SF Weekly Reaches New Low in Hit Piece on SEIU

The weekly’s claim that SEIU is aligned with corporate interests is also off base, and would come as a great surprise to the owners of downtown office buildings targeted by SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaigns. The New Times Corporation that publishes the SF Weekly is notoriously anti-union, and is attacking SEIU not because it is ineffective, but rather because it fears its increasing success.

The SF Weekly is such a politically inconsequential news source that I prefer not to raise the profile of its stories by commenting upon them. But its April 11-17 cover story attacking SEIU’s international leadership targets some of the key players in America’s progressive labor movement, and is so duplicitous that the record must be set straight.

The story, “Union Disunity,” argues that SEIU President Andy Stern is in a “showdown” with Sal Roselli, President of SEIU’s United Healthcare Workers-West over “the rights of unionized health care workers and the patients they care for.” Writer Matt Smith claims to have obtained “secret” and “for-top-union-officials-eyes-only” documents confirming that “SEIU bosses” advanced a “secret sellout” of workers over the objections of Roselli and others.

The first question is why a 2003 agreement between SEIU and nursing home operators is suddenly front page news. Far from being “secret,” the legislative deal between SEIU and nursing home operators was widely discussed and debated at the time. In fact, all of the criticisms of the agreement have been extensively detailed by other publications, including, if my memory is correct, in a previous attack on SEIU and Rosselli in the SF Weekly.

Under the 2003 agreement, nursing home operators would not oppose union organizing drives in exchange for SEIU’s support for higher reimbursement rates. Some interpreted the deal as also including reduced state monitoring of nursing home conditions, which is why critics of SEIU claimed that it would compromise patient care.

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