[gangbox] SLAMMING THE DOOR ON THE DOORMEN

SLAMMING THE DOOR ON THE DOORMEN...how New York City's luxury apartment
building workers union grovels before the corporate rich....

By Gregory A. Butler, local 608 carpenter

On April 2, 28,000 building service workers in New York City's 3,000
luxury apartment houses voted to go out on strike. As of this writing
(April 22, 2003) their contract expired two days ago, and the strike
deadline is midnight tonight.

For the members, the issues are clear...above all, it's a question of
these $ 27,000 a year workers either getting an adequate raise..or
having a 3 year wage freeze crammed down their throats with only a
measly $ 1,500 dollar bonus (distributed in 3 $ 500 increments) as a
sweetner.

For the political machine that dominates local 32bj of the Service
Employees International Union, the issues are a bit muddier....because,
as usual, the officials of the so called "low wage union" appear to be
more interested in currying favor with the Democratic Party machine,
and grovelling down before the landlords, than they are in fighting for
their members needs.

The SEIU machine also has wrapped itself up in red white and blue
wartime jingoism..and, in a really deeply weird move, one of the
union's demands is "anti terrorism" training for the membership!

And, no, I'm NOT talking about training to protect the MEMBERS from
terrorist attack....the union is proposing that it's members be trained
to protect the TENANTS and their property.

Apparently, the lives of the building service workers themselves are
expendable.

This appears to be a move to kiss up to the rich people who live in
these apartment buildings, many of whom fear terrorists attacks, and
want the staffs of their buildings to serve as bodyguards in addition
to their other duties. As we will see below, the SEIU bosses spend an
awful lot of time currying favor with the affluent people who live in
these luxury apartment buildings.

Judging by the amount of play that the "anti terrorism" training stuff
gets on the local's official website http://www.seiu32bj.org , and the
prominence of that demand in New York Times coverage of the dispute,
the union might even be willing to make a bad deal on wages just to get
the "anti terrorism" language in the contract! This may be due in part
to the fact that the union would be running the training, and this
would be yet another source of patronage jobs for the SEIU staff.

The luxury apartment house workers do not have the final say about
striking, of course.. In a deeply totalitarian and dictatorial union
like the SEIU that decision is left up to the officers of the local.

Specifically, wheather there's a strike or not is in the hands of one
Michael Fishman, president of 32bj.

But, is Fishman really qualified to make that decision?

Fishman, like almost all SEIU officials from International President
Andy Stern on down, has never mopped a floor or fired a boiler in his
natural life. He is not, and never has been, a porter, or a doorman, or
a handyman, or a building super, or an elevator starter, or an office
cleaner, or a security guard...in short, this guy knows absolutely
nothing about the jobs his members do.

Mike is a professional union boss, a full time union staffer who's
drifted from union to union over the years like a high paid vagabond.

At one time, he was actually on the staff of the United Brotherhood of
Carpenters and Joiners of America.

According to Mike's official biography on the 32bj website, Fishman,
55, claims that was a union carpenter back when he was 19, although he
doesn't say what local he was supposedly in, and it's not at all clear
on wheather he was an apprentice, or magically got a full book as a
teenager...

In any event, Mike was quickly annointed to the union staff as an
organizer..and has spent the subsequent quarter century as a full time
union boss.

Mike ended up running 32bj when one Gus Bevona, the previous president
of the local, was forced to "retire"in 1999. Gus was, allegedly, tied
to < la Cosa Nostra >, paid himself a grotesquely high salary of almost
half a million dollars a year, lived rent free in a multi million
dollar marble tiled penthouse atop union headquarters at 101 6th
Avenue, and, in general, totally screwed his members over.

Reportedly, Bevona left office just steps ahead of a racketeering
investigation.

Mike was then appointed by Andy Stern as trustee of the local. When the
trusteeship was lifted, the SEIU international machine effectively
blocked longtime building service worker activists like World Trade
Center porter Carlos Guzman and Upper East Side apartment house doorman
Paul Pamias from running for office, and, instead, installed Fishman as
the president.

They actually had to tear up the local's bylaws to do that.

You see, 32bj officials are supposed to have actually worked for 3
years in the trade before they run for union office..

Seeing as how Fishman, as well as most of his fellow SEIU international
appointees, had never even worked ONE DAY in the industry, that just
wouldn't do.

So, the bylaws were rewritten, and a bunch of non-janitors, who'd never
ever swung a mop or pushed a broom, were thrust into power in the
nation's largest building service workers local union.

Considering Mike's utter lack of janitorial experience, this writer
questions his competence to understand the matters that are on the
table.

Beyond that, Fishman's administration has their priorities seriously
screwed up.

First of all, Fishman delayed the strike date, because it fell on April
20, the night of Easter Sunday, and just a few days after Passover,
which began at sundown on Wednesday, April 16.

According to Mike, it would cause "too much trauma" for New Yorkers (or
at least that small minority of New Yorkers who are rich enough to live
in luxury buildings with doorman service) to have a strike during the
holidays.

So, Fishman delayed the strike date for 48 hours, to Wednesday, April
22...needless to say, the 28,000 men and women who's jobs are at stake
were not allowed to say thing one about this.

As it happens, very few rank and file 32bj building service workers are
Jewish, so, for them, Passover is just another day..

But, Mike Fishman, along with many of the middle class college grads
who staff local 32bj and the SEIU international, along with many of the
landlords, as well as many of the affluent folks who live in the luxury
buildings, are in fact Jewish, so, for them, it's one of the holiest
days of the year.

However, even if 32bj's membership was heavily Jewish..the fact is, the
strike deadline was set for AFTER Passover, so it was a non issue.

As for Easter...many rank and file 32bj members are Russian, Ukranian
or Greek.. As Eastern Orthodox Christians, they celebrate Easter under
the Julian calendar, where it falls on Sunday, May 4. And, even for the
many Roman Catholic, Baptist and Born Again Christian members....I'm
sure they'd be willing to sacrifice a holiday to get a badly needed
raise.

This is yet another example of how Fishman is, apparently, more
interested in currying favor with the rich and powerful than he is in
standing up for the members who's dues pay his ample salary.

If that pathetic attempt to suck up to the landlords (and the wealthy
tenants) wasn't nauseating enough, Fishman is concerned that a strike
would somehow hurt "homeland security" Bizarrely enough, as I mentioned
above, anti terrorism training for members is actually one of local
32bj's contract demands..

Unfortunately, Fishman isn't the only building service industry union
boss who wants to play soldier...

