In March 2009, then-SEIU President Andy Stern was optimistic about labor's progress in President Obama's first year. Stern told me that of labor's top three priorities - universal health care, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), and comprehensive immigration reform - he expected the first two to pass in 2009...

As the SEIU awaits the results of its Kaiser election contest with NUHW, the union faces a reckoning regardless of the outcome. If SEIU loses, it will likely have no workers under contract at major California hospitals within three years. If it wins, SEIU will be forced to reconcile the...

In his book, Confessions of a Union Buster, Marty Leavitt observed, "The only way to bust a union is to lie, distort, manipulate, threaten, and always, always attack." In California, SEIU faces a similar challenge: it must convince 44,000 Kaiser hospital workers that the NUHW leadership team that brought them...

Since President Obama took office, the Republican Party's agenda has dominated the public debate. Fox News and right-wing talk radio decide what's news, and the traditional media either echoes the story or is criticized for not doing so, as occurred when the New York Times Public Editor chastised the paper...

After an 18-month battle that began with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) believing it could affect a hostile takeover of a fellow international union and once close ally, the two unions reached a settlement today almost entirely on UNITE HERE's terms.

SEIU's raids on UNITE HERE split the labor...

On June 11, St. Joseph's Health Systems (SJHS) did something that employers have long done, but which Barack Obama's presidency was supposed to stop: It filed a frivolous NLRB appeal to delay unionization for workers who won an election.

In this case, SJHS is denying unionization to Santa Rosa...

According to published minutes from an April 10, 2010 SEIU-UHW meeting, SEIU plans to "Basically create WWIII" in order to drive NUHW organizers and supporters out of California hospitals. SEIU specifically intends to closely coordinate with Kaiser Security and Human Resources Department to "remove NUHW" from hospital cafeterias and other...

Since January 2009, SEIU has spent millions in two campaigns against rival unions. Its campaign against UNITE HERE has alienated virtually the entire labor movement, effectively destroyed the Change to Win Labor Federation, worsened SEIU's budget problems, and achieved none of the hoped-for membership gains -- yet SEIU's raids against...

"I cannot underscore strongly enough how pissed off the base is over the lack of action." --Gabe Gonzalez, Center for Community Change

Last week, immigrant rights groups became the first major progressive constituency to issue a release publicly denouncing the Obama Administration. Blasting the White House for "escalating deportations and...

Since the election of our first ex-community organizer as president, organizing for progressive change has declined. The reasons range from sharply reduced funding for organizers, to complacency after Democrats' sweeping 2008 victories, to labor unions being forced to focus on protecting current workers from contract givebacks rather than organizing new...

I won't be watching President Obama's State of the Union speech. It's not that I don't enjoy his speeches -- having seen more than of all other presidents combined -- but the problem is the disconnect between Speechmaker Obama and President Obama. Speechmaker Obama is always "fighting for working families,"...

After spending 2009 mobilizing grassroots support for progressive change, activists in 2010 face a new challenge: pressuring President Obama to fulfill a progressive agenda. A new approach is clearly needed, and three steps should be taken.

First, email campaigns, protests and media events must directly target Obama, rather than...

When Barack Obama backed a Senate health reform plan that differed radically from prior proposals, he ignored the lessons he learned as a young organizer on Chicago's South Side. Obama once knew that it's wrong to bypass the community's agenda to strike a backroom deal, regardless of its potentially superior...

As President Obama quietly watches Senators undermine health care reform, redirects over $30 billion annually from domestic programs to expand the Afghanistan war, and sounds like the Concord Coalition in prioritizing deficit reduction over job creation, we hear little activist protest. Nor have activists publicly mobilized in response...

After seeing the U.S. premiere, I wrote that Michael Moore's Capitalism, A Love Story, is a must-see movie and his most powerful and politically fulfilled work. Moore thought so as well, and engaged in a media blitz to encourage a massive turnout to the 962 theater opening on the October...

Demonstrating his passionate commitment to progressive change and single payer health care, Michael Moore held the U.S. premiere of his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, last night in Pittsburgh in conjunction with the AFL-CIO national convention. Sponsored by the National Nurses Organizing Committee and other unions, Moore gave the...

Has Barack Obama abandoned the populist policies that got him elected, and done nothing for working people? Frank Rich of the New York Times certainly implies this, framing his August 9 column around a claim by a Virginia real estate agent that "Nothing's changed for the common guy. I feel...

SEIU President Andy Stern issued a staff memo last week saying "we are close to putting the dispute with UNITE HERE behind us." Stern said he was optimistic that a settlement was near, and that, "We and the members of Workers United don't want more fights." But Stern's rosy assessment...

In a dramatic blow to SEIU's efforts to raid UNITE HERE members and jurisdictions, 15 of the nation's leading unions pledged Monday to provide UNITE HERE with "material and moral" support. Before a wildly cheering and upbeat crowd of 700, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee denounced SEIU for the "poaching" of...

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...