Those Sloggers keeping tabs on Talking Points Memo over the last couple days, may have seen a potentially exciting news blurb: the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the nation’s largest, most powerful labor union, is forming a third party (yay!), in North Carolina (um, what?). Over at Greg Sargent blog Plum Line, a headline entry trumpets “It’s War: SEIU Launches Third Party in North Carolina”. TPM speculates that the nascent North Carolina First Party may be an attempt to unseat recalcitrant House Dems who voted against healthcare reform (NC is home to three of them).
This struck me as a little strange for a number of reasons. First, SEIU isn’t exactly in the habit of attacking Democrats. Their president, Andy Stern, is closer to the Obama Administration than any one else in the movement. He isn’t known for trying to mess with the Dems’ game. Second, if SEIU was to start an alternative left-labor party, why on earth would they form it in the state with the lowest unionization rate in the country (3.1 percent)?
The answer is: they didn’t. Or the international union didn’t anyway. (I have called SEIU’s international offices in DC multiple times to no avail.) I called around to a couple of my old North Carolina contacts, who told me that this isn’t alternative party isn’t going anywhere. According to one North Carolina labor activist, who prefers to remain anonymous, the North Carolina First party is a simple publicity stunt by a local union leader who wants to stir up some shit.
I won’t go into too much detail, as I doubt that NC union politics are of much interest to Slog readers, but the details are beneath the jump.
Until two years ago SEIU didn’t have much of a presence in North Carolina. Then they affiliated with the State Employees Association of North Carolina (SEANC), a 50,000 member quasi-union (NC state employees can’t collectively bargain), thus giving SEIU a foothold in the state and a nice bump in the international’s membership numbers. (But the NC state employees aren’t union members in the traditional sense—they still can’t collectively bargain, they pay minimal dues, and get minimal benefits.) Other than giving SEIU larger membership rolls, the deal’s primary result was giving the SEANC president, Dana Cope, a bigger platform and a chance to use the SEIU brand. (SEANC did not respond to my phone calls.)
Cope seems to have recognized that if you sport the nationally familiar SEIU brand, people will notice you. And he has decided to use that brand to piss off the local Democratic Party. If that doesn’t sound particularly sensible…well, it isn’t. But he isn’t totally off base. NC’s Democratic Party has long been labor-unfriendly, and they’ve controlled state politics pretty handily for more than a century. Since Reconstruction the state has had a total of three Republican governors, with a legislature to match. If labor is going to pit itself against the establishment in NC, the Democrats are that establishment. On the other hand, it isn’t like the Republicans would be any friendlier.
The North Carolina First party is a way for Cope to rankle local Democrats to no productive end. The new party will probably die on the vine. If the party meant to be serious, they wouldn’t have made their announcement a mere six weeks before the filing deadline for independent candidates. (No potential candidates have yet been named.) The international probably won’t support them either, which is presumably why they haven’t called me back.
In American politics, a labor insurgency doesn’t look like the North Carolina First party. It looks like this.
SEIU isn’t in the habit of attacking Democrats?
You must be new to this state.
The SEIU doesn’t attack Dems here. They are in bed with them. They continue to support them and and scare up an astroturf-like presence of organizers and the the few members they can get to make photo ops in attempts to try to shame Dems into serving the people. They still give money when they pass regressive taxes and pay for polls giving Dems the cover they need to pass regressive taxes. The problem is with the International. Stern has crawled so far up Obama’s and the DLC Democrats asses it isn’t funny.
It’s hard for Unions though. We have a debt based economy. To fight for fundamental changes in the structure of the economy would require supporting non-establishment candidates and the only game in town is with the closed playing field of DC politics. SEIU should have a stronger presence in the media (talking about changing the fundamentals) but that would require they orient to the truth and that would take them out of the DC influence peddling game.
Where is the voice of the Unions in the aftermath of the Miner’s tragedy in WV? They need to be leading the debate.