unifying strategy. 

If some upheaval like this was happening to, say, Dobson's Focus On The Family, you can bet the winger boards would be all over it.   

Simple evolutionary theory:  change or die.  Change to Win is aptly titled, because it is certainly time for changes in the labor movement.  If they continue to utilize rigid models from 70 years ago, they are doomed to failure.  Does anyone believe the strategies of businesses have not changed?  Heard of the K Street Project?  Chris Cox?  The labor movement is quickly becoming irrelevant, and that should be reversed.

As I'm probably the only (or one of the few) person here who has any real experience with a labor union.. I have to say that Andy Stern is one of the biggest faux leftist hypocrites, and enemies of the labor movement, with the exception of Bush and his cronies. He's not interested in the rights of the worker's in the SEIU or in any other labor union.. he's for his own power. Anyone who is in a worker's labor union and keeps informed on the goings on should be more than well aware of Stern's shenanigans with the Able Company, promising the company an easy path to an acceptable contract if only they would coerce the janitors into attending a meeting with Stern (the janitors had intended to leave the SEIU and join another union as they weren't being protected by the union.)

Just look who one of Stern's big revolutionary compatriots is.. James Hoffa Jr. a man who hasn't met a republican politician he wouldn't bend over for... Hoffa, like his father before him is corrupt.. and the Teamsters, well, their idea of organizing is forming unions for middle management, and said Teamster locals comprised of middle management, especially in municipalities, are enjoying unionized benefits, while siding with corrupt politicians to privatize the jobs held by AFSCME workers.

There are problems with organized labor.. there are corrupt people involved in it as in other organizations.. for example, the head of the local International Labor Union in my state, George nee has been outed as sitting on the board of the quasi public/private worker's compensation insurance company that has, since it's inception has been guilty of viciously attacking workers who file a claim, and increasing the likelihood of a claim resulting in the worker having to go to court to pursue their claim.. what's also happened as a result is more worker's, especially those unionized workers are forced from their jobs. And Mr. Nee is making a killing off his position as a board member, while pretending to be a patron saint of the worker. He's now part of an attempt to turn the  company private, in violation of the millions in state tax dollars that were used to create it, while insisting it keep the millions in tax exemptions it has received based on it's public status. Again, yes, there are problems in the labor movement, and those problems include men like George Nee, Andrew Stern, James Hoffa Jr. and others like them.. I'm sure John Sweeney isn't perfect, but he's a damned sight better than those looking to play the Naderite divide and destroy games, thereby sounding organized labor's death knell. I found the text below at Counterpunch regarding Stern, et al.. attempt at revolution..

The coalition's leading men right now are:
* Andy Stern, president of SEIU, the nation's biggest union, with 1.8 million members. Hailed as the most progressive and growth-oriented union, SEIU is the leader of the pack and, with plans laid since 2004, the most likely to leave the federation.
Yet for most of the past ten years that his former mentor, John Sweeney, has been president of the AFL-CIO, Stern has been instrumental in everything from the staffing of the organizing department, to the policy on immigration, to the effort to consolidate state and local labor bodies, to the endorsement of political candidates (spending $65 million of his poor members' money, more than the total spent by the AFL, to try to elect John Kerry). One of Stern's brains trust, Steve Lerner, had charge of the AFL's failed strawberry campaign, its failed Las Vegas building trades campaign, and is married to the woman who headed the AFL's ridiculously bloated and now dissolved field mobilization department.
At least part of SEIU's growth over the years is attributable to deal-making, sometimes promising corporations help in lobbying state regulators in return for union recognition, or promising state governments workers at a discount. It added 70,000 Illinois child care and home health care workers over the past two years, thanks first to an internal AFL process that awarded SEIU jurisdiction over those workers, and then to a pact with Governor Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat elected in 2002 with the help of all of organized labor.


Obsessed with size and consolidation, SEIU is notable for the biggest, most geographically outstretched (therefore least participatory) locals, the most aggressive application of trusteeship (stripping power from an inordinate number of locals), and the heaviest reliance on national staff with no experience in the jobs or culture of the workers.


It is a union with a huge black, Latino and female membership ­ representatives of whom were arranged like altar bouquets round the dais on June 15, along with dark-skinned and female members of the other coalition partners for a more alluring portrait of labor's future than six middle-aged white guys could have presented on their own. But SEIU is not invulnerable to fissures along these lines. Beyond frustration with the famous arrogance of the white-dominated national staff, members active in the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and other federation minority constituency groups are aware of those bodies' deep disquiet over "insurgent" plans, which they regard as a retreat from inclusion.
When Stern got the go-ahead from his executive council to pull out of the federation, the bigger news was that Dennis Rivera and New York's powerful, highly political 1199 abstained. Rivera had been ready to give his okay, but directors and rank-and-file representatives on the 1199 board thought otherwise. 1199 is the example SEIU vice president and Stern's sometimes-uneasy black front man Gerry Hudson raises when he needs to assure leftish audiences of the conscious engagement of SEIU's rank and file. The abstention underscores why it's the rare example; no leader likes a power struggle.

