From WorkingUSA, December, 2012, Volume 15, #4. Bidding Adieu to SEIU: Lessons for Its Next Generation of Organizers? By Steve Early A review of Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting For the Labor Movement, by Jane McAlevey with Bob Ostertag. New York/London: Verso Books, 2012. 318 pp. $25.95 (hardcover) Few modern unions have done more outside hiring than the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), America’s second largest labor organization. Beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing unabated today, SEIU and its local affiliates have employed tens of thousands of non-members as organizers, servicing reps, researchers, education specialists, PR people, and staffers of other kinds. While most unions hire and promote largely from within (i.e. from the ranks of their working members), SEIU has always cast its net wider. It has welcomed energetic refugees from other unions, promising young student activists, former community organizers, ex-environmentalists, Democratic Party campaign operatives, and political exiles from abroad. (One prototypical campus recruit was my older daughter, Alex, a Latin-American studies major who became a local union staffer for SEIU after supporting the janitors employed at her Connecticut college.) Many, if not most, of SEIU’s outside hires no longer work for the union, in part because of its penchant for “management by churn.” This means that its network of distinguished alumni today is far larger than its current national and local workforce, which is not small. And not all of these SEIU alums have fond memories of their tour of duty in purple, the union’s signature color. For an institution that demands great loyalty from its staff, SEIU is not known for its reciprocal attachment to those who do its bidding. Ex-SEIUers include many dedicated, hard-working organizers who were useful for a while, until they were not. In several recent purges, SEIU even managed to forget about the past services rendered by organizers sometimes described as “legendary.” I refer here to Bruce Raynor, former head of Workers United/SEIU, and Stephen Lerner, a fellow SEIU executive board member who directed the union’s Private Equity Project and devised its much-applauded “Justice for Janitors” campaigns two decades ago. Cut From The Purple Team Raynor began his labor career as a southern textile worker organizer in the 1970s, helping workers like the one portrayed by Sally Fields in Norma Rae. While still serving as national president of UNITE HERE in 2009, Raynor rather messily defected to SEIU, a fellow Change To Win affiliate. In the face of stiff rank-and-file opposition, he steered about a quarter of UNITE Here’s membership into the far larger union run by his friend, Andy Stern. Raynor was given a new title-- Executive Vice-President of SEIU. Yet, just two years later, he was drummed out of Workers United/SEIU on disputed charges of expense account fiddling (Why someone earning more than a quarter of a million dollars a year needed to bill SEIU for $2,300 worth of “non-business” lunches remains an unsolved mystery of American labor, right up there with the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa). Stephen Lerner’s fall from grace (and loss of his $156,000 annual salary) began, more incrementally, in the fall of 2010. Lerner had just unveiled what was supposed to be a global, multi-union SEIU-coordinated bank workers organizing campaign, only to find himself put out on paid administrative leave for three months, after a noisy beef with his new SEIU headquarters boss. Lerner had been an influential publicist for many SEIU causes, including the New Unity Partnership (a predecessor to Change To Win), when his longtime patron, Andy Stern, was still Service Employees president. Under Stern’s successor (and protégé), Mary Kay Henry, Lerner’s contributions were far less appreciated and, soon, no longer wanted at all. Under President Henry, Lerner’s bank worker organizing was shut down. But, when his SEIU staff pension and job severance issues were eventually sorted out, he became free to rail, to his heart’s content, about Wall Street and “the banksters” bereft of any meaningful union base. Henry then ran, un-opposed, for re-election in May, 2012, with an “administration slate” cleansed of both Lerner and Raynor. A “Deep Organizer” Scorned Jane McAlevey, author of Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting For the Labor Movement, was very briefly, in 2008, a member of the same national union executive board graced, in happier days, by both men. While the normally quite vocal Lerner and Raynor have been very reticent about their involuntary departure from SEIU, McAlevey is a woman organizer scorned (or unburdened by any non-disclosure agreement?). Her resulting fury, or political frustration, is reflected in many parts of her memoir about being undermined and driven out of a 9,000-member SEIU affiliate in Nevada that she labels “one of the most successful in the nation.” Written with the assistance of Bob Ostertag, Raising Expectations settles old scores with numerous members of what McAlevey calls “the Stern gang in D.C.,” who helped shorten her illustrious SEIU career to a mere 4 ½ years. The book should, therefore, be required reading for anyone hoping to last longer at SEIU—“before the rug is pulled out from under them” by the same “people at the top” who so disdained McAlevey because she wouldn’t cop to their “paranoid institutional culture.” Lest anyone think that the author’s own employment was a little short-term for such a blistering critique of SEIU and other unions, I should note (as the book’s subtitle does) that McAlevey actually spent an entire decade trying to straighten out organized labor before concluding it was pretty hopeless. As she writes in the book’s final chapter: "I operated on the assumption that, if you just kept winning in a principled way, the work you were doing would create the conditions for its own continued existence. The people at the top might not like you, they might not understand what you were trying to do, they might consider you a big pain in the ass, but if you consistently succeeded at the assignments they gave you, ultimately they would give you more assignments and the work would go forward. I was wrong….Past a certain point, winning actually becomes a liability, because the people at the top will feel threatened by the power you’re accumulating unless they can control it; they cannot imagine that your ambition would not be to use that power in the same way they use theirs. It took ten years of banging my head on a wall to finally knock that into it." Power Structure Analyst? Forty-eight year old McAlevey had a varied non-labor career before she started “winning in a principled way” and power-accumulating (without personal ambition) in “the house of labor.” She was a student government leader at the State University of New York at Buffalo, an activist in the environmental justice movement at home and abroad, associate director of the Highlander Center in Tennessee, and a program officer for Veatch, a progressive foundation backed by the Unitarian Church. In 1998, McAlevey was recruited by then-AFL-CIO Organizing Director Richard Bensinger to head up the Stamford Organizing Project. SOP was a collaborative effort by local affiliates of SEIU, the Auto Workers, Hotel Employees, and Food and Commercial Workers. Raising Expectations reports that it “helped 5,000 workers successfully form unions and win first contracts that set new standards in their industries and [local] market.” This multi-racial, cross-union model wasn’t replicated elsewhere, the author suggests, becausepost-1995 efforts “to reform the national AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C. were shipwrecking.” One casualty was the federation’s short-lived experiment with Stamford-style “geographical organizing.” Even after she moved on, McAlevey’s methods earned high marks from campus fans like Dan Clawson, author of The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements, who lauded the Stamford project as an expression of new “social movement unionism.” McAlevey prefers to call her work “deep organizing” or, in other parts of the book, “whole worker organizing.” This approach involves “bring[ing] community organizing techniques right into the shop floor while moving labor organizing techniques out into the community” after conducting “power structure analysis that enables workers to systematically pool their knowledge of their communities and integrate this knowledge with conventional research done by union professionals.” Workers themselves, not union staffers or some “union front group,” are empowered to decide “when and where to take on ‘non-workplace issues,’” like affordable housing, that too many unions fail to address. A Mission in Las Vegas After Stamford, McAlevey worked for SEIU in New York, Washington, D.C., Kansas, and California as the union’s Deputy Director for Strategic Campaigns at Tenet Healthcare and other companies. Her longest and last stand was in Las Vegas, working as the Andy Stern-installed executive director of 9,000-member Local 1107, a public sector and health care affiliate of SEIU that also represented thousands of non-dues payers........ (For the rest of this review and a response by the author of Raising Expectations, see http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-WUSA.html and subscribe to WorkingUSA today! Steve Early is the author most recently of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor from Haymarket Books, which chronicles the struggle between SEIU and NUHW in California. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com)