Last night's attack on an all day "Labor Notes" convention was it for me. Sending a retired auto worker to the hospital, 100's of purple-shirted SEIU members with anti-CNA placards, smashed their way into the conference, forcing many to seek safety inside and outside a DearBorn, Michigan Hotel, last night. As an SEIU member, I am ashamed of SEIU and its bully-boy tactics over the past few days, including stalking CNA/NNOC Board Members in Southern California at their place of work and at Home. But this is too much for me. SHAME ON SEIU.
At the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Dearborn Michigan, SEIU purple-shirted members, disrupted the final session of a "Labor Notes" covention at which CNA-NNOC members had been heckled all day. This was the culmination of SEIU's of two days of intimidation of CNA/NNOC staff at their homes and work places angered over their cancelation of the vote in OHIO last month when CNA/NNOC blew the whistle on a hastily, called vote without any campaigning to unionize 8000 workers of CHP in OHIO. Mr. Stern and CHP had an internal "partnership" agreement to quietly move these 8000 workers into SEIU after years of non-successful organizing. The vote was to happen within two weeks with no campaigning by SEIU nor anyone for that matter. This is the same deal SEIU offered the public sector of one Ohio County but the employer refused to sign on to the deal with SEIU because many members did not want to join the union. As a labor member, I am opposed to management labor deals that do not organize the members first with the broadest choice possible of unions to pick from.
Let me be blunt. Union organizing it tough work in the anti-labor climate in the USA. But if CNA/NNOC can win union organizing after years of work with Texas nurses, it can be done. But it must start with the members first, be democratic, have a debate and then a vote. All choices must be allowed. It is not good enough to say this was the only way we could have a union. What kind of a union, holds a two week vote with a 1-800 number to ask questions? What kind of a union that makes a deal with the employer that agrees to no campaigning to see if the majority of the 8000 workers want this union or a union at all?? What do members in the long run get? A union tied to the company, the corporation, the management that in the end turns on the workers if they do not go along to get along in their own work place.
I am ashamed of what happened last night by bus-loads of SEIU members. I am ashamed that my dues money may have paid for those bus loads of members to attack my brothers and sisters in other labor unions and to the staff of "Labor Notes" who sponsored this event. I am ashamed that my dues money is paying for SEIU staff to harass CNA Board members in the work place in Southern California and at home. There is no excuse for such violence and intimidation. I am so sorry that my dues money is being poured into such a hate-filled campaign against CNA/NNOC. These are the same tactics the Operation Rescue used to bully and intimidate health care providers at Planned Parenthood to the point where such hatred went beyond disagreement and picketing into stalking us at home and later overt violence directed at providers like me in our own work places. As a nurse practitioner, it is unconscionable to see this level of hatred directed at a peaceable assembly of labor activists and their hosts.
Shame on SEIU and shame on SEIU leadership. This isn't about Ohio anymore, it's now about Dearborn, Michigan.