SEIU VP Explains Strategy: Build a Progressive Movement with Labor at Its Core

by Gerry Hudson

“The poor are dispersed in jobs which are difficult to organize because of scattered, small units, seasonal employment, etc., and where the potential membership is so impoverished that it cannot even finance a basic union structure at the outset. Where these workers have succeeded in creating their own organizations—in the hospitals of New York and the fields of California, for instance—they have done so by being a labor-oriented civil rights movement and not just a union. The people belonged to minority groups and as such, they were able to appeal to a broad segment of the community, to the rest of labor, the churches, the middle-class liberals, the idealistic young and so on.”

These words were written by DSA’s founder and ideological mentor, Michael Harrington in his 1968 iconic book, Toward a Democratic Left: A Radical Program for a New Majority. He was referring to the early struggles of 1199 hospital workers who are now part of SEIU’s United Healthcare Workers East and West.

I came to DSA (it was DSOC back then) in the 1970s as a young labor activist working in an 1199 nursing home. I joined DSA precisely because of Mike Harrington’s vision of a non-sectarian, majoritarian left, with the labor movement at its core. And I joined because, as Michael used to say, good is not the enemy of perfect. He believed–as I do–that incremental change is vital if we are ever going to achieve power for working people. As democratic socialists we don’t believe in the big bang of revolution, but rather in the gradual struggle that is sustained over generations and that has real impact on people’s daily lives.

It’s tragic for so many reasons that Michael died too young; his voice and his wisdom are sorely needed. How he would marvel at the election of Barack Obama and the promise that this victory affords all of us on the democratic left! He is sorely missed. But were he alive, I would hope—and expect, that he and others who are informed by this vision of democratic socialism would join with us in SEIU as we seek to take advantage of a moment most of us have spent our lifetimes only dreaming of.

With our country poised for massive, progressive change, we finally have the chance to build a broad democratic left majority with labor at its core. But to do that, we have to be bold and creative, not stick to outmoded ideas, and we must challenge even some of our most fundamental ideas so that we can grow a labor movement that has shrunk precipitously in the last decades.

At SEIU, we have been deliberating in our union, in our locals, at our convention, among our elected bodies and with our allies, how to make certain that we don’t squander this moment.

At our convention last June, thousands of local union leaders and member activists openly debated, amended and overwhelmingly adopted our new “Justice for All” program, which calls for the focus and resources of the union to be dedicated to building a movement of all workers. Justice for All explicitly rejects the business union model, that of a union built on servicing and defending the union’s remaining islands of strength in cities like San Francisco, while we become more and more irrelevant everywhere else. Instead, we want to promote an ideological and practical solution, so that a movement of all workers can win broad goals to change and transform the entire country: healthcare for all, immigration reform, quality public services for our communities, along with the organization of millions of workers in the South and other non-union parts of the country.

The truth is that when you are as small a percentage of the workforce as unions are today, growth may not be sufficient, but it is an absolute necessity. Without significant growth in union density, nothing else we do can be sustainable in the long run.

Combined with the goal of building a global labor movement, the program adopted by SEIU delegates is one of the most progressive and ambitious of a major union in recent history. The most radical development from the SEIU convention is that delegates overwhelmingly voted to commit SEIU to changing the world, not just their work sites. For example, every SEIU healthcare local union but one – UHW -– endorsed a program to forge members’ existing strength into a national program to unite workers in Catholic and for-profit hospitals and to improve living standards and working conditions for nursing home and homecare workers, not just in places like New York and San Francisco that traditionally have had relatively strong labor movements and friendly political environments, but in more difficult regions where workers face much greater obstacles.

Because our locals realigned along industry lines, we are better positioned to organize and negotiate with the giant monopolies that will emerge out of the economic meltdown. Because our members have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to support the battle to win a progressive majority, tens of thousands of SEIU members can take leave from their jobs to work to hold politicians accountable. And because we have grown and dedicated a significant percentage of dues money to organizing, we can spend as much as $250 million toward organizing the 93 percent of workers who aren’t in unions.

We must challenge both our leadership and our entire membership, to consider how to grow outside of our present sphere. If we are going to organize in the South, in right-to-work states in the West, in the battleground Midwest states, and even in parts of California where there is low union density, then the most important rallying cry is not about higher standards for existing members—that’s precisely why the CIO model was created in opposition to craft unionism. Our goal must be to win a greater share of wealth for all workers.

If we had to trade expanding the union and increasing workers’ political power in politics, versus the old-style service model of focusing on individual grievances and protecting the workers who are already organized at the expense of new growth, truth be told, we’d take that trade any day. Neutrality agreements have indeed changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of SEIU members and others. Union membership growth and vastly better economic terms in contracts have been the direct result of comprehensive campaigns that abandon dependence on anti-union governmental regulatory agencies like the NLRB. It is completely backward to ask what the “cost” of neutrality agreements is; the question is, what’s the price of not winning them? Hard won neutrality agreements led to hundreds of thousands of Latino janitors winning a union, higher wages and healthcare in the Justice for Janitors campaign. Tens of thousands of African American security officers recently won a union with health coverage and significant wage increases through these kinds of agreements in the Stand for Security Campaign.

The struggle for unionization for workers in 1199 was an historic moment not only for the labor movement, but also for the civil rights movement, of which it was an integral part. Today, SEIU wants to continue on the tradition that we have inherited by building a mass movement for social change that addresses workers where they work and where they live, that brings in our allies, that makes the world a better, safer and more just place. That’s what our Justice for All campaign is about and that’s also why we are reconfiguring our internal jurisdictions—to build workers’ power where they work and where they live so that they can exercise real political strength to grow the numbers of the labor movement.

We are, as Michael Harrington wrote so clairvoyantly more than forty years ago, a labor-oriented civil rights movement, not just a union. To that end, we look forward to others on the democratic left joining us in our struggle.

Gerry Hudson, an executive vice president of SEIU, heads the union’s Long Term Care Division, representing nearly 500,000 nursing home and home care workers nationwide. He came to SEIU in 1978 from the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale, N.Y., where he was a member of SEIU Local 144. Hudson coordinated the merger of Local 144 into SEIU/1199 and was elected as executive vice president for the former-District 1199 in 1989. He is a long time activist on the democratic socialist left and in African-American progressive politics.