WAL-MART AND SEIU. I'm a bit skeptical of SEIU's alliance with Wal-Mart in this interview I did with Andy Stern, so it's probably worth making the opposite argument as well. Stern's attempt to enlist Wal-Mart as an ally rather than an enemy in the fight for universal health care is, I think, precisely the right tactic. The left is at real crosspurposes on the Wal-Mart issue, wherein unions want to force Wal-Mart to offer their employees better benefits in the short-term so as to make unionizing easier, while the broader left wants to end worker reliance on company's like Wal-Mart for health care. In other words, we come not to strengthen the corporate welfare state, but to bury it. So large-scale organizing to get this or that corporation to offer better benefits is, at best, beside the point, and at worst, counterproductive. Better would be a systematic approach to force Wal-Mart and others to substantively support some sort of universal health care reform. This, in theory, is what Stern and SEIU have done. My skepticism comes in how low of a bar they've set for "support." Wal-Mart hasn't committed to any specific reform plan, so there's no assurance that the system they're envisioning is actually a good one. Additionally, they haven't put any concrete amount of money, political muscle, or other resources behind pushing for reform, and they've said publicly that they'll continue supporting politicians who oppose universal reform. So the danger becomes that Wal-Mart blunts the union drive against their shoddy benefits by pointing to this SEIU partnership when it's really nothing more than an abstract endorsement of the concept of universal health care. That would be the worst of both worlds. Stern's a smart guy, and cognizant of these dangers, but for now, he's basically saying, "trust me." --Ezra Klein
