Steve Early: Bidding Adieu to SEIU: Lessons for Young Labor Organizers? - 0 views
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Vanessa Vaile on 18 Apr 14Few modern unions have done more outside hiring than the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), America's second largest labor organization. Beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing unabated today, SEIU and its local affiliates have employed tens of thousands of non-members as organizers, servicing reps, researchers, education specialists, PR people, and staffers of other kinds. While most unions hire and promote largely from within (i.e. from the ranks of their working members), SEIU has always cast its net wider. It has welcomed energetic refugees from other unions, promising young student activists, former community organizers, ex-environmentalists, Democratic Party campaign operatives, and political exiles from abroad. Many, if not most, of SEIU's outside hires no longer work for the union, in part because of its penchant for "management by churn." This means that its network of distinguished alumni today is far larger than its current national and local workforce, which is not small. And not all of these SEIU alums have fond memories of their tour of duty in purple, the union's signature color. For an institution that demands great loyalty from its staff, SEIU is not known for its reciprocal attachment to those who do its bidding. Ex-SEIUers include many dedicated, hard-working organizers who were useful for a while, until they were not. Jane McAlevey, author of Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting For the Labor Movement (Verso Books, 2012) even became a member of the SEIU national executive before she too was cast aside. Her resulting fury, or political frustration, is reflected in many parts of her new memoir about being undermined and driven out