SEIU's David Rolf: A New Savior For Labor?

David Rolf. Source: American Prospect

By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

David Rolf is the president of SEIU 775. He has been influential in the struggles around a higher minimum wage, the Fight For $15 campaign and for organizing new members. Increasing dues payers means more revenue which is the goal of any business.  He has been called the most successful union organizer in the US in the last 15 years by the American Prospect Magazine.

I read a piece about Rolf in Capital and Main an online publication that has on its Board of Directors members of the trade union hierarchy and free market (a friendly free market of course) gurus like Robert Reich, the economist Jared Bernstein and Barbara Ehrenreich as its advisors. Not too many shop stewards. The podcast included here at the end of this post, is an interview with him and I listened to about half an hour of it.

One might think the employers have Rolf on their most wanted list having referred to the $15 minimum wage as “bold and morally compelling demand” Rolf has a new model for organizing, or that’s what he calls it, and no doubt some owners of capital will not be receptive, but the new age types, the more astute far thinking sectors of the capitalist class like what he has to say.

Rolf condemns the present system of bargaining in the US as a failure. Perhaps it worked in the industrial 1930’s when a few major corporations set the standard he suggests, when one unionized corporation could set a wage rate for all and “IBM could pay a nickel more and keep the union out.” Either way, that old adversarial system of bargaining does not work in the present information and service economy.

Rolf goes in to a lot of detail about the failures of present day organizing, what he calls the “enterprise” system and talks of designing new systems, even social scientists have a role, the more “experts” the better; Intel CEO, Andy Grove has been a useful source of knowledge for Rolf. Like Andy Stern, the former university educated head of SEIU (Rolf will be there soon)  and Rolf’s mentor and co-thinker, their fondness for tech gurus and Silicon Valley is well known.

The old system of adversarial bargaining presents problems in that it puts so many obstacles in the way and in short “pits capital and worker against each other,.” That comment alone should be a sure sign that Rolf’s future is not a good one for working folk. Capital and labor are naturally antagonistic as one lives, parasite like, off the other.

Rolf thinks that the European model is grand and wants to emulate the Germans and have “representatives of the employees”  (experts like him) the employers and the government, “set standards for wages and benefits throughout an entire industry or across a geographic area.” Rolf promotes worker ownership and introducing “ethical workplace certification and labeling programs designed to appeal to socially conscious consumers.” Capital and Main:1-11-18

Rolf wants to partner with the state and business to centralize bargaining power and cover million of workers even those not in unions. Rolf’s Team Concept philosophy, which opposes the “adversarial” approach that would have unions acting independently, means the bosses have demands too. And relying on the employers’ courts, a friendly city council at the moment, or business as so-called “equal partners,” rather than on the conscious, mobilized power of organized workers acting in our own self-interest, is weak. Negotiating as joint partners with the state and business does not strengthen workers. As one critic put it, “SEIU is making a huge investment with no clear sense that it will ever be able to claim a fast-food worker as a member. How long can that be a sustainable model?”

Rolf has had major success increasing SEIU’s membership and organizing low paid often marginalized sectors. He was a major force in the campaign for a $15 minimum wage in Seattle. But while the $15 wage campaigns have made a difference for many workers, $15 is still poverty wages in most cases.  Over the last 40 years or so the minimum wage had less and less purchasing power while profits have increased and the capitalists' share of the national wealth pie has increased. So $15 at this point in time, after massive wealth accumulation, is not exactly a sacrifice on the part of capital.  We are all familiar with the inequality situation.

When I went up to Seattle for a conference around the $15 an hour minimum wage campaign I stopped to pick up by rental car at the airport and the young guy at the counter was a Teamster. He earned below $15 an hour and I happened to mention that he must be happy that he was getting a raise. He was not. Rolf and other union officials, along with socialist council member Kshama Sawant, struck a deal that allowed some employers, who already had a unionized workforce, to avoid paying the $15. It was called the collective bargaining opt-out. This would allow some unionized hotel industry bosses and others to keep wages at a competitive level and the argument was made to me that they had health care which sort of countered it.  One Fight for $15 activist told me that if they pushed the unionized bosses to pay the $15 they would eliminate health benefits----this was a fight they didn’t want and didn’t believe they could win. They couldn’t win it without building a movement based on workers and our communities, instead, the result was an employer supported deal backed by the unions.

