This is a puzzlement. Andy Stern was once one of the nation’s most important labor leaders as head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). After he stepped down, he became close to Eli Broad and joined the billionaires’ fight against teachers’ unions!
Hamilton Nolan writes:
Andy Stern spent 14 years as the head of the SEIU, America’s most politically active labor union. He was perhaps the most visible union leader in America. And what is he doing now? He’s lending his name to a billionaire-funded astroturf group that aims to quash the power of teacher’s unions.
When Stern left the SEIU in 2010, he was a true political power player—his official bio, in fact, brags that “Stern has visited the White House more frequently than any other single person during the Obama Administration.” Under his leadership, his union dramatically grew its membership and helped Barack Obama get elected. But his successes came at a cost. Stern developed a reputation as a business-friendly union leader, known for striking deals with companies that were often seen as too weak by many in the labor movement. Under the guise of modernization and growth, Stern seemed to lose his connection to the grassroots, radical, people-powered aspects of the union world. In 2010, The Nation quoted one union leader as saying, “Andy Stern leaves pretty much without a friend in the labor movement.”
His post-SEIU years have only intensified this feeling. Stern has spent the past decade serving on corporate boards, touting the idea of a universal basic income as an economic solution superior to building labor power, and further ingratiating himself to corporate America as a sort of post-union ambassador to the Aspen Institute world. He also took a seat on the board of the Broad Foundation, a billionaire-funded group that pushed charter schools—raising eyebrows from teacher’s unions, who are often cast as the villain by wealthy reformers seeking to build alternatives to America’s public education system…
The most prominent and powerful American labor actions of the past year were the teacher’s strikes that swept the nation, from West Virginia to California. Public school teachers have, more than anyone, been the most visible engine of recent union militancy. And as all of that was happening, here is what Andy Stern did: in April of this year, he was announced as an official adviser of the National Parents Union, an education reform group with deep ties to the Walton Foundation, the charitable arm of the family of Walmart heirs, the single richest family in America. (Charter schools are a major focus of the Walton Foundation; the NPU’s board members are affiliated with a variety of groups that have received significant Walton Foundation funding, and its co-leader is an executive at Green Dot Public Schools, a charter group funded in part by the Waltons.)…
The SEIU—still a politically active union, and one which is now having its name used, to fight against teacher’s unions, by a corporate-friendly former president who maintains a higher profile than the union’s current president—did not offer any comment.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
THE TEACHERS UNION SHOULD BE DESTROYED!!!. THEY ARE PROTECTING PEOPLE WHO SHOULD NOT BE TEACHING. THEIR PRIMARY PURPOSE IS TO ENRICH THE LEADERS AND WIELD POWER. THEY ARE AN IMPEDIMENT TO REAL PROGRESS IN EDUCATION.
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Wow. Where did you come from? And why are you shouting??? And what anti-education group do you work for?
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I don’t suppose you would see fit to grace this assertion with the silly formality of evidence, would you?
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I hope you didn’t expect that response. A day and a half later and only the crickets of my tinnitus.
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MARLENE,
THE TEACHERS’ UNIONS (ON STATE, CITY, AND NATIONAL LEVELS) SHOULD NOT BE DESTROYED. THEY SHOULD BE REFORMED SO THAT THEIR POWER AND VOTING GOVERNANCE STRUCTURES ALLOW FOR PRESIDENTS TO BE VOTED IN AND OUT FAR. MORE SWIFTLY AND EASILY.
MIKE MULGREW AND RANDI WEINGARTEN HAVE BETRAYED CONSTITUENTS FOR YEARS. RANDI NOW BLOWS IN THE CURRENT EDUCATOR’S WIND, WHICH IS A GREAT THING BUT BY NO MEANS ERASES HER TRUE LACK OF COMMITMENT TO THE CAUSE.
TEACHERS’ UNIONS NO LONGER REPRESENT TEACHERS, FAMILIES, CHILDREN, AND THE SACRED PROCESS OF EFFECTIVE LEARNING AND TEACHING. THEY ARE IN BUSINESS FOR THEMSELVES AND HAVE COMPROMISED TEACHERS, HELPING GREATLY TO TAKE AWAY THEIR AUTHORITY, AUTONOMY, AND ABILITY TO VOICE THEMSELVES DEMOCRATICALLY.
TEACHERS’ UNIONS – AND LEADERSHIP UNONS FOR THAT MATTER – HAVE NOT CAUSED THE HORRIFIC POVERTY CHILDREN EXPERIENCE, SOMETHING THE RULING AND OWNERSHIP CLASS HAS CAUSED THROUGHOUT THE DECADES . . . . WHICH IS THE SAME OVERCLASS THAT WANTS TO DESTROY UNIONS IN GENERAL.