Outside 1199, it's not difficult to find members of SEIU who have no idea what union they're in. A couple of years ago random members of Local 32B-J in New York could tell me no more than the local number. An SEIU nursing home worker in Ohio whom I asked to name her union last year said simply, "AFL-CIO".


* James P. Hoffa, president of the Teamsters, the nation's biggest general union, representing everyone from truckers to warehousers to clerks to casino workers to nurses and public defenders. The Teamsters has 1.4 million members. Its most recent "organizing" leap was the acquisition through merger of 60,000 graphic communications workers. Before Hoffa joined the reformer chorus, general unionism was its bete noire; forced mergers and union reorganization along lines inimical to the Teamsters' go-for-anything approach formed the centerpiece of its demands.


Hoffa's own grasp of organizing is tenuous. He is close to the most reactionary and corrupt elements in the Teamsters. His most energetic political interventions have been to thump for Arctic drilling and to attack his own reform-minded members. Yet Hoffa was embraced by Stern when the former proposed the 50 percent dues rebate. Though it has been promoted as an incentive to organizing, the dues rebate is, in essence, a tax cut for the largest, richest unions. It is now the top "insurgent" demand, on which, they say, they will brook no compromise.


The Teamsters' bold outlook? In 2008, they face the expiration of the UPS contract, and now UPS has paid over a billion dollars for the nonunion freight giant Overnite, which crushed the Teamsters in an ignominious three-year strike. The architects of the famous, successful UPS strike, which depended heavily on financial and foot soldier support from the AFL, are either no longer with the union or on Hoffa's enemies list.


Hoffa's brand of "aggressive organizing", his coalition partners' chief commandment, is best illustrated by his collaboration with Tyson Foods earlier this year to decertify his own union's Local 556 in Pasco, Washington. The 1,500 meatpackers had been led by Maria Martinez, a co-chair of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. After a relentless campaign, in which workers were bombarded by literature bearing Hoffa's attacks on the local leadership, threatened with plant closure and forced to vote twice, the workers capitulated. They are now among the 92 percent of private sector workers whom the Change to Win Coalition has dedicated itself to unionizing.


* Joe Hansen, president of the food and commercial workers (the UFCW, with 1.4 million members). Hansen is given to thundering in the press that "the status quo will not stand", and in the spring wrote Sweeney a self-important letter hinting at disaffiliation. His executive council has given him authorization to pull out.


Hansen is intimate with the status quo, his reputation stamped in the mid-1980s when he was the UFCW leadership's tool in destroying the strike and ultimately the union of meatpackers with Local P-9 at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota. "P-9" is one of those markers in labor history, emblem of both the courageous spirit of rank-and-file workers and the machinations of treacherous union leadership. Hansen, who'd plotted with strikebreakers, was made the trustee from which position he expelled the workers' elected leaders, offered unconditional surrender to the company, and saw to it that none of the strikers ever returned to work.


His most notorious action was sandblasting a 16x80 foot mural that 100 workers had painted on a labor center wall, doing it himself with the other trustees after the Austin building trades refused, and erasing first the painted faces of the workers and then the slogan "Solidarity".


Today UFCW is the exemplar of business unionism, making deals for new members, pushing two-tier contracts, pitting worker against worker where it isn't ignoring them, clueless how to plan, never mind win, a strike as Southern California grocery workers learned bitterly after five months out, hapless in its approach to Wal-Mart (a campaign for which the coalition demands the AFL contribute $25 million).


* Terry O'Sullivan, president of the Laborers, running a union of 800,000 members. Having never worked in the trades, Sullivan owes his job to patrimony, another feature, along with familiarity with the Mob, that he shares with Hoffa. The elder O'Sullivan had been secretary-treasurer of the union and close to the Coias, who ran the union like a fiefdom along with organized crime.


To avoid federal trusteeship, Arthur Coia Jr., then head of the Laborers, instituted an in-house clean-up crew with its own investigators, whom he appointed, ultimately stepping down as president in 2000 though not before insuring for himself a lifetime salary on the backs of some of the lowest paid workers in organized labor. O'Sullivan Jr. was part of the makeover, a young, educated non-Italian. He is eloquent on immigrant rights and the injustice of a globalization system that rewards the mobility of capital while punishing the mobility of workers, a nod to the many transnational workers in his membership and industry.


O'Sullivan has not asked his executive council for authorization to pull out, and harbors his own ambitions to lead the AFL-CIO but is covering all bases. Meanwhile, he can't even clean up his own union. As recently as last year, the onetime acting chief of the FBI's labor racketeering unit and a former internal investigator for the union, Ronald Fino, wrote to the U.S. Attorney in Chicago saying that Coia's influence remains through his lackeys in the union and arguing that although action had been taken against some mobbed-up locals or district councils in Chicago, Buffalo, New York, and New Jersey, "the bare truth is this: the whole consent decree program has been a sham. A vehicle to remove Coia opponents and replace them with Coia loyalists, a vehicle where certain Genovese family controlled officials have been allowed to escape prosecution and allowed to strengthen their position."


