Andy Stern's (current SEIU) legacy

I've blogged two other times on the SEIU-- once on this hilarious SEIU anti-union irony from News of the Weird and once from the recent speech I heard on nefarious SEIU activity in Indiana...

From Steven Malanga in the WSJ...

When Andy Stern announced his retirement earlier this month, virtually every news account noted that under his leadership the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had become the fastest growing labor group in America...

But it's important to understand how Mr. Stern pulled this off, because his union's story is really the story of the transformation of the labor movement in America. The SEIU did not win its most significant victories on the picket lines, but rather in backroom political deals with legislative leaders, especially in states like California where the political class is already union-friendly.

Those deals helped the SEIU to organize workplaces that are nominally considered part of the private sector but actually are heavily controlled and influenced by government regulation, most especially in health care...

The long effort [to unionize home-health workers], however, hardly represented a traditional union success story, even to those in the labor movement. As Class Struggle, a left-wing workers magazine, noted at the time, many of the home-care workers never even had an idea they had been recruited until they started seeing SEIU dues deducted from their paychecks. The home-care campaigns, the magazine noted, "were simply business deals cut with employers," in this case local governments, which garnered the union more members and more dues....

The SEIU's mediocre organizing record outside of industries in which its political muscle matters helps explain why Mr. Stern was such a big supporter of President Obama's federal health legislation....the ideal Andy Stern environment for successful union organizing in today's politicized economy.