The other city building maintenance union, Staionary Engineers local 94
of the International Union of Operating Engineers, which represents
the skilled maintenance mechanics who maintain boilers and elevators in
major office buildings, has actually already set up it's anti-terrorism
training program, along with the FBI, New York State Police, NYPD and
New York State National Guard.

Local 94's members mainly work in office buildings in Midtown Manhattan
and the Financial District.

Many of these towers contain the offices of the titans of Corporate
America..the same corporate rulers who were targeted by < al Qaeda > at
the old World Trade Center on September 11th.

Apparently, the plan is for these stationary engineers to play
bodyguard for those prominent executives who might be targets of
terrorist attacks.

Of course, neither local 94 nor local 32bj are ASKING FOR ADDITIONAL
PAY for their members, even though they'd be doing more work, and, in
fact, would be risking their lives to protect the corporate rich.

Nor is either union talking about unionizing New York City's huge
number of non union security guards and professional bodyguards..the
workers who, unlike stationary engineers and building service workers,
are actually trained and licensed by the state to do security work.

Beyond that, Mike has said, in comments quoted in the "New York Times",
that he didn't want an apartment house workers strike because it would
hurt "the members, the tenants, the owners and the city".

Mike was especially concerned about the 1 million people who live in
buildings staffed by 32bj members.

Now, you might think that it's a good thing that a labor leader would
be concerned about the consumers that his members serve...until you
realize that the tenants that Fishman cares so much about are not
working class tenants, but are, in fact, some of the richest people in
the city, if not the country, or the world.

There are 8 million people in this city..and most of them are working
class people.

But, this town, due to it's status as the capital of high finance, and
a major center of the entertainment industry, has an awful lot of rich
people in it.

There are about a million people in Greater New York [NYC plus Long
Island, Westchester, the Lower Hudson Valley, North Jersey and
Fairfield County, Connecticut] who live in households that are worth
over $ 1 million..and a lot of those folks maintain a New York City
residence in the luxury apartment houses that are staffed by members of
32bj.

Those 3,000 buildings are heavily concentrated in the affluent
Manhattan neighborhoods of the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Soho,
Greenwich Village, the West Village, Turtle Bay and Chelsea, the
wealthy Brooklyn neighborhoods of Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights and
along Queens Boulevard in the neighborhoods of Forest Hills and Kew
Gardens in Queens.

There are a few buildings occupied predominantly by working class
tenants that are also covered by this agreement, most notably the huge
Starrett City apartment complex in East New York, Brooklyn, the LeFrak
City complex in Rego Park, Queens and the Esplanade Gardens and Lenox
Terrace apartments in the largely working class, and overwhelmingly
Black, Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem..

About 1,500 of these buildings are owned by landlords, with the balance
being co-ops owned by their residents, and managed by a co-op board
elected by the residents.

The landlords and co-op boards are represented by an organization
called the Realty Advisory Board of New York, (RABNY) which bargains
the citywide agreement with the union.

Luxury buildings in the affluent, predominantly White, Riverdale
section of the Bronx, as well as the large, predominantly working
class, largely Black, Latin and South Asian, apartment complexes in
Co-Op City and Parkchester, and the hirise apartment buildings along
the Grand Concourse, are covered by a seperate agreement with the Bronx
Realty Advisory Board (BRAB) that doesn't expire until 2005.

On the other end of the economic spectrum, there are about 750,000
working class New Yorkers who live in 250 public housing projects run
by the New York City Housing Authority. The 20,000 workers who service
those buildings are not in Fishman's union..they are members of City
Employees local 237 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

There are a few low income housing developments who's workers are in
the SEIU. They are government funded but staffed by employees of
private anti poverty agencies (a.k.a. "Community Based Organizations")
like SOBRO, Mount Hope Housing Company and Bedford Stuyvessant
Restoration Corp. Those CBO's are represented by an employers
association of their own, the Association for Neighborhood Housing and
Development, Inc. (ANHD).

Thanks to the close ties between the SEIU heirarchy, the anti poverty
honchos and the Democratic Party machine, those workers in anti poverty
agency-owned buildings are under seperate agreements that are, for the
most part $ 6 dollar an hour sweetheart contracts. I'll go into more
detail on that below.

But, the reality is, the vast majority of working class New Yorkers
(like this writer) live in apartment buildings that are staffed by non
union workers.

So, when Fishman expresses such heartfelt concern for "the tenants",
he's not talking about working class families going without heat and
hot water.

He's really talking about rich New Yorkers having to get their own
mail, take out their own garbage, and open the door for themselves when
the come into their buildings

Yes folks, belive it or not, incredible as it might seem, rich people
here in New York are so lazy that they actually pay people to HOLD THE
DOOR FOR THEM..that's what the SEIU members classified as "doormen"
actually do..they hold the door for lazy rich people when they enter
and leave their apartment buildings!!!! Working class tenants open and
close our own front doors, of course.

Those are the folks who Fishman is so worried about, brothers and
sisters. Those are the people that Mike wants his members to get
special "anti terrorism" training to protect....

In fact, the comfort of rich New Yorkers is apparently more important
to Mike Fishman than the welfare of his own members..workers who,
earning, at most, $ 35,000 a year, (most of them only make $ 27k), have
to eak out a living in a city where even run down tenement apartments
in the ghetto rent for $ 1,200 a month + utilities. Mike is willing to
sacrifice his members' well being so as to not inconvenience rich
people.

And, let's be clear here..if these 28,000 building service workers
struck, even for an extended period of time, those rich folks would be
in no danger of not having elevator service, heat or running water.

They'd merely have to open their own front doors, they'd have to get
their own mail, UPS and FedEx packages, and (horror of horrors) they
might actually have to take out their own garbage.

As I pointed out above, most rich New Yorkers, just like most working
class New Yorkers, live in apartment buildings.

But, the kind of apartments they live in are way different than ours.

Specifically, they have a much larger workforce assigned to take care
of the buildings, and the tenants get a far broader range of services.

A typical working class apartment building in this town, (like the one
this writer lives in) has a staff of 2, a super and a porter.

The super (short for "superintendent"), who lives on the premises, is
on call for emergency repair work around the clock, monitors the
operation of the boilers and does minor electrical, plumbing,
locksmithing, masonry, carpentry and painting work around the building.
Supers also supervise the work of contractors hired by the landlord for
major work, and monitor contractors and movers hired by the tenants.
The super also supervises the work of the porter.