At no time does Rolf stress the crucial role of the rank and file membership of the unions in the struggle for improved conditions.  There is no talk of the need for rank and file control of our organizations or of the power of the working class to be brought to the table at all.  Like Stern before him, he has consolidated locals and has no real interest in rank and file democratic control. He is a compromiser: “He kept saying, ‘Let’s not have our desires for the perfect get in the way of success.’ He was practical, less ideological than other members of the task force. If the labor movement had more David Rolfs, it would hold its own for a very long time.”, says one corporate head of Rolf’s negotiating style.

Rolf is the most recent of a number of pro-management gurus and Democratic Party agents in the workers’ movement. I am afraid I am going to be too long winded here but I feel the need to share some recent history with younger workers in unions or interested in them and our history

Many young union members might not be aware of it but 1995 was a historic year for US trade unionism. It was the first contested election for president in the history of the national body of organized labor in the US that was formed in 1955 through the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO.) The victor was John Sweeney of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Sweeney and his slate included former mineworkers union head, now AFL-CIO president, Richard Trumka and Afscme’s Linda Chavez Thompson in a position created to win support from women and ethnic minorities.

There was much militant rhetoric flying around at the time. Labor could not continue to fight "...only defensive battles.", the platform of the new voices claimed and promised to make the AFL-CIO the , "....fulcrum of a vibrant movement, not simply a Federation of constituent organizations."  The reformers made it clear, "...we cannot wait for change in the political climate to provide us with the opportunities to grow.  We must first organize despite the law if we are ever to organize with the law." (1) Fighting talk from the progressives. 

In the included podcast Rolf talks of the giant HMO Kaiser and its joint relationship with the bosses after a contentious adversarial relationship that Rolf seems to feel is just about bad bargaining methods.  Not long after Sweeney’s election, the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department’s Kaiser Coordinating Committee produced a glossy fold out aimed at union members at Kaiser Permanente. It was a proposal to the rank and file of Kaiser’s unions urging them to vote yes for a new “labor management partnership”. There had been some major disputes at Kaiser and what was then SEIU Local 250 led by Sal Rosselli and the California Nurses Association led by RoseAnne DeMoro were among the more aggressive union officials in the area. 

The brochure was carefully worded to overcome the inherent resistance among the rank and file and the average worker to management/labor teams: “I urge you to vote “yes”, Sweeney writes, and points to all the reasons explained in the brochure; it gives the unions a “real voice” and Kaiser has the incentive because the new program “commits the labor movement” to helping Kaiser be competitive and win market share.   In the interests of fairness the Kaiser Coordinating Committee does mention a no vote. “The worst that could happen? The worst that could happen would be for us to not give this ambitious and groundbreaking partnership a try, because things are bad and getting worse”, the brochure says. That’s inspiring isn’t it!

Having nothing else on the table from the heads of organized labor other than vote yes or things will be terrible, the rank and file went against their gut instincts and voted yes.  The Team Concept, that disastrous philosophy that argues workers and bosses have the same economic interests was in full swing at Kaiser.

Unfortunately Sal Rosselli of SEIU 250 was on the committee and supported the Team Concept which caused some division between SEIU and CNA (registered nurses) members on the job. CNA was not in the AFL-CIO at that time and opposed the measure as far as I recall. The AFL-CIO leadership was eager to place their members’ livelihoods in the hands of executives from the Health Care industry and the CNA members at Kaiser were thrown to the wolves. This now meant that AFL-CIO and SEIU members would be crossing CNA’s picket lines in support of their new friends at corporate.

So John Sweeney, who once talked of blocking bridges like Martin Luther King, quickly went from blocking bridges to building them.  Building them not between the leadership of the Federation and its members but between the leadership of the Federation and the employers.

But wait! Another labor superman arises to save the day. Andrew (Andy) Stern. Stern became president of SEIU in 1996 after John Sweeney was elected head of the AFL-CIO. Stern, the son of a lawyer, was one of the “Young Turks” of the changing labor movement. He was educated, smart. He was the youngest ever member of the SEIU executive board when he was elected to it in 1980. The capitalist media loved him and lauded him with praise, Business Week, Time, CNN, CBS, he had it all; they weren’t afraid of him, he was their new shining star, a visionary. "We like to say: We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn't work, we try the persuasion of power" he told the WSJ in 2008.

