Association for Union Democracy news & updates

PRESS RELEASE: AUD Proposes Democracy as a Weapon Against Corruption

Association for Union Democracy, Inc.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 3, 2008
Media Contacts: Herman Benson, Kurt Richwerger (718) 564-1114 (AUD) info@uniondemocracy.org
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AUD Proposes Democracy as a Weapon Against Corruption

In today's New York Times, the Service Employees International Union announced plans for an internal ethics commission to address recent corruption charges facing several top union leaders. The union indicated that it would consult the Association for Union Democracy as part of its efforts.

The Association for Union Democracy is very willing to bring our forty years of experience to bear in assisting the SEIU, but what the SEIU faces is a moral crisis involving both democracy and corruption.

We believe it is essential to ensure protection for democracy and dissent within unions. Our experience shows that democracy is the linchpin for preventing corruption.

An internal panel of the kind proposed by SEIU President Andrew Stern would simply mull over the niceties of still another code and would be more than a waste of time; it would be an evasion. What the SEIU needs now is to establish a board composed of respected individuals, independent and completely outside the union power structure - a kind of supreme court endowed with the power, in defense of member rights, to overrule decisions of the international president and the international executive board in those circumstances in which members' democratic rights could be endangered.

The need is not to devise a code of ethics, the need is the genuine practice of democracy. The basic code of ethics was delivered on Mount Sinai in the commandment "Thou shall not steal." Everything else is a refinement. If the SEIU feels it needs an amplification of its own code to remind its officials of that commandment, it need only copy one of the many excellent codes already available. The problem in the SEIU is not that it lacks an ethical code, but that it has evolved a bureaucratic system of organization and, despite any code, has created an atmosphere of authoritarianism that obviously spawns corruption.

SEIU Creates Ethics Panel to Boost Oversight

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."

Andy Stern is slipping off the pedestal.

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)

SEIU needs a Public Review Board.

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.

Action and inaction in the Operating Engineers.

"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..."

Reflections on the SEIU Convention in Puerto Rico.

"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..."

AUD's SHORTS

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)

Help AUD contribute.

AUD and our message of union democracy are more relevant today than ever. Within the last year, a broad discussion on the future of the labor movement and the role of union democracy (there has been nothing like it for decades) has erupted out of the labor movement itself. With more than 40 years of campaigning for democratic rights, with our board members who are experts in union democracy, with our Union Democracy Review, with our website, with guidance we provide for hundreds of unionists each year, AUD can contribute to that discussion as no others can. But we need your help.