THE MOST HEAVILY UNIONIZED TEACHING FORCES IN OTHER NATIONS HAVE A CHILD POVERTY RATE THAT IS DWARFED BY THAT OF THE “EXCEPTIONALISM-BASED” UNITED STATES.
DO CONSIDER TASTING THE FLAVOR OF YOUR WORDS BEFORE DECIDING TO SPIT THEM OUT.
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Sounds a lot like Steve Sweeney in NJ, except Sweeney is the Democratic state senate president and a DINO.
These turncoats make me sick.
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Who just sold out the rest of the NYC Building trades. Voting to remove the Business Manager of the Iron workers NYC Local Union, who refused to have his members cross the picket lines put up at Hudson Yards. The largest developer in the Nation, Related Industries trying to break the NYC Union trades. .
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Yup. Now others are seeing it. Best outcome is the NJEA has some allies now while we struggle to fight his nonsense.
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enough money buys whatever it wants
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How do I post an Emoji
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Type it sideways like in the old days of the Internet
🙂 😀 😦 😉
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Too many union leaders use their position as a stepping stone into a more lucrative line of work, even if it means selling out the people that they once represented. America is the land of opportunism.
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Liberal ed reformers support labor unions IN THEORY.
Only in theory. Actual labor unions and working people? Not so much.
They say they want “empowered” teachers, but no one actually knows what that means and so no one has to do anything. The enthusiasm for “empowerment” falls of dramatically when teachers actually demand some practical, tangible benefit- like wages or health insurance or due process or transparency in salary schedules or hiring and firing decisions.
For a while they tried to say they support private sector labor unions but not public sector labor unions, but that’s baloney too. If they supported private sector unions they would allow organizing among all the contractors they hire- janitorial and food service and transportation- and they don’t. They pay rock bottom temp wages for those positions. Which is amusing and certainly counterproductive because the low wage labor they use LIVE in the places they parachute into. That would be their children going to those schools.
They love the working classes. Just not the actual people who do the work.
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DINOS and the GOP targeted public sector unions because the private sector unions had already been decimated by them.
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They like the movie version of labor unions. Norma Rae with her “union” sign.
As long as she’s a prop and doesn’t actually demand anything they’re 100% behind her.
When is the last time Arne Duncan or the rest of them even lived in a neighborhood with people who work for a wage? If ever?
They are the definition of out of touch. They’d have to go back two generations to find a wage earner.
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A lot of the stats ed reformers use to bash public schools and public school teachers are collected by labor unions. They know that, right? They only know the number of disciplinary actions and infractions because the union requires a process and that process is recorded, making that information available to them.
They know that a LACK of collected data on the charter side does not mean charter school teachers are “better”, it just means the schools are all run as individual private entities so no one collects or looks at systemwide issues with teachers.
Because Success Academy is not unionized so had no recorded or transparent process for issues with teachers does not mean issues with teachers do not exist. It just means no one knows about them. They’re comparing “some information” to “no information” and ludicrously concluding that “no information” means nothing bad ever happens with a charter teacher.
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SEIU’s SecretaryTreasurer when Stern was President was Anna Burger. After she left SEIU, it appears her first stop was to serve on the Board of the Center for American Progress Action Fund (she’s not currently listed as a board member).
In 2006, Andy Stern spoke at a CAP function. The following are reported excerpts from his speech, “….the New Deal is no longer alive…the era of strikes is over… labor-management partnerships are more effective… (we should) shun anti-globalization rhetoric.”
Stern is the perfect fit for CAP and the Broad Foundation. Larry Summers, a friend to Andrei Shleifer, the architect of Russian privatization, is one of two “Distinguished Senior Fellows” at CAP and, like Stern, he is on the Broad Foundation board.
Now, lets talk about the links between AFT’s leadership and CAP which promotes school-privatization..
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No one should be surprised in the state of RI concerning the loyalty of the union leadership. The RI teacher unions and state workers union sold out to their rank and file when they supported the former treasurer now fraud governor of RI, raimondo to save their salaries, perks and status quo during the 2011 pension situation and the subsequent Settlement Agreement of 2015; all of it being fixed/rigged.
The rank and file were willing to go to court and fight the illegal legislation raimondo passed RIRSA-2011 but the union leadership (Boudreau for the AFT-R, Frank Flynn for AFT working teachers and Bob traitor Walsh for the NEA and he is not even a teacher but a banker and Wall St guy) all supported raimondo and the Ga legislation. The other unions George Nee of AFL-CIO, SEIU and Council 94 of State Workers also supported raimondo and the pension reform of raimondo at the cost of 23,000 retirees losing COLA and the pensioners who still worked had drastic conditions now placed upon them. They love rank and file because they pay union dues for them to continue to support their lifestyle. Many of the rank and file need to smarten up; they are being lied to and don’t even realize it.
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Last week when the Dems solicited campaign money from me I told them Raimondo chairs the DGA. I advised the caller to “feel the Bern”.
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The “black box” issues with charters and lack of transparency and “no news is good news!” fallacy of ed reform will multiply dramatically with their promotion of publicly-funded private schools.
Then we’ll get even more ridiculous comparisons – they’re not going to have the slightest idea what is going on in those schools and they will happily make comparison to public sector schools, who collect TONS of information. Obviously, collecting MORE information means there will be more disfavorable information, but the Best and Brightest will never consider this obvious problem with their comparisons, and continue to make phony comparisons. For political marketing purposes. Gussied up as “science”.
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Of late, teachers have been hitting the streets and fighting for better funding for their schools. The extremists in the right-wing, who have just about killed off the union movement in the United States, have or some time now targeted government-sector unions, including teachers’ unions, because those are just about all that is now left of the once powerful unions in the United States. In other words, teachers have been teaching IN THE STREETS.
AWESOME.
In honor of those teachers, one of the greatest union songs ever:
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Labor unions once led a grand fight for social justice, mostly in the decades betw the great RR strike of 1877 and great postwar strike wave of 1946. Those were years of ferocious battles, armed local and general strikes and insurrections, and police-vigilante-army attacks on strikers and organizers. This labor history is so old and far away its almost lost to memory or even to imagination of the class war that roiled America for decades after the Civil War. Since 1950, expulsion of radicals, socialists, anarchists, communists, activists and progressives of all kinds from the labor movement has led to a profound decline, along with automation, CAD/CAM, and runaway plants. Rank-and-file militance can sometimes bypass the repressive crony pro-business union leaders to make some gains. We’re in a time, imo, when democratic initiative has passed to mass civic movements and occupations confronting the regimes that front for big money–Wall St occupation in 2011, now Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Sudan. Suppression of militant labor, expulsion of militant leaders, outsourcing and contingent production, relocation to cheap labor anti-union states and countries, globalization of production, etc., have put enormous power in the hands of management and its government agents. Long-term re-organizing of worksites underway but for now, wildcat strikes as well as ad hoc mass citizen protests and occupations are tools to resist the status quo and are also blended/intersectional(unlike the labor union tilt towards whiteness and maleness).
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for now, wildcat strikes as well as ad hoc mass citizen protests and occupations are tools to resist the status quo
YES!
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Living in the United States Is Bad for Your Health
At this moment, Bernie Sanders is in a pharmacy in Canada, with cameras, showing that Canadian diabetics buy their insulin for ONE-TENTH what U.S. citizens spend because of the protected healthcare rackets in the United States. These racketeers siphon off much of our health-care dollar into private profits, and our legislators protect them. Trump, McConnell, Biden all do this. As a direct result of U.S. law, American diabetics become blind, lose limbs, and die from rationing insulin.
It’s long past time that the U.S. joined the rest of the industrialized democracies in the world and adopted a universal, single-payer healthcare system.
FEEL THE BERN!
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Thanks for the heads up.
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Bernie, he may be the last honest politician standing!
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and perhpas more essentially, one of the only politicians able to HEAR
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Stern’s speech at CAP as reported by CAP (1) the New Deal is no longer alive (2) the era of strikes is over (3) labor management partnerships are more effective (4) anti-globalization rhetoric should be shunned
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Let us dismiss the notion that Stern was ever near the most influential Union leader. First he left the AFL CIO in a grand standing move to form a separate Umbrella group. “Unite Here ”
So like Bezos phony promise to create jobs at his Amazon NYC headquarters. Raiding other employers of personnel is not creating new Jobs .
A Union leader who leaves the AFL-CIO which has non raiding agreements and then claims growth, not by organizing new workers but by hostile challenges to existing Union contracts and sweat heart deals with employers is and never was a great leader. . For Instance if 100 thousand +workers affiliated with 1199 of the NYC Health and Hospital workers decide to affiliate with the SEIU instead of being in AFL-CIO , that has not added one worker to the labor movement. And Stern in spite of his claims did not increase overall union membership at all. He shifted the pieces around and made the movement and his union weaker.
But the Nation did a great article when he was forced out in 2010 . And this quote may explain his love affair with the billionaire Ed reformers.