Stern was one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent agents in the organized workers’ movement at the time and rewarded the party handsomely supporting John Kerry, Barack Obama and handing over millions of union members’ dollars to Democratic Party candidates.

In 2005 Stern, along with James P Hoffa of the Teamsters, another lawyer, led a breakaway group from the AFL-CIO called the Change To Win Coalition. There was no significant difference of opinion between the two groups in what the media described as a “raucous debate” at the time. It was mostly over political activity which amounts to getting Democrats elected, “In our view, we must have more union members in order to change the political climate that is undermining workers rights in this country.” Hoffa wrote in an AFL-CIO press release in 2005. The rank and file of the unions involved didn’t get to participate in the “raucous” debates of course and many workers were confused by the whole affair. 

Stern's friends, Perelman and Bloomberg. Source

Stern was a Senior Fellow at the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business Law and Public Policy at Columbia form 2011to 2016 and has gone on to write a number of books. He’s done well out of the labor movement and is acceptable to those whose policies devastate workers’ lives.He has since been on the boards of major hedge funds and also Eli Broads's "Broad Center". Broad is an avid supporter of privatizing education and hostile to teachers' unions.

About the same time there was much chatter here in the San Francisco Bay Area about another “firebrand” emerging at the South Bay Labor council that is in the heart of Silicon Valley. Her name is Amy Dean. She was young, smart, techie oriented. She could save the working class and our organizations. She was the head of the South Bay Labor Council from 1993-2004. Much was made about her youth and the fact that she was the first woman to head such body. What’s more important than a person’s gender in the struggle against capitalism and the bosses’. Who cares what their program is?

What makes union leaders like Dean, Stern, Rolf and other proponents of Labor/Management joint teams popular with the mass media is not their militancy, but their willingness to tap in to the resources the worker has to increase efficiency and make capitalism more competitive. They are a breed of educated middle-class leaders that fit the bill. They are modern, well versed in the terms of left academia and are posed as the alternative to the male dominated moribund old leadership that has its roots in the past.

Like Stern, Dean, described as one of the “young Turks” and the Mother Jones of Silicon Valley, has found a niche for herself since her days at the South Bay Labor Council. I have written many times that the heads of organized labor, including this trendy crowd, see the unions as employment agencies and themselves as the CEO’s.  Dean says it clearly:  “Labor must become proficient at being able to broker the supply and demand of labor within a labor market.  Yet, I am suggesting nothing different from the ways in which a temporary agency functions. Temporary agencies were created to fill an important niche that client firms needed but are not filling, the niche that the employee side needs.  Thus, we have determined that marrying training with job development and placement is an absolute critical core capacity unions of the future must have.” (My added emphasis)

 

Amy Dean. Source

Ms. Dean has written numerous books and her “passion” as a senior consultantfor the Management Assistant Group is working at the intersection of labor, faith and community based organizations in order to build a fair and just world; how nice. Intersection is a favored term of the left left-petit bourgeois in academia these days.  I just happened to read, or skim through a transcript of an interview with Amy Dean, Richard Bensinger, and some other expert who will save the workers of the world, not from capitalism but unfair capitlaism. It’s quite sickening. Bensinger, is an organizer for the UAW and consultant to international unions apparently, how is that going one might ask? He was also an advisor to AFL-CIO president Sweeney at one time. Any conscious worker or activist in the workplace knows damn well you don’t get to be an advisor to the head of the AFL-CIO or a major union in this climate unless you are completely safe, no threat at all.

This is the game plan that the new star of labor for the employers, David Rolf, is following. 

The goal of organizing workers in to unions for Rolf and those like him is more power at the ballot box and increased pressure on the Democratic Party on the one hand and labor peace, an attractive appeal to liberal capitalists on the other. Like Stern and Dean, Rolf is another agent of the Democratic Party in the workers’ movement. The workers’ are not organized to act on our own behalf on the job or in the building of a working class/labor political party that can break the dictatorship the two capitalist parties have over political life. Instead, we must rely on the “experts” and on good capitalists and their theoreticians.

