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This is a nice point from Chris Hayes on the fights between SEIU and the UHW:
The more I talked to the UHW members and heard their grievances, the more I thought about the fact that organized labor has two goals that can often come into tension: power and dignity. We tend to focus on the power aspect in politics: the power to collectively bargain, to make sure labor captures a fair share of profits, to demand higher wages--all of which have been in sharp decline. That's the objective nature of unionization. The subjective nature of unionization, though, is dignity. It is the process by which working people come to believe that their views and their ideas and their demands are important. That they should be listened to. These two values can be in tension, as I suspect might be the case in California. Sometimes maximizing power might (I stress might, because the UHW-SEIU situation is very, very complicated) require people to fall in line, but the prerogative of dignity is to speak out and stand up.The union movement plays two roles simultaneously: They advocate for workers on shop floors, and they advocate for workers in national politics. A powerful national operation requires a hefty dose of centralization. A shop floor operation requires extreme responsiveness, and freedom. A fair amount of the tension in SEIU can, I think, be attributed to the fact that folks who are charged with dealing with the shop floor want more resources and attention devoted to that mission, while the leadership charged with dealing with the legislative environment that restricts organizing and impedes universal health care can't escape the urgency of their mission. It's a tough line to walk.
