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Indybay Feature

Is Fresno SEIU’s Vietnam?

by Randy Shaw via Beyond Chron
Monday, June 22, 2009 : SEIU defeated NUHW by 233 votes in their bitter election over Fresno’s 10,000 home care workers, but now faces a situation analogous to the United States in Vietnam. It took nearly one thousand staffers and an estimated $10 million for SEIU to eke out a victory in Fresno, the labor equivalent of carpet-bombing.
But just as the massive bombing of North Vietnam failed to bring the United States an ultimate victory, SEIU’s Fresno campaign left its opposition unvanquished, and likely better positioned than SEIU to win future elections.

SEIU’s Fresno campaign leader Dave Regan echoed Air Force leader General Curtis LeMay’s “total war” strategy toward the Vietnamese when he promised “to drive a stake through heart of the thing that is NUHW,” and “put them in the ground and bury them.” Regan insisted, “this is not an election that we want to win 52 to 48, or by a few hundred votes. We want them to believe when we are done here that it is hopeless. We got to give them a butt whipping they will never forget ... And a year from now or three years from now or five years from now we are all gonna sit back and say, 'I was there when we kicked those SOBs in Fresno County.'” But Fresno is more likely to be recalled as the place where NUHW survived SEIU’s “total war” strategy, leaving SEIU in a Vietnam-like quagmire.

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by chuck mcnally
You have union members fighting back against a corrupt union(SEIU) that thinks that they can buy there way out of the mess they have created by invading one of the strongest union locals in the country(formerly called UHW).

Andy Stern and Co.(SEIU)may have once been lefties, maybe even pinko commies, but they have sold out in favor of cutting deals with the bosses and government in order to get more member dues. Union members of UHW and NUHW supporters are not necessarily commies either. They are just trying to keep their union together and fighting to make sure that they actually have a union. Not just some hollow, dues collecting shell that bargains away their benefits and seeks to divide their union local(UHW).

I won't get into the Vietnam comparison too much because I think that Randy Shaw does a pretty job in his article, though I would say that even SEIU staff has compared the takeover and occupation(aka trusteeship)of UHW to Iraq. SEIU staff even predicted the quagmire that is now the trusteeship of the former UHW. Dave Regan, one of the SEIU trustees, even predicted that homecare workers and hospice workers would have been divided from UHW and sent to the corrupt 6434 SEIU local by May 1. Mission accomplished huh, sound familiar...Too bad they didn't count on the resistance of union members and the success of NUHW. It's more like a mirror image of the Iraq invasion than Vietnam, but Randy does a good job with his analogy in the article.

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