This new breed of trendy labor officials, educated, liberal minded, using all the right trendy formulations and supporting all the right social issues, have a liberal attitude to capital and the employers as well. We must not be fooled by their attacks on the old guard in the labor movement as while they differ in method their goals are the same. They can “work” with the bosses’, help them stay competitive and increase efficiency though involving workers in some decision making and forming workplace committees with them in order to tap in to the knowledge those who actually do the work possess.

They attend the universities where they soak up bourgeois economics like a sponge, and participate in forums and think tanks of the liberal bourgeois like the Council on Competitiveness and the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Rolf studied labor history at university and wrote his, “….senior thesis on the “Protocols of Peace”—the 1910 agreement between New York’s clothing manufacturers and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, hammered out by Louis Brandeis, Lincoln Filene, and John Dewey.”  (American Prospect).  Rolf has known where he was headed for a long time and we don’t need to follow him. This does not mean we would oppose organizing people in to unions, and he has done that. But what we do beyond that is just as important.

I recommend both the Capital and Main interview and podcast to those reading this and also the article in the American Prospect; there is more in them that I can include here. Behind these publications are the same forces, the economists, academics and labor officials who look to them for intellectual guidance and who can legitimize their pro-business view of the world. The idea that workers can govern society or control our own organizations or that there is an alternative to capitalism does not exist for them. Their path is a disastrous one for workers.

No one can oppose any rise in the minimum wage but it is not only inadequate, as an integral part of the team, the employers have had their input to the point that by the time some workers get it wages have improved very little if at all. The bosses’ have not been forced to pay, they have agreed to a figure as a working partner, some cases even with MacDonald’s, a global corporation, the increase takes four years to reach that level. Then there’s the costs of housing, transportation, child care. We must not lose sight of the big picture.

Rolf offers nothing new. Absent from his view of the world and of  organizing workers, is the immense potential power of the working class and the need for workers to rely on our own strength in politics and in the workplace. The legislation that arose in the 1930’s simply codified what was already won in the streets and through the mass occupation of workplaces. Much of that legislation by-passed agricultural, domestic workers and others who were mainly workers of color due to racism on the part of the state and the trade unions. We can learn from these mistakes and not make them as we learn from the methods that built the trade unions in the first place, mass action, occupations etc. and the need to challenge anti union, anti-worker laws.

It is not from saviors like Rolf that organized labor can change in a real way, but through rank and mile militancy, rejecting the Team Concept and fighting for what we and society needs as opposed to what is acceptable to the bosses, and the Democratic Party. Building opposition groups in the workplaces and where we can, the union halls, based on such an approach and doing so publicly, challenging the present leadership’s policies and offering new leadership based on them, is what will work. Linking and helping build similar organizations in our communities and using our organized power to support community struggles ensuring reciprocation will help to spread organization beyond the workplace.

Social issues such as police brutality, racism, sexism, and certainly environmental catastrophe, and all forms of discrimination, these are issues that affect all of us and must be an integral part of the movement to transform our organizations and society; capitalism is a system of war and there is no future unless we end it and build a genuine democratic socialist world. As we have stated before, the best protection against sexism and sexual abuse at work is organizing in to fighting, democratic unions that take this issue seriously as a divisive issue that harms all workers.

In the process of building a living, breathing democratic movement, political representatives rooted in this movement and expressing its demands and desires can arise as an alternative to the twin parties of capital and the dictatorship that capital has over political life.

The “new model” that union leaders like Rolf espouses is not internationalist and in the era of capitalist globalization we cannot win without worker globalization, without a program that includes a partnership with workers in other countries, many working for the same global employers we do. (Safeway, Apple, WalMart).  The team building with US bosses, leads us in to a race to the bottom with workers in other countries as each group of workers competes in order to help our own capitalists win market share form their foreign rivals, much like the relationship at Kaiser, helping one health maintenance organization corner market share.

Rolf has a good future ahead of him. I am sure his $200,000 a year salary will not remain that low for too long. The next step should be president of SEIU nationally then perhaps politics as a new shining light in the Democratic Party, and a few book deals. After all, he’s been described as arrogant, brilliant and egotistical by his critics and supporters alike. He will go a long way in the capitalist world.

  (1) New Voice For American Workers: A Summary of Proposals From The Unions supporting John Sweeney, Richard Trumka and Linda Chavez Thompson June 28, 1995