The porter, who usually does not live in the building, mops the floors,
takes the garbage from the ground floor garbage bins where it is
deposited by the tenants and puts it out on the curb for Department of
Sanitation pickup in the morning and serves as a helper for the super.

In some small apartment buildings ("small" by New York City standards
being less than 20 apartments) don't have a porter at all, the super
does the cleaning and puts out the garbage in the morning as well as
doing the repair jobs.

Folks who live in the projects get even less service.

Their buildings don't even have supers.

Instead, they have a Housing Authority office in each housing project.
The clerical workers there recieve requests for repair, and collect the
rent each month. Each complex also has a small staff of porters, who
clean and take out the garbage.

In each boro (Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island)
the NYCHA has central maintenance offices, staffed by carpenters,
locksmiths, painters, masons, ironworkers, electricians, elevator
mechanics and plumbers, who handle the bigger maintenance jobs.

Luxury buildings also have supers and porters. But, there are usually a
lot more porters than low or moderate income buildings would have..and,
the luxury tenants have things done for them, like having their garbage
taken down to the street, that tenants in low or moderate income
buildings do for ourselves.

They also have those folks called "doormen" (as the job title implies,
almost all of them are men, the city only has a handfull of female
doormen). They hold the door when the tenants enter and leave, announce
visitors, get the mail, FedEx and UPS packages, hail cabs for tenants
and otherwise spare these affluent folks the inconvenience of taking
care of themselves.

Doormen also do security work, monitoring who comes in and out of the
building..a very important function, especially in buildings with high
profile tenants (famous actors, ambassadors, affluent businesspeople
ect).

Since the bombing, rich folks here have become very concerned, almost
to the point of being paranoid, about terrorist attacks.. That paranoia
has only accelerated since the US and Great Britan invaded and occupied
the Republic of Iraq. That is exactly why Fishman is so concerned about
his doorman members having anti-terrorism training...he wants the rich
to feel safe and comfortable in their homes.

These buildings also have handymen, who help the supers do all the
miscelanious electrical, plumbing, locksmithing, carpentry and painting
jobs in the apartments. Luxury tenants, generally speaking, get their
repairs done much faster than tenants in low or moderate income
buildings or the projects.

The famous author F. Scott Fitzgerald once said "the rich are different
than you and me".

And it's true..they are..

They're REALLY, REALLY LAZY...

That's why they have to pay people to do stuff for them that working
class people do for ourselves.

And that's exactly what the apartment house members of local 32bj do.

By contrast with how the luxury apartment house dwellers live, working
class tenants have to get their own mail..and, if FedEx or UPS comes,
you'd better damned well have somebody home to get the package, or
they'll just send it back. That's a real problem for single parents and
the city's many dual career couples, where both partners are at work
during the day.

As for security...you'd better buy two or three really good locks for
your front door, and a steel gate for the window near the fire escape,
(along with, perhaps, a baseball bat or knife kept hidden near the door
to your apartment) because, in a working class apartment house, the
only thing monitoring the door is an electronic intercom and a buzzer
system, which can be easily evaded by an even mildly perseverant
burglar or stalker.

In low and moderate income buildings, we don't have doormen to hail a
cab for us...and, our porters don't take our garbage down to the bins
for us either, those are things you just have to do for yourself.

It's actually kind of disgusting how the newspapers here (ESPECIALLY
the New York Times) have been moaning and crying about the tragedy of
how these rich folks are going to have to get their own mail and take
out their own garbage...as if the vast majority of New Yorkers don't
have to do those things for ourselves every day of the year!!

What's worse is the fact that THE LEADERS OF THE UNION seem to be more
worred about some rich guy having to take out his own trash than they
are about the welfare of their membership!!!

The question is, how did the leaders of the SEIU get such a chronically
pro employer world view?

Let's take a look....

What was once known as the Building Service Employees International
Union was originally chartered by the American Federation of Labor in
1921 in Chicago. It's jurisdiction at the time included janitors,
office cleaners, doormen, maids, building porters, supers, handymen and
the various unskilled and semiskilled workers found in and around
office buildings and apartment houses.

The BSEIU filled in a jurisdictional hole in the maintenance sector of
the AF of L's building trades, by providing a union for the unskilled
workers in that sector.

The skilled workers in building maintenance, the stationary engineers,
were represented by the International Union of Operating Engineers, a
union that also represented construction heavy equipment operators.

One unskilled apartment house craft already had a union..the stationary
firemen, who were the engineers helpers and also loaded coal into the
boilers, were represented by the International Brotherhood of Firemen
and Oilers. (the IBFO met with hard times when landlords switched from
coal fired boilers to the less labor intensive gas, steam and oil fired
systems, and the now defunct union is today an SEIU affiliate).

Building laborers who did cleaning on buildings while they were under
construction were represented by what was then called the Hod Carriers,
Building and Common Laborer's International Union of North America,
today's Laborers International Union of North America.

The bulk of the BSEIU's members were big city building service workers,
who had been organized during the upsurge of union activism during
World War I. Prior to the chartering of the BSEIU, the janitors had
been originally recruited into what were called "AF of L federal
locals" local unions directly affiliated to the federation that
represented workers who's craft didn't yet have an international union.


One factor that was decisive in forcing building owners to use union
janitors was the fact that, during this time of union militancy, many
IUOE stationary engineers and IBFO firemen refused to work alonside non
union workers.

Also,by the 1920's, much of the AF of L in big cities like New York and
Chicago was dominated by < la cosa nostra > and other gangsters, so the
building owners could safely sign a union contract secure in the
knowlege that the mobsters would control any worker millitancy.

Not surprisingly, once the BSEIU was organized, the conservative
gangsters who controled the major locals and the international office
were not very active in organizing the unorganized.

For the most part, the only major organizing they did was to extend the
union's jurisdiction to jewelry factory workers and diamond cutters in
New York City's Diamond District along West 47th Street in Manhattan,
and to parimutuel [betting] clerks at horse racing tracks like
Aqueduct, Belmont and Yonkers.

Needless to say, the jewelry and horse racing industries were targets
for organizing primarily because of the large potential for fraud,
graft, theft, extortion and other criminal activity in those
industries. The union could serve as a protection racket, protecting
criminal-minded employees from firing or discipline, in return for a
kickback of a portion of their ill gotten gains.

In the horse racing business, the BSEIU only organized the parimutuel
clerks, because they handle the money and can be used to fix races (a
pratice that continues to this day, in the New York area, that activity
is concentrated at Yonkers Raceway)...

