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 nationâs 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 âItâs War: SEIU Launches Third Party in North Carolinaâ. 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 isnât 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 Demsâ 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 didnât. Or the international union didnât anyway. (I have called SEIUâs 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 isnât 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 wonât 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 didnât 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 canât collectively bargain), thus giving SEIU a foothold in the state and a nice bump in the internationalâs membership numbers. (But the NC state employees arenât union members in the traditional senseâthey still canât collectively bargain, they pay minimal dues, and get minimal benefits.) Other than giving SEIU larger membership rolls, the dealâs 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 doesnât sound particularly sensibleâŚwell, it isnât. But he isn't totally off base. NCâs Democratic Party has long been labor-unfriendly, and theyâve 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 wouldnât 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 wonât support them either, which is presumably why they havenât called me back.
In American politics, a labor insurgency doesnât look like the North Carolina First party. It looks like this.
