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Civil War in Us Labor

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Civil Wars in U.S. Labor

Author: Steve Early

Book Review

Presented by:

Daisy Shelton

March 5, 2012

Civil Wars in U.S. Labor

“This book reports on recent conflicts within the progressive wing of U.S. labor that negatively affected far more workers that the union dues payers directly involved.”(Early) This book revolves around the inner workings of the Service Employees International Union, (SEIU) considered to be the nation’s most politically influential labor organization. This union allegedly did the most to get Obama into the White House.

While this book really delves into the years 2008-2010 it does also give some earlier history back stories. As a person that has never been in a union and really have never considered myself for or against a union, I found that this book offered an insight to some of the bureaucracy and politics involved in unionism. It at times seemed to me that the unions weren’t really there for the working class people, as I had always thought was their reason for being, but more for the power and money for the individuals at the top. Inside the pages of this book I read of many wars and struggles among different branches of sometimes the same union to gain the right to represent workers that were already represented.

The one constant character in this book is Andy Stern. Andy Stern became president of the SEIU in 1996. As detailed throughout the book, during Stern’s reign in office, millions of dollars were spent, not to fight for the worker’s rights against employers but to fight local branches and to remove the current local officials from office to be replaced by hand-picked political allies of Stern.

More and more union members became intimidated by the SEIU into voting for the takeovers rather than risk loss of jobs or benefits. The SEIU and the employers worked

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