By popular demand…a thread on raiding. What seems to have sparked the particular interest is the battle between AFSCME and SEIU out in Riverside County, California so I’ve collected and posted a few documents on the subject below.
A few thoughts. Because of the large recent influx of readers, I want to assume that not everyone is a labor movement junkie and understands what “raiding” is. Maybe it’s obvious but…the Utne Reader explanation would be: a situation where a union swoops down to snatch away workers that are already represented by a different union. The encroaching union typically gets enough cards signed by workers to force a new representation election under the auspices of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
What complicates our soap opera today is that when both unions are members of the AFL-CIO, there is a process known as Article XX which forces the combatants to present their case in front of an umpire, who makes a ruling which each union must abide by. The hitch: the process has no force on unions outside the AFL-CIO…so SEIU, the Teamsters and the UFCW no longer have to abide by the process.
Which of course makes all this very messy. In fact, the Article XX process may be one of the few benefits Federation membership conveys to its affiliates.
I’ve never been a fan of raiding, except in circumstances where one can show outright corruption or malfeasance (the latter often being in the eye of the beholder). It’s a waste of time and resources to be fighting over workers who are already in unions. And with 92 percent of the workers in the private sector not in unions, and, thus, living as sitting ducks for abusive corporations, there are plenty of people to recruit.
Having said that, it’s pretty clear why unions raid: workers who already have a union are a whole lot easier to convince to join a union, even if that means a little family food-fight.
When the Change To Win coalition was formed, it publicly stated it was not interested in raiding other unions; SEIU, Teamsters and the UFCW have made similar statements in the wake of their disaffiliations. And it would be reasonable to hold each of the unions to those statements.
So, now comes the Riverside fight. The upshot of the fight is this: AFSCME argues that SEIU is raiding its workers. SEIU claims, in a release issued today, that the workers had sought a merger with SEIU and AFSCME is interfering with that process. In the midst of all this, AFSCME put the local, the United Domestic Workers (UDW), in trusteeship (meaning, the local is now being run by someone from the international union) charging mismanagement of finances. The UDW leadership has charged that AFSCME made the move because of the interest in jumping into SEIU’s arms.
Let’s hope that, in the new labor world we live in, this dispute ends up being an anomaly. There’s plenty of work to be done. Raiding is the great sucking sound of the labor movement descending further into irrelevancy.