By contrast, to this day, the grooms, the workers who actually work
with the horses, and don't handle cash, have been left unorganized by
the union, and are some of the lowest paid workers in the entire
country.

During the 1930's, there was a very brief, and rather uncharactaristic,
upsurge in militancy in the BSEIU in New York. In 1934, the BSEIU's New
York City locals, which, at the time, had a strong influence from
members of the Communist Party, USA, staged their first, and, to date,
last, major industry wide organizing drive. They staged a commercial
building workers strike in Manhattan's Garment District that year, and
another citywide building service strike in commercial and apartment
buildings in 1936.

Locals 32 (Manhattan) 32K (Brooklyn) 32B (Queens) and 32E (Bronx)
organized large numbers of apartment house porters, supers and, in
luxury buildings, doormen. Together with window washers local 2, office
cleaners local 32J and elevator operators local 58, they represented a
total of 31,000 workers in the industry..and, the New York locals
combined made up 45% of the entire BSEIU membership.

That era was the high water mark for unionization of apartment house
workers...it was pretty much downhill from then on.

After the communists were driven out of the BSEIU, the gangsters came
back, and dominated the union.

They largely abandoned any efforts to organize the many non union
supers and porters in working class apartment buildings, and were
content to maintain the membership base that the communists had built
up in luxury buildings in the late 1930's.

This was a union-wide problem in the Building Service Employees Int'l
Union. For many years, the BSEIU's corrupt bureaucracy chugged along
with about 70,000 members in the entire union, and made no major effort
to organize the large portion of the craft that were non union.

The main preocupation of the BSEIU's leaders (in particular in big city
locals like New York's 32, 32B, 32E and 32J and Chicago's local 1) was,
like most labor racketeers, trying to get as much protection money from
the employers as they could, running little scams like job selling,
[especially for building super jobs, which came with free apartments],
and keeping the members in line by any means necessary.

But, by the late 1950's, two new frontiers had opened for the labor
movement; hospital workers and state, county and municipal government
employees.

These groups of workers had heretofore been either unorganized or in
weak company union-style "associations" dominated by politicians,
lawyers and the bosses of the local Democratic and/or Republican party
machines.

In the 1940's, communists and socialists in the Congress of Industrial
Organizations had taken the first difficult steps in organizing these
workers, chartering unions like the United Public Workers and the
United Office and Professional Workers of America, which faced great
resistance from the government.

By the 1950's, the mainstream union bureaucrats and the labor
racketeers came in to capitalize on this new territory opened by the
labor radicals.

And the bosses of the rechristened Service Employees International
Union [during the 60's the union's bosses dropped the word "Building"
from the union's name, in honor of the expansion of their jurisdiction]
were among those in the labor establishment who decided to cash in.

Organizing civil servants had many advantage for these conservative,
and often corrupt, bureaucrats. In many cases, the "organizing drives"
consisted of making back room deals with Democratic Party hacks, or
taking over already existing company unions, or, "employee
associations", as they were usually called.

A far cry from having to struggle against employers, and mobilize and
agitate workers, necessities of most private industry organizing
drives, especially in the building service industry. Union bosses found
that kind of militancy very distasteful, and even dangerous, as
mobilized workers often get radical ideas about controling the union
they pay dues to.

So, the SEIU waded into civil service unionism, becoming a major player
in the sector, right up there with the American Federation of State,
County and Municipal Employees [AFSCME], the American Federation of
Teachers [AFT] and the public employee division of the International
Brotherhood of Teamsters [IBT].

The bosses of the SEIU also discovered the hospital sector.

There, they could often cut the same backroom deals with employers
that were possible in the local government sector.

And, unlike public employees, there was, at the time, only one other
competitor in the field, local 1199 of the Retail, Wholesale and
Department Store Union.

Local 1199 was a communist led union that was originally chartered as a
pharmacist's and drug store clerk's union for the New York City Boros
of Manhattan and the Bronx in 1936.

1199 got into hospital organizing in New York in 1959, and, within a
few years, had, despite the local's communist officers and
radical-sounding media image, had come to understandings with most of
the private hospitals in NYC.

SEIU didn't try to contest 1199 in New York, but did their hospital
worker organizing in California and other states. By the 1970's, the
SEIU was America's leading hospital worker's union, and they also
organized virtually all the non professional hospital workers in
Canada.

But, the bosses of the Service Employees International Union didn't
limit themselves to just expanding their jurisdiction into civil
service and health care.

Like a lot of other unions in that era, the SEIU also started down the
road of "conglomerate unionism", organizing anybody with a W2 and a
socal security card, even if they were in industries far removed from
the union's 3 main jurisdictions.

The so called "allied services division" came to consist of everybody
from metal plate workers to gravediggers to arena workers to New York
City taxi drivers.

In many cases, sweetheart contracts were signed.

This was especially true of the luckless New York City yellow, or
"medallion", taxi drivers, the workers who drive the licensed taxi cabs
that cruise Manhattan below 96th street and JFK and La Guardia
Airports.

Their local, Taxi Drivers and Allied Workers local 3036, SEIU, was
originally organized by, of all people, Harry Van Arsdale, Jr, the boss
of the Electrician's local 3 and the New York Central Labor Council.

Van Arsdale even got himself elected president of the local, while
simultaniously running local 3 IBEW and the CLC.

Even odder, Harry affiliated the local to the SEIU, rather than his own
union, or, perhaps, a more jurisdictionally appropriate union like the
Transport Workers or the Teamsters.

Harry served two terms before fleeing back to his own union, in the
face of rank and file pressure, and leaving another hack to run 3036.

Within 15 years of these unfortunate workers being organized into the
SEIU, the 30,000 cabbies had been betrayed and had their jobs destroyed
by their own union.

WITH THE ACTIVE CONSENT OF THE LOCAL 3036 BOSSES, the medallion cab
drivers were :

- taken out of the jurisdiction of the NYPD and the civil courts, and
placed under the juryless kangaroo court "justice" system of the NYC
Taxi and Limousine Commission;

- stripped of their employee status and declared "independent
contractors" legally barred from unionizing;

- stripped of their previous commission system, where they got 60% of
the metered fare + tips;

- forced to "voluntarily" lease the employer's cars for $ 100 a day
plus $ 3 dollars union dues plus the driver buys the gas CASH UP FRONT;


- and, finally, to add insult to injury, most of the drivers were
denied benefits from their own benefit fund.

In other words, they got screwed royally.

After the taxi industry was deunionized, the hollowed out husk of local
3036 was cobbled together with a few other miscellaneous allied
services division locals.

