I think, and that's not to say that S.E.I.U. didn't make a mistake in trading the local AlliedBarton campaign for successfully unionizing 8000 guards elsewhere. I don't know, and the story doesn't convince me one way or the other.

I've known about such negotiation from Josh Richard's attempt to organize the hotel workers at the Doubletree, a campaign that one union negotiated out of in exchange for successfully unionizing workers at a group of other hotels.

Negotiation isn't a dirty word, nor is pragmatism. Negotiation between S.E.I.U. and businesses that have had non-union workers for 30 years, or forever, is progress. It may not be the ultimate goal that Progressives want, which is where everybody who wants a union shop gets a union shop, but if the end result of negotiation is more unionized workers than before, it's a step in the right direction. After decades of union decline in America, Andy Stern's got unions growing in industries that many people said he could never organize. The article focuses more on a controversial tactic rather than the overall achievement, but hey. It's an Inquirer article about unions. What do you expect?

Maybe someone could fill us in on the AlliedBarton organizing.

and its anti-union bias. It's amazing that many progressives still find it to be an objective observer of our times. I fall prey sometimes myself, I admit.

Great l-o-o-o-o-ng article, I should say. I was glad I wasn't teaching summer classes while I was reading it.

Esther Kaplan does such a good job of fairly representing various labor organizers' views on S.E.I.U.'s practices and does a mostly good job of fairly documenting those practices (coupla California and Oregon facts aside), that it didn't really matter that when she finally got around to stating her own views that I only kind of half-agreed with part (giving locals more autonomy) and strongly disagreed with part (she clearly disapproves of the Aramark deal and I'm a bottom-line accountant's son about it--if there was a better way of unionizing those 15,000 low-wage workers then how come nobody ever used it?). It's good writing though when you can inform enough on an issue that the reader eventually forms his or her own opinion and disagrees with you.

It's a clear sign that Andy Stern has changed America when rival unions are now competing to represent workers in industries that had gone without unions for decades and decades and decades, spanning millions of workers' entire careers. That competition ultimately should prove the best means of criticizing S.E.I.U.'s method of striking compromises in order to organize millions who had never had a union before. The organizers who dislike those compromises should work to make them obsolete. When successful alternatives to Stern's practices emerge--ones that allow for the same or similar numbers to unionize--workers should take them. However, those alternatives are not yet apparent. When the more ideologically pure Sal Roselli tried to improve on S.E.I.U.'s Tenet deal, he walked away having unionized only about 20% of the workers.

There's a reason why Roselli is now just the type of guy that the Inquirer is likely to quote. Anti-union people will always cherish a good squabble among unions.

Clearly these tactical arguments will evolve over the long haul. Practices that are best now may not be best 20 years from now if unionism can continue to grow, so that hopefully some compromises prove no longer necessary.

It's exciting that we can now look forward to future arguments about union growth that will actually have positive examples to refer to.