SEIU Convention Opens In Puerto Rico As Teachers Protest

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/node/8681

By Doug Cunningham

The SEIU's quadrennial convention officially kicks off today in San Juan Puerto Rico as the leadership of one of America's biggest and fastest growing unions charts a course for continued growth and worker representation. SEIU President Andy Stern says SEIU is pursuing a global strategy to advance the interests of workers in the 21st century global economy.

: "Our theme of our convention is justice for all. It's a recognition that the words workers of the world unite can no longer just be a slogan. It's the way that workers win in a global economy. The gap between the rich and the rest of the world population is growing so wide and so fast all over the world that in this time of a global economy with multinational employers unions must go international as well. I'm enormously excited to call this convention to order and to build the global union that SEIU wants to become."

Mark Brenner of Labor Notes magazine is covering the convention. He says there are big pushes to further reform SEIU coming from SEIU national leaders.

: "There are questions over how the union is going to restructure itself in the next four years, in particular there's a big push from the leadership to centralize power and bargaining control in the hands of a small number of people in Washington, D.C. There's also a move to give the international union a lot more control over how the locals are structured, more or less at will."

SEIU dissidents like California's United Health Care West want to see more rank and file democracy within SEIU and will be proposing reforms of their own, like one member one vote. They believe there's too much top-down centralization of power within the union and that it's taking away the real voices of the rank and file. Over the weekend the Puerto Rico teacher's union protested what it says are SEIU attempts to take over their union by cutting deals with Puerto Rico's governor. Labor Note's Brenner says riot police were on hand as the Puerto Rican teacher's union picketed the SEIU convention in San Juan.

: "The police attempted to keep the FMPR demonstrators out of the convention area and about fifty of them broke through the police lines and set up a picket line in front of the SEIU convention. It was quite a scene.
I mean, you had riot police blocking the entrance to the convention center, with SEIU delegates behind them. It was really unbelievable and I think it really threw a lot of SEIU delegates for a loop."