* Bruce Raynor and John Wilhelm, general president and chief of the hospitality division, respectively, of the merged UNITE HERE (apparel, laundry and hotel and restaurant workers), with 450,000 members. Like Stern, they are beloved by progressive labor academics and journalists and provided the necessary gloss of militancy and élan to the NUP. It's trickier now, not only because they have been outdone in pure heft and bombast by coalition partners Hoffa and Hansen, but also because the recent enlistment of the already disaffiliated Brotherhood of Carpenters to the Change to Win Coalition has allowed reactionary or unattractive unions to outnumber putatively progressive ones among the "insurgents".


But Raynor and Wilhelm, who both started out as political activists and organizers, haven't got where they are without learning to accommodate thieves. Raynor never did declare war on the shakedown artists in UNITE's garment locals, just as Wilhelm has not purged Mob influence from all of HERE. Raynor's number two man at UNITE, Edgar Romney, presided over a domain of union shops in New York with some of the worst sweatshop conditions in America, where contracts weren't upheld, labor standards were violated, and dues-paying members lost wages and overtime pay. Romney has just been named treasurer of the Change to Win Coalition.
The merger of UNITE and HERE was mostly a marriage of convenience. There's nothing wrong with that except for the pretensions that these unions' every move is guided by strategic vision for industrial density. Hemorrhaging members in the garment and textile trade and abandoning the nation's sweatshops as a lost cause where it hadn't already acceded to them, UNITE started organizing industrial laundries. It did a good job of it in Las Vegas, where those mainly serve the hotels, many of which have contracts with HERE.


But UNITE's two-year effort to unionize the 17,000 workers at Cintas, an industrial cleaner and uniform rental provider, has so far come to grief, and needing to keep up its numbers, merger was the clearest option. UNITE, which has its own bank, the Amalgamated, brought resources to the marriage, and for Wilhelm, who all but declared his desire to unseat Sweeney as AFL chief, the assurance that his union, which is very impressive in some places, would be in friendly hands should he step up.
Now Raynor has received authorization from his executive council to pull out, but complications loom. Organizing national hotel chains, the meat of HERE's business, has always required the support of everyone else in institutional labor to lean on politicians, to cancel conventions or otherwise withhold business. Then there's the matter of all those union funds held on deposit at the Amalgamated Bank. CWArecently withdrew $50 million, a shot across the bow.


So, there are the men who proffer themselves labor's salvation. The tragedy of it is that one could draw up nasty little portraits of just about all the other unions in the federation, which for now are backing Sweeney. Sweeney should not be running again, and Trumka, having lost his purchase on leadership, should not be in a position to succeed him. But first the NUP and now the coalition, without organizing a majority, without the slightest interest in unity or respect or movement as anything but a slogan, essentially put a gun to Sweeney's head and said, "Make our day." Having failed internally at the thing they're supposed to know best -­ organizing for power - they are now reduced to posturing for it, huffing and puffing to blow the house down.

It may not be reversed in the mainstream media, with its penchant for distraction, but the kinds of venues like this one should not fall into that trap.  I will note that the RW intellegentsia (I suppose I could say "stupidentsia" to exercise their kind of wit) have a way of focusing more on what matters to them than merely lapping up the issues du jour more than is mandatory, although let's not forget that the RW faces much less stringent rules than authentic progressives, since the umpires are all favoring them all the time (eggplanting is de rigeur for a really outspoken authentic progressive, after a certain point).   Proudhon once said that the law in its infinite majesty proscribed rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges and begging in the streets.   It would better be phrased that it proscribes authentic leftists and rightwingers alike from exposing rightwing goons, and organizing disfavored kinds of labor unions.

     But I notice not only the excessive attention to Rove (which comment of mine in the political miscellaneous section was the first at least of mine that I noticed to no longer be automatically posted on the front page with the six most recent such postings, and this despite my querying of the internal workings as to why) but the real need for MUCH better explanation of WTF is going on with these unions?   It just baffles me.  How could a group of unions with that many numbers and that much clout be unable to sway the AFL-CIO more, unless Sweeney is truly a saboteur?
I also cannot understand why both Unite to Win and Change to Win, at their websites, had no forum for making donations, and no explanation THOROUGHLY for the uninitiated of what is going on, in full detail, with all the whys and wherefores.
There was also little by way of a well structured forum (like at this website, or for their purposes, perhaps the format of DU or NationalLedger) to thrash out the issues.   Hmmmm>  These are supposed to be organizers, you know, the people who are at the cutting edge of these things, like ORGANIZING?  And these are the reformers trying to emphasize organizing MORE.

My own suspicion, and it is very much from outside this process which had been so little discussed until it came up in the Labor Forum on this website, is that as with the flipflop spin, the Matt Bai Lie, the media lockdown during Votergate 2004 and everything else I have observed in US politics, and INCREASINGLY  the case, this is another top-down dictated sabotaging of real democratic organizing, with everyone 'getting with the program' and it's a LOUSY program.

   But you know how us 'conspiracy theorists' are.  We are most intolerable, or at least irrelevant and worthless, when we're right on the money.