The handfull of cabbies were lumped in with three other shrinking
allied service division locals, Jewelry, Diamond and Watchcase Workers
local 1J; Metal Spinners and Silver Plate Workers local 49E (the two
diamond district locals) and Cemetery Workers and Greens Attendants
local 365.

They were annexed in 1998 to the former School and Library Workers
local 74, a civil service local representing NYC Board of Education, NY
Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Public Library
building service workers, which was rechristened "local 174".

Meanwhile, what happened to the apartment house workers?

By the 1970's, local 32B-32J and local 32E (the Brooklyn and Queens
locals, along with the largely female office building cleaners local
32J and elevator operators local 58, were annexed by local 32 while the
Bronx local remained independent) had over 100,000 members.

About half of those workers worked in the commercial building sector as
office cleaners and porters, and 32B-32J had a substantial number of
nursing home workers among it's members. But, about a third of the
membership were in apartment houses, mostly luxury buildings.

The earliest signs of decay showed up in the 1970's. Many landlords in
largely Black or Latino areas of the city, like the South Bronx,
Harlem, Central Brooklyn and Far Rockaway, Queens, began torching their
buildings for the insurance.

These landlords did this as a business decision..they could make more
money from insurance fraud than they could from continuing to charge
the relatively low rent that the tenants could afford.

For the working class tenants, it was a disaster....hundreds of them
died (along with dozens of FDNY firemen), tens of thousands were
rendered homeless, and whole communities were destroyed by this massive
wave of corporate terrorism.

A lot of folks think that the first time New York got hit by terrorism
was in September 2001.

Not so, we had our own home grown terrorist attacks from the arsonist
landlords in the 1970s.

But, unlike the 9/11 attacks, where rich folks got killed, those
attacks only affected working class tenants, most of whom were Black or
Latino. Consequently, the burning of New York has been all but
forgotten..
except by those who got burnt out.

This massive wave of corporate-sponsored arson had the unspoken support
of the city's top mortgage bankers, in particular the Rockefeller
family controled banks Chase Manhattan and Citibank, who wished to
force up rents by destroying large numbers of low rent apartments. The
insurers went along with the scam too, and happily paid out the
settlements to the arsonist landlords.

I've written about the untold story of The Burning of New York on
GANGBOX before, at :

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8770

32B-32J's members were in the firing line too..and not just the workers
who's homes went up in smoke. Some of those apartment buildings had
been staffed by 32B-32J supers and porters..for the supers, it was a
double whammy, they not only lost a job, but their homes as well.

When those buildings were renovated in the 1980's and 1990's, building
service workers got screwed again. I'll go into more detail on that
below.

During the 1980's, the long slow decline of the union began to
accelerate, a process of decomposition and decay that continues to this
day. That decline accelerated when 32B-32J president John Sweeney (the
current AFL-CIO president) ascended into the top echelon of the AFL-CIO
bureaucracy, and was replaced by Gus Bevona.

As I pointed out above, 32B-32J had been a dirty union for most of it's
history.

In particular, 32B-32J BAs were famous for selling apartment building
super jobs.

The scam worked like this...a worker would pay a BA $ 10,000. Then, the
BA would persuade a landlord to fire a super, and evict him and his
family from his apartment, on trumped up charges. The BA would then
make sure that the workers arbitration case lost, by sabotaging it from
the inside. Then, the guy who'd paid for the super job would be hired
to replace the fired super.

The union also did very little to enforce union conditions in 32B-32J
buildings. Basically, as long as the landlords paid union scale, and
contributed to the benefit funds, they could do whatever the hell they
wanted to the members, and the union would look the other way.

Now, there was a new element...contracting out and decertification.

Nationally, real estate companies were getting out of the business of
cleaning their own properties, and were hiring contractors to do the
work. Some of those contractors were union...many of them were not.

The SEIU ended up largely being driven out of the building service
industry in city after city after city across the country, including
Denver, Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville,
Tampa/St Petersburgh, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Baltimore, Detroit,
Atlanta, Dallas/Ft Worth, Wilmington, even the city that was home to
the SEIU's headquarters, Washington DC.

And, worse yet, the union was left totally out of the new suburban
office parks growing up in Long Island, Northern New Jersey, Fairfield
County, CT, Westchester County, NY, Route 128 in Eastern Massachussets,
San Jose,CA, Orange County, CA, the "Beltway" in Northern Virginia &
Central Maryland, the "Chicagoland" area just outside of Chicago, I-285
in Northern Georgia, Redmond, WA, ect.

I've written about the sad story of the decline and fall of the SEIU in
the building service industry, in detail, on the GANGBOX website, at :

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/pocodinero1.html

and

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/pocodinero2.html

and on the GANGBOX listserv, at :

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4949

In New York City, most properties stayed with union
contractors..although they began a slow inexorable drive to push union
scale downwards. 13,500 32B-32J office cleaners found themselves laid
off when their buildings hired non union contractors... If they were
lucky, they faced the ugly choice of working scab, or not working at
all. Many didn't even get that choice..they just got the axe, and were
replaced.

The union's response? More concessions to cleaning contractors like
American Building Maintenance (ABM), One Source and the Denmark-based
multinational office cleaning contractor International Service Systems
(ISS) who stayed union.

Some landlords simply decertified the union, and went open shop..with
little to no resistance from the union.

There was a half hearted effort by the union to preserve conditions in
the office building sector in the winter of 1996.

The local called a strike, and proceded to run it very badly.

Picketing was sporadic, and no effort was made to stop even high
profile properties like Rockefeller Center and the old World Trade
Center from openly using scabs.

32B-32J didn't even ask the Teamsters or the Building Trades to respect
their picketlines..until the BAs of the Building Trades embarrassed
them by asking 32B-32J if they wanted their picketlines respected!!!

A month into the strike the union finally bothered to hold a march and
rally (down at the old World Trade Center).. and, not long after that,
Bevona ended up imposing a really bad agreement on his members.

In the apartment house sector, the union's membership dwindled, until
almost all that was left of their apartment house jurisdiction was the
luxury buildings.

In the case of those buildings that were burned down in the South
Bronx, Harlem, Central Brooklyn and Far Rockaway, when they were
renovated by anti poverty agencies ("Community Based Organizations")
many of them (including the building that this writer lives in) ended
up hiring non union porters and supers.

Some of the larger anti poverty agencies, represented by the
Association for Neighborhood Housing Development, Inc. (ANHD), signed
union agreements.

