Posted on 07/18/2011 9:34:38 AM PDT by markomalley
Background on this: the SEIU was forced to cough up a copy of its Contract Campaign Manual as part of a court case and its an interesting little document. The whole thing reads, as F. Vincent Vernuccio notes in the Washington Times, as a step-by-step checklist on how to manipulate just about everything, really in the course of forcing favorable negotiation terms. Mostly because thats what it actually is.
Lots of people are going to concentrate on passages like this:
Union members sometimes must act in the tradition of Dr. Marin Luther King and Mohatma Gandhi and disobey laws which are used to enforce injustice against working people.
or
It may be a violation of blackmail and extortion laws to threaten management officials with release of dirt about them if they dont settle a contract. But there is no law against union members who are angry at their employer deciding to uncover and publicize factual information about individual managers.
as they should, frankly. But looking at the document itself tells you something interesting about SEIU: it apparently hasnt had an original thought in its collective head since, I dont know, about 1985 or so*.
Seriously, are these people idiots or something? Theyre using an unrevised contract negotiation manual thats old enough to vote? The font alone is a dead giveaway that nobodys critically thought about this thing in over a decade and a half: in fact, the generally poor condition of the copy given to the courts as part of the case suggests that the SEIU may not even have a clean version of it in digital form in the first place. Theres probably one kind-of OK copy somewhere in the files of the central office, and they use that to make as many photocopies as they need, when they need it** and no, this isnt nit-picking: it reveals a serious problem in their training system. Ive been in office situations where the training manuals were done once, then never ever ever corrected or updated; and, after about three years or so, new hires quickly learn to never bother with the manuals, because theyre useless.
And theres my point: this manual may be great on walking union goons through the finer points of descending en masse on peoples homes and scaring teenagers, but its less than useless when it comes to controlling the media narrative. Its amazing that whats supposed to be a standardized collection of labor relation wisdom does things like:
And Im going to end on that point, even though there are two more sections that can be mocked, in roughly the same fashion as the previous ones; that bit about electronics supply stores and cords and tape recorders and phone line kind of makes my point for me. We live in what is becoming a post-digital world; one where distributive networks have already transformed the basic nature of communication and production, and were now just seeing the secondary and tertiary implications play out from that. Meanwhile, Big Labor groups like SEIU are still mired in a purely analog rut like so many reactionary Luddites, grimly pursuing a public relations and media strategy that may have worked perfectly well from 1950 to 1990 which is to say, one that is woefully out of date. Entertainingly, this is pretty much on par with the rest of their organizational model.
Id say poor, poor dinosaurs and maybe even almost mean it, except that SEIU goons like to hit people. In which theyre much like the rest of Big Labor, really.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Thats my best guess, based on the old-person font and the fact that the whole thing was clearly written before the concept of a worldwide, distributed computer network had really become familiar to Americans. It could possibly have been written as late as 1990 or 1991, but by the time I started graduate school we were already seeing things like Mosaic pop up. Surely they would have noticed that, correct? Or even the old BBSs? Certainly AOL was up and running by 1993 (however youd like to define it) and yet theres no noting of this new computing paradigm. I feel reasonably comfortable pegging this as being a mid-Eighties publication, in other words.
**I base this on over a decade and a half of working in offices that had not yet embraced this marvelous thing that we call PDF. Or computer networks.
For some strange reason, the perps always turned out to be some combination of toothless old women and lame old men.
Don’t know if this means anything, but the SEIU may have provided this old trash as a way of “partially” satisfying the requirements of the court and not releasing the CURRENT directives that would use extended methods of manipulating the media via the internet.
I wonder if the joke is on us though... who knows if they just gave up this old manual and hung on to the one they currently use?
Thought that was an interesting observation as I thought we would see unions striking after Wisconsin.
b
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