Student organizers pissed at SEIU/UNITE HERE coalition; are SEIU & UNITE HERE company unions?

Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which has been at the centre of several controversies within the U.S. labour movement in the past few years (Change to Win Coalition, SEIU vs California Nurses Union, et cetera), has been accused of abusing the trust of some student volunteer organizers on several U.S. university campuses. Jack Stripling wrote an article about the students concerns for Inside Higher Ed that’s pretty interesting; I would encourage you to check it out. The students, who had been helping SEIU organize service workers (mostly food services + janitorial), feel SEIU has treated them as ‘pawns’. They have released an open letter detailing their problems with SEIU at several campuses and listing a series of demands for SEIU to do: improving internal union democracy, fight for better contracts with Aramark, stop using students and campus workers as pawns in corporate campaigns.

The worst part is the accusation that the SEIU/UNITE HERE collaboration, Service Workers United (SWU), has signed a secret agreement with two of the ‘Big 3′ companies in the industry, namely Sodexho and Compass, and currently negotiating with Aramark to include them as well. This agreement essentially has Sodexho and Compass offer ‘neutrality’ during organizing drives for the union agreeing to (among other things) not conduct public awareness campaigns, hold any kind of picket (informational or otherwise), go on strike, and to allow the company to choose what locations are to be organized! If this is true, it is a staggeringly disgusting sellout of labour principles, and needs to be immediately repudiated and denounced by every labour organization.

It will be interesting to see what effect this has on the SEIU’s organizer recruitment down the road; SEIU has placed a lot of emphasis on recruiting recent university graduates with organizing experience to work for SEIU, and a large part of their draw has been giving these students a chance to get paid to work for the labour movement; sellout agreements like these will almost certainly tarnish this. Up here in Canada, where SEIU is not nearly as large, I don’t think this will have much effect (since most of our campus workers are not organized through SEIU). However, this agreement did very much remind me of the CAW-Magna agreement recently negotiated, where Magna would allow CAW to organize its plants in exchange for killing the union by removing its ability to go on strike.

The question, of course, is whether these national agreements make unions like SEIU and UNITE HERE ‘company unions’, essentially unions in name only that are beholden or even controlled by the company. You don’t have to be a Marxist to see that workers and owners have seperate interests, nor to understand that having an agreement that removes the right to strike and even the right to choose where to organize will destroy whatever chance the union has of genuinely improving the rights and working conditions of workers.

This is, in my opinion, a very, very depressing road for the labour movement to be going down. Capitulation, while it might achieve some short-term goals, will never lead the labour movement out of its current stagnation.