But, due to the fact that ANHD and these anti poverty agencies were
tied to the same wing of the Democratic Party as the local 32B-32J
bureaucracy, the agreements were sweetheart contracts, grossly inferior
to the 32B032J/RABNY master contract.

Each agency had it's own private contract, with it's own expiration
date.

Generally, porters only got paid $ 6 an hour for a part time work
schedule, usually around 25 hours a week. The porters ended up
averaging out to $ 12,000/yr, as compared to the $ 27,000/yr that
porters get in the luxury buildings. And, supers only got around $
20,000/yr, as compared to the $ 35,000/yr that supers get in the RABNY
buildings.

Oh, and did I even have to mention...almost all of the ANHD supers and
porters are Black or Latino, while a large proportion of the RABNY
building workers are White?

Hey, it could have been worse.

In many cities, from Chicago to Los Angeles, from Houston to
Pittsburgh, from Seattle to Atlanta, Black workers were completely
driven out of the building service industry by employer ethnic
cleansing, to be replaced by Latino illegal immigrants making near
minimum wage.

By the time that Gus Bevona was forced from office in 1999, 32B-32J had
lost half it's membership, falling from 100,000 workers to barely
50,000..and that number was artificially inflated by the annexation of
window cleaners local 2. Not all of the member loss was due to decerts
and contracting out...20,000 nursing home and home care workers in
32B-32J were, without a vote, herded into hospital and human services
workers local 1199, when that union affiliated with the SEIU.

Beyond that, RABNY and the real estate interests it represents had
grown tired of paying tribute to gangster unionists. They wanted
Bevona-style givebacks..without the bribery.

And that's exactly what they were going to get from the international
SEIU bureaucracy, and it's appointed trustees in local 32B-32J.

The Fishman trusteeship did some annexations of it's own.. With
assistance from Andy Stern and the SEIU international, they artificialy
reinflated the local membership to 70,000 by taking over New Jersey
local 617, Connecticut local 531 and Bronx local 32E.

Another group of workers got lumped into the "new" 32B-32J..the theater
porters, the workers who cleaned Broadway theaters and entertainment
venues like Radio City Music Hall and the Theater at Madison Square
Garden. Their union, local 54, was disbanded by the SEIU international
and they became the "Theater, Amusements and Cultural Division" of
32B-32J.

Now that these workers had lost their local, and were merely a drop in
the bucket of 32B-32J, the local proceeded to give away the store to
the theatrical producers.

Previously, theater porters had a guaranteed 40 hour a week schedule,
even if the theater was "dark", (entertainment industry jargon meaning
that there were no shows in the theater).

When shows were scheduled, theater porters had ample opportunities for
OT, in particular those porters who worked Broadway theaters, where the
typical schedule for a play or musical is 8 performances, 6 day a week
(two performances on Saturday and Sunday, one performance per day
Tuesday through Friday, with Monday as a dark day, or day off).

Now, the theater porters only work when there's a show..and they only
get paid for the actual number of hours they work. This has led to a
massive decline in income for theater porters..and, has put milions in
the pockets of the producers..all thanks to Mike Fishman's 32B-32J.

Besides annexations and givebacks, 32B-32J got a new name too..it's now
officially known as "local 32bj", rather than "32B-32J".

To paraphrase the old "Dragnet" TV series..they changed the names to
protect the guilty.

Since this is the totalitarian SEIU we're talking about, it should come
as no surprise that nobody bothered to ask the building service workers
in Newark, New Haven and the Bronx if they wanted to be annexed to a
Manhattan-based local union, of course.

Of course, the window washers wern't consulted either when their union
was taken away from them, and they were herded into 32bj.

Nor were the theater porters asked if they wanted to be stripped of
their own theatrical industry local, and lumped into a janitors
union..nor were they consulted when they lost their guaranteed 40 hour
week.

One disaster that struck 32bj's membership was entirely not of the
SEIU's making..

That is, the September 11th bombing, and the consequent destruction of
local 32bj's single largest union shop..the 7 buildings of the World
Trade Center - the Port Authority's 110 story Tower 1 and Tower 2, the
6 story lowrises, 4 WTC, 5 WTC and the US Customshouse at 6 WTC, the
Marriot World Trade Center hotel at 3 WTC and Larry Silverstein's
privately owned 50 story tall 7 World Trade Center tower.
The Deutsche Bank building and 90 West Street were also heavily
damaged, and now stand as burnt out abandoned buildings just south of
the Ground Zero site (Turner Construction hasn't figured out how to
demo the Deutsche Bank building without recontaminating the whole
neighborhood with gypsum dust and mold, and 90 West is landmarked -
they can't legally demo it)..

31 members of the local died at their posts that horrible morning..and
1,100 other members, employed by ABM and One Source, found themselves
out of work. Other SEIU members working at 90 West St and the Deutsche
Bank building lost their jobs too.

ABM and One Source solumnly promised 32bj that every one of those
workers would get another job.

They just left out exactly WHAT KIND of jobs they had in mind.

Instead of using those workers for regular building maintenance
work...they were used to do gypsum dust abatement at the many Lower
Manhattan office buildings contaminated by the giant 200' high plumes
of pulverized sheetrock and concrete dust that blanketed Lower
Manhattan as the two great towers fell.

Of course, that's hazmat work...the jurisdiction of Laborers local 78.

But, union laborers make a hell of a lot more money than 32bj building
service workers do, are city and state licensed for the work, and
recieve very extensive (and very expensive) training for their
dangerous jobs.

Despite the protests of Laborers local 78, 1,100 SEIU members, with
paper dust masks and absolutely no hazmat training, were sent to clean
up toxic World Trade Center dust from surrounding buildings.

This was done with the full knowledge and consent of Mike Fishman and
local 32bj.

It is unknown at this time just how many of those 1,100 office cleaners
have come down with World Trade Center Cough, the chronic lung disease
that has stricken so many construction workers, firemen, police
officers and day laborers who worked in and around Ground Zero in the
months after the air raid.

Despite all his heartfelt concern for the rich people in luxury
apartment buildings who fear terrorist attacks, and his publicly stated
intense desire for his members to serve as guardians for those folks
(with no extra pay), Mike Fishman has yet to publicly say word one
about those 1,100 SEIU building service workers who's lives he put at
risk by letting ABM and One Source use them as untrained and unequipped
World Trade Center dust hazmat abatement workers.

That says volumes about that union's priorities...to the SEIU, it
appears that the safety of the ruling rich is more important than the
lives of building service workers.

So much for "Justice for Janitors"!!!!

