Labor's Growing Pains

The Service Employees union (SEIU) first began its effort to organize Catholic, hospitals there in the small city of Lorain, just west of Cleveland,in 1999. Dave Regan's enormous breakthrough was, to the famously militant nurses union, a disturbing development in what they've come to see as SEIU's corporate-friendly unionism, whose apotheosis was SEIU president Andy Stern's joint press conference last year with Wal-Mart on healthcare reform. According to SEIU's own analysis, only small portion of its explosive growth springs from the controversial employer agreements. Kaplan shares that the pressure on SEIU is coming from labor progressives-not complacent labor chiefs signing off on give-backs until they reach retirement.