Post 132: One other point of interest: Local 1199, was quite active around Columbia at that time and was a radical force. When they went on strike at Columbia many of the radical students supported them. There also was a radical group called the Columbia Tenants Union run by a wild man named Bruce Bailey, who ultimately was found cut to pieces in a couple of garbage bags. There also were a few radical student groups like the Sparticists (very small) and the Revolutionary Student Brigade, which would demonstrate every so often. I wonder whether our President was hanging out with the fringe groups that were less than engaged in campus activities.
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There were several estranged student radicals who became involved with the Columbia Tenants Union rather than demonstrate against American national policies.
I think it was more significant that SEIU Local 1199 was active and militant in New York and at Columbia in particular at the time that Obama was in New York. It would be interesting to find out whether Obama and Ayers had anything to do with the SEIU at that time (since ACORN and the SEIU are joined at the hip), what the SEIU’s role, if any, was at Consolidated Edison, the company run by Ayers’s father, and whether the SEIU had anything to do with Obama’s decision to go to Chicago after law school.
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ALL: Interesting comments...I don’t remember seeing any exploration or research on this angle from BHO’s Columbia or NYC years. Do you??
Nope.
SEIU -— some background
People’s Politics
October 07, 2009
For full disclosure, I am not a fan of unions today but certainly believe they were very valuable to the development of the middle class and breaking the hold of the robber barons of the early 20th century in the US. It can be argued they were essential for the development of our life style today; as well, it can be argued they were partially responsible for the current collapse of the auto industry. I believe the unions have outlived their usefulness and apparently most of the country does too; union membership has been on a fairly steady decline for a number of years and in 2008, which was the latest year government statistics are available, stood at 12.4 percent of employed wage and salary workers. Interestingly, 2008 was the first year with an uptick in a while as it rose .3 percent from 12.1 percent a year earlier. This was a rise of 428,000 workers to a total of 16.1 million according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; this is a substantial number of Americans, although not as many as it has been in the past.
While most of the unions’ workforce has been dropping in recent years, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been doing quite well. In fact, “union membership rate for public sector workers (36.8 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private industry workers (7.6 percent). Within the public sector, local government workers had the highest union membership rate, 42.2 percent.” As a digression, the “largest numbers of union members lived in California (2.7 million” in 2008; I wonder if that had anything to do with California’s current financial troubles.
While the SEIU can trace its origin back to 1921, it only became a potent force when it left the AFL-CIO in 2005 and embarked on its aggressive growth plan. The SEIU now consists of about 1.8 million workers, more than 10 percent of the total union membership in the country; a great deal of its growth has come from poaching members from the AFL-CIO. It is interesting that so many of the SEIU’s members are government employees; it makes for a natural confluence of power of union management and government policy making which strikes me as a bit dangerous. In fact, “SEIU president Andy Stern is one of many radical union organizers who came out of the Midwest Academy, which was formed by onetime Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) members Paul and Heather Booth to train community organizers and infiltrate the labor movement.” Is this the person we want influencing government policy?
The SEIU historically has had a close relationship with ACORN, the now discredited community organizing group. Just some of the relationships:
* “ACORN created and controls SEIU 100 (Gulf Region) and SEIU 880 (a recently expanded SEIU mega-local that covers Chicago, Illinois, Indiana, and Kansas).”
* “ACORN founder S. Wade Rathke referred to mega-union SEIU 880 as ‘one of the pillars of the ACORN Family.’”
* “SEIU President Andy Stern hand picked ACORN’s Rathke to direct SEIU’s nationwide organizing projects.”
* “From 2005 through 2008, SEIU spent $9 million on ACORN training programs and contracting out ACORN organizing services. SEIU even hired ACORN founder Wade Rathke to command SEIU national organizing programs.”
* ACORN’s Wade Rathke is listed as President, SEIU’s Hospitality, Hotels and Restaurants organization.
I believe the relationship is unhealthy and see no reason, with the same training and many of the same people, the SEIU would be any less corrupt than ACORN; it should be looked at by the Department of Justice. Attorney General Holder should be far more interested in possible abuses here than by the interrogators of the CIA. It is hard for me to believe the 1.8 million employees are all Democrats; it seems logical at least some would be Independents or Republicans. Is the SEIU rebating their members for their political activities? I doubt it.
So far, I haven’t seen any interest by the Obama Administration to look into SEIU. It may be because the SEIU pledged $85 million (I can’t find if they met their pledge) to the coffers of Democrat candidates in the last election; perhaps I’m being overly cynical in that view though as Holder may be too busy with the CIA investigations to worry about something as “insignificant” as $85 million.
http://noise.typepad.com/peoples_politics/2009/10/seiu.html