In this concessionary climate, with the SEIU making givebacks at every
turn, and with a union leadership more worried about the safety and
convenience of rich folks than they are about their members needs, I
seriously question what kind of agreement is going to come from that
bargaining table.

But, what can building service workers do about this?

To answer that question, we have to look at WHY the SEIU bosses are so
pro management.

Basically, it's because of an ideology called "business unionism".
There are several varieties of that toxic anti working class ideology
that infest the American labor movement..and the SEIU has seen at least
two of those strains.

One variant is something I call "Gangster Unionism".

Basically, that involves corrupt union bosses selling givebacks and
special deals to union employers willing to pay bribes and kickbacks.
You might call that "Gus Bevona unionism"..and it's the dominant form
of business unionism in the New York building trades. It also was the
primary principle that guided local 32B-32J's operations from 1921 to
1999.

I've written about gangster unionism before, at length, on the GANGBOX
listserve, at :

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2920

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2987

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/3024

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/7582

and

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8985

There's another version, that, in the years since the 1970's, has come
to dominate the SEIU as an international union, and, since 1999, has
become the dominant ideology in local 32bj.

I call it "Corporate Unionism".

The corporate unionists are very different than the gangster unionists.
While gangster unionists sell givebacks and special deals to some
employers in return for bribes and no show jobs, the corporate
unionists freely give all the employers givebacks, wage cuts and
special deals, and ask for nothing in return.

In a way, the corporate unionists actually do more damage, because the
gangster unionists do manage to get relatively good pay and conditions
for at least part of the workforce. Not so the corporate unionists, who
try to pull everybody's wages and conditions down to the lowest
possible level...

And, in a way, New York building service workers are lucky...because
they've only been subject to corporate unionist representation since
1999. In areas like Los Angeles, where corporate unionism has dominated
the union for almost 20 years, the higest paid building service worker
only makes $ 9/hr.

Another particularly ugly aspect of corporate unionism is it's
totalitarianism.

Union members are completely removed from even the appearance of
participation in the political life of the union. This can be seen most
dramatically in the fact that most of the current crop of SEIU bosses
have never ever worked in an SEIU represented craft in their lives!

In some ways, 32B-32J under Gus Bevona was more democratic than Mike
Fishman's "reform" 32bj..

As dictatorial and corrupt as the union was in those days, the one
small democratic element that remained was the fact that most of the
officials had at least briefly worked in the trades the union
represents (for example, John Sweeney's early days as a cemetery
worker).

Not so today.

Fishman, and most of his fellow 32bj officers, never pushed a broom,
nor mopped a floor in their lives

And, 32bj isn't even the worst offender

In some SEIU locals, especially 1877 in California and 254 in Boston,
Massachussets, almost NONE of the officers and organizers ever worked
in the building service industry. Many of the organizers come from
upper middle class or wealthy families, and were hired straight out of
college onto the union staff.

So, if neither gangster unionism nor corporate unionism serve the
interests of building service workers, what's the answer?

I belive that building service workers need something that I call
"Revolutionary Unionism".

I've talked about revolutionary unionism on the GANGBOX website before,
at :

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/csu1.html

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/downbylaw.html

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/contract2001.html

and on the GANGBOX listserv, at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/22

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/954

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2466

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2659

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4738

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/5059

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/7966

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8649

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8770

and

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/9027

Revolutionary unionism is based on the simple fact that workers and our
employers have nothing in common, and in fact we are enemies. There is
a fundamental conflict of interest between employees and
businesspeople. That conflict is inherent in the capitalistic system,
and will continue as long as we live in a society ruled by bankers and
financiers. There is no "class partnership"...their wealth is based on
our labor, we make them rich, and only get back a small portion of the
wealth that we create.

In the case of building service workers, they are the men and women who
make those apartment buildings habitable..and, make it possible for the
landlords to charge rent.

The supers make sure the boilers are functional, the building's
mechanical and electrical systems are operational, and that maintenance
projects are performed in a timely fashion. The porters make sure that
the garbage gets collected..which may sound "menial" to some..but, if
the garbage did NOT get collected 3 times a week, vermin infestation
and disease would soon follow. Without these services, it would be
impossible for the landlords to collect rents from their
tenants..because people would not pay to live in an uninhabitable
building.

As for the luxury towers, they charge extremely high rents ($ 3,000 a
month for a "studio", or one room, apartment in the more affluent parts
of the city....as compared to $ 1,200 a month for a 2 bedroom apartment
in the Black and Latin working class ghettoes of NYC).

And with those extremely high rents, comes a much higher level of
service..such as having doormen sort mail, recieve packages, screen
visitors and perform other related "concierge" services, or having
porters actually take down the garbage from the apartments, rather than
just putting it out on the street for collection by the Department of
Sanitation.

Building service workers make those high rents possible..and, the pay
they recieve in return is far less than the value of the services they
perform.

In light of those facts, these workers deserve, at the very least, far
more than they currently recieve.

I would propose that doormen, building porters and handymen recieve the
same pay that building laborers recieve in the building trades. That
is, $ 26/hr, or $ 1,040 for a 40 hour week, or $ 54,080 per year.

As for building supers, since they are on call 24 hours a day, and have
such a broad range of maintenance responsibilites, they should get a
salary of $ 1,500/wk, or $ 78,000/yr.

As for the whole "terrorism" question that brother Fishman is so
obsessed with, if this is indeed a union issue, let's get serious about
it....

If an apartment house indeed has tenants at risk for terrorist attack,
that building's owners should HIRE NEW YORK STATE LICENSED ARMED
SECURITY GUARDS, rather than having unarmed doormen serve as amateur
bodyguards for no extra pay.

Those armed guards should be union, of course, and should get paid at
least 20% more than my proposed doorman pay scale, or $ 31.20/hr, $
1,248 for a 40 hour week, or $ 64,896/yr. Besides that, in the event of
a line of duty death, they should be provided with a minimum of $
100,000 in employer paid life insurance, plus a full pension, payable
to the widow/widower and/or surviving children for life.

Also, all firearms, non lethal weapons, kevlar body armor, first aid
kits, police radios and chemical, biological and/or nuclear protective
equipment they are required to use should be furnished and maintained
by the employer, at no cost to the employee. The guards should be also
given time, during working hours, to go to the rifle range to work on
their marksmanship, and to attend other relevant security guard
training courses.

Also, any doormen or other building workers who might be in the line of
fire should be similarly equipped with kevlar body armor and, where
necessary, chemical, biological and/or nuclear protective gear, again,
furnished and maintained at the landlord's expense.

