Steven Greenhouse at the Times as the run-down on the latest intramural battles inside the Service Employees International Union.
This tussle started back in early February when Sal Rosselli, president of a large local in CA, resigned from SEIU’s CA executive council and posted a blistering open letter [PDF] faulting the union for pursuing growth uber alles and neglecting their members. But it’s part of a much longer debate about the relative merits of (to over simplify) increasing union density through aggressive growth, even when that growth comes as a result of a grab bags of tactical approaches that can border on vanguardist, and focusing instead on union democracy, making sure unions are accountable to their members. Again, that’s an oversimplification, but the fact is there is some tension between growth and small-d democracy inside a union and this tensions was in many respects part of the subtext for the split between the AFL-CIO and CTW a few years back.