“Andy got captured by the notion that by being part of the inner circle of discussions in Washington and rubbing shoulders with people with power that he himself was powerful,” Wilhelm says. “I know that I have zero power if I’m disconnected from my members. And that’s what happened to Andy—he couldn’t have gotten more disconnected. That’s the kiss of death.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/seiu-andy-stern-leaves-behind/
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The two “Distinguished Senior Fellows” at CAP are Larry Summers, subject of the article, “Corporate Media and Summers Team Up to Gut Public Education” (Truthout) and Austan Goolsbee, a professor at the unfettered markets, University of Chicago. Austan’s claim to fame was his public letter bashing Bernie’s economic policies during the 2016 presidential campaign. One of his fellow letter co-signers was Laura D’Andrea Tyson, who at one time was identified as a CAP Senior Fellow and a McKinsey Senior Advisor. (Tyson is no longer listed at CAP’s website.)
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With friends like these, . . .
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Yesterday I received an email from Parent Power in Education.
I spent most of the day researching the scope of this work. About ten minutes ago a wandering finger deleted the research.
Go to the website below and scan down until you see all of the logos for the organizations being organized to propagandize for school choice and charters. They are in multiple states and districts. Some groups are well-established. Others are new. At least a dozen receive financial backing from New Profit.
Parent Power in Education is trying to scale up and formalize grass-roots “activism” so every parent enlisted in the cause of choice/charters has a role and each role is perceived as if putting parents in charge of local and state educational policies. The illusion is that every one of these organizations is a grassroots effort.
They are not. Big money is behind each of the sixteen organizations participating in this effort, recently announced and promoted by the 74 Million. The initiative is funded by the Walton Family Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and New Profit. New Profit is providing web-based tools for organizing parents. Although many parental roles look as if they are from grassroots activism, these organizations are highly structured and staffed by paid personnel and some offer “fellowships” for becoming trained as and advocate.
https://www.parentpowerined.org
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As long as the money flows, there will be Astro turf groups lined up to get some
Rotating cast of characters
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Sad that the Waltons can ignorantly lose $100,000,000 on Theranos and $1 bil. to destroy democracy and, still have the money to buy lavish palaces and yachts.
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Chump change for a family whose net worth is $150 billion
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Do I picture images from the French Revolution?
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SEIU was very very slow to allow their members who are teacher aides to join in the LAUSD strike, and only did so after great pushback from their members. Then, when the special school board election was on, to replace the felon Ref Rodriguez, SEIU went against the teachers’ choice, and instead supported the power choice of the downtown business leaders, including Eli Broad and the LA Times editorial board. Fortunately, their side lost. They have many union members who work for the city, but to me they have forgotten their purpose and the need for worker solidarity. I am sure a great many of their members also have kids who are LAUSD students. They were lousy at representing their workers at school sites, at least at my school, but were always glad to hop on any gains UTLA fought for. UTLA also supported health care for SEIU members, which gained UTLA nothing.
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We interrupt this stimulating discussion of labor unionism in the United States with the following ENGLISH USAGE TIP OF THE DAY:
Donald Trump is 73 years old. The 7 is silent, like the h in “hour.”
Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
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So what do you think is the real deal behind Stern’s claim of support for a Universal Basic Income? Is that just an insidious way of further hobbling unions, ostensibly so there is no need for collective bargaining, so that unions will implode and, thus, stop exercising political power by funding candidates on the left?
Center-right DINOs have to be called out at every turn, because they are living proof that the Democratic party does not really represent workers and historically marginalized groups. Other than throwing a bone every now and then, like the ACA and gay marriages, the party has been corporate owned and hasn’t been there for the common man for way too long now.
This is why we need to support genuinely progressive candidates, like Sanders and Warren!
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ACA had benefits for big Pharma and insurance companies. Gay marriage resulted in zero cost to the richest 0.1% – -two easy planks in the platform similar to the immigration plank that the richest 0.1% favor.
Establishment Dems like those at CAP will never support public schools or anything else that has a cost to the wealthy.
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@Marlene Butler- You had an insipid, vapid, ludicrous point but the all-caps changed everything. I can now see how passionate you are so I now fully believe you. Bravo.
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Sarcasm deftly served.
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“After he stepped down, he became close to Eli Broad, WAS BOUGHT OFF AND joined the billionaires’ fight against teachers’ unions!”
I took a personnel class for my masters to be a certified adminimal. The adjunct, a former superintendent bragged about how he was able to turn the head of the district’s union into one of his toadies. The guaranteed way to get an “A” in his class was, on the essay tests, to say that Dr. So&So said this, and Dr. So&So said that, and otherwise kiss his arse in any way possible. Egotistical bastard that he was.
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