Those pay scales should apply to ALL apartment house workers, be they
under the RABNY agreement, the BRAB Bronx agreement, or the ANHD "not
for profit" anti poverty agency independent agreements.

Incidentally, on the commercial side of 32bj's jurisdiction, office
cleaners and porters should recieve that same $ 26/hr pay scale. I
would also propose that the theater porters get that same scale, plus
restoration of their 40 hour guaranteed work week.

And, it should almost go without saying that all of these workers
should all have full medical, dental, hospitalization, prescription
drug, psychiatric and optical coverage for themselves and their
dependents, with all premiums paid in full by the employers and minimal
copays.

Now, I'm quite sure that both the current bosses of 32bj and the real
estate titans represented by RABNY would both cry that those pay scales
are "too high" and the landlords "can't afford it".

Problem is, that's bullshit.

In a high cost city like New York, $ 78,000/yr really isn't that much
money..and, certainly, the plutocrats of New York City real estate have
deep enough pockets to cover those kind of wages. With the inflated
rents that NYC tenants pay, the landlords could probably afford to pay
the supers $ 100,000/yr....asking for only $ 78k is really letting the
real estate interests off easy.

Besides, entry level SEIU union organizers hired straight out of
college make $ 50,000 a year..so, why shouldn't the workers they
represent be in that same financial bracket?

But, to achieve that standard of living, it would be necessary to
organize the entire building service industry in New York City, a task
that the SEIU hasn't even attempted here since 1936.

There is a vast unorganized building service workforce here.. Let's
look at it this way...there are 28,000 SEIU members in building
service, who's 3,000 apartment buildings house about 1 million New
Yorkers. There are 20,000 NYC Housing Authority buildng service workers
in local 237, Teamsters, who's 250 housing projects house 750,000 New
Yorkers.

Now, there are at least another 3 million apartment dwellers in this
city, who live in buildings staffed by non union workers. Which means
that there must be around 75,000 non union building service workers
here.

Organizing those workers would almost double the size of 32bj.

Beyond the non union supers and porters, there is another non union
cleaning workforce here..the domestic servants. According to Domestic
Workers United, the recently formed independent domestic workers
lobbying organization, there are around 100,000 maids, nannies, au
pairs, housemen, cleaning ladies, cooks, gardners, butlers and other
domestic servants here in New York City.

Now, those workers are isolated in the homes of the rich and difficult
to organize..but, a large proportion of these workers live and work in
luxury apartment buildings..most of which just happened to be staffed
by 32bj members.

Now, the typical SEIU organizing drive is not going to cut the mustard
here...platoons of high salaried professional organizers, assisted by
legions of lawyers, and reinforced by Organizing Institute trained
student organizers, all tied up in endless NLRB election campaigns, is
just not going to get the job done.

The reason?

Simple.

The typical non union apartment building here only has a staff of 2, a
super and a porter.

The domestics are even more scattered...typically, only 1 per
household.

Using the NLRB method in cases like that would be a very expensive
joke.

As it is, it's almost impossible to organize large bargaining units
with the NLRB petition method (there's a 75% failure rate - plus,
20,000 workers a year get fired because they even tried to go down that
road). Also, the NLRB method costs an arm and a leg...in particular,
lawyers fees and the high salaries that most unions pay for their
college educated Organizing Insititute-trained staff organizers.

Using the NLRB method for tens of thousands of 1 or 2 person bargaining
units would be breathtakingly stupid, and a guarantee of defeat.

Instead..it would probably make more sense to organize a citywide
strike of all building service and domestic workers in the city. The
currently unionized luxury apartment house workers could be the
spearhead of such a strike..but it would also have to be spread out to
every apartment building in the city, as well as to the servants who
work in the apartments and penthouses of the rich.

That is the method that originally built the AFofL back in the 19th
century and the CIO in the mid 20th century. It's time to revive that
technique to rebuild the AFL-CIO in the 21st.

Beyond that, the SEIU badly needs structural change.

The service employees union has these vast locals, with tens of
thousands of members, which are deliberately set up to deny members
even the semblance of a voice in the union, and mainly serve to pool
large amounts of dues money in a few hands.

A 70,000 member "local union", like 32bj, isn't a real local union at
all. It's impossible to have real membership meetings, and it's very
easy to squelch the voice of rank and file workers.

In fact, when Fishman came to power in 32bj, he set up a system of
"district meetings", designed deliberately to prevent worker-activists
from getting motions passed on the floor of union meetings.

There are 5 regional 32bj meetings which, on paper, constitute one
meeting. To get a resolution passed from the floor, it has to be
submitted, in writing, long before the meeting, and has to be passed at
ALL FIVE MEETINGS..including the meeting all the way up in Connecticut,
and the one out in New Jersey.

And, the SEIU bosses can reject the proposed motion for a laundry list
of reasons "No motion shall be considered or acted upon if it is not
materially different from a motion which has been considered and
rejected in the 12-month period preceding the submission of the motion.
No motion shall be considered or acted upon unless it is
comprehensible. The Joint Executive Board shall determine whether a
proposed motion is not materially different from one which has been
considered and rejected in the 12-month period preceding its submission
and shall determine whether a proposed motion is comprehensible."

There are 26 other steps to getting a resolution passed in 32bj..all of
them as convoluted, lawyeristic and red tape filled as the one I
reprinted above.

And, needless to say, in a union where much of the membership's first
language is Spanish, and many members are most comfortable speaking
Greek, Italian, Russian, Ukranian or Haitian Kreol, these rules are
written in only one language - English.

Apparently, the "pro immigrant" SEIU belives that foreign born workers
should be seen and not heard.

In any case, no resolution gets to the floor of the 5 meetings unless
it's already met the approval of the 32bj executive board.

Not to metion the fact that, realistically, it's impossible for, say, a
member from Westchester to attend all 5 meetings and speak for his/her
resolution.

For that reason, and many others, this writer belives that 32bj should
be broken up into smaller, craft-based, human scale local unions which
have as compact a territory as possible.

I would propose that the New Jersey 32bj members be spun off into
seperate local unions for Jersey City office cleaners,
Secaucus/northern Hudson County office cleaners, Bergen County/Passaic
County office cleaners, Newark office cleaners, Union County office
cleaners, Hudson County apartment building workers, Bergen County
apartment building workers, Newark/Exxex County apartment building
workers, Union County apartment building workers, Passaic County
apartment building workers, New Brunswick building service workers,
Northwestern New Jersey buil