Andy Stern’s “Mini-me” Leaves SEIU Local, Publishes Lame Manifesto

David Rolf

Andy Stern’s mini-me -- David Rolf -- has termed out of his job as the president of SEIU Local 775… but not before penning a lame manifesto that once again marks SEIU’s conservative position in the US labor movement.

Instead of organizing workers and conducting strikes -- like United Teachers of Los Angeles’s 30,000 teachers -- Rolf preaches labor-management partnerships and lots of technocratic masturbation.

For those who don’t know him, Rolf is the guy who teamed up with Stern to serve as “cheerleaders” and “circus barkers” for Uber and other tech firms pushing poverty jobs on millions of US workers.

He also set up an outfit modeled after business incubators for tech start-up firms that, says Rolf, will help rebuild the US labor movement. At Rolf’s “Workers Lab,” Stanford business professors instruct “labor innovators” about how to “monetize” their unions’ members by using apps to "mine" and then sell a variety of personal data captured from workers.

Um, so that’s what the labor movement needs?

Labor Notes published a takedown of Rolf’s latest manifesto, which he entitled “A Roadmap to Rebuilding Worker Power.” Here are some excerpts from the Labor Notes piece (Chris Brooks, “Labor's Real Innovators Will Come from the Ranks, Not the Corporate World,” Labor Notes, October 24, 2018.)

Outgoing SEIU Local 775 President David Rolf is the most prominent exponent of this dead-end approach. His new book proposes that unions stay relevant by pursuing nine “value propositions.”

…But Rolf has little to say about what I would consider a union’s main job—fighting the boss.

In a book ostensibly about worker power, the word “strike” appears eight times, while “partnership” appears 62.

Rolf wants to “innovate” unions into a totally different kind of organization—one that’s more of a business. “It’s time for us to accept that innovation needs to be the new religion,” he writes.

Thanks but no thanks. Give me that old-time religion.

…it wasn’t self-described “innovators” who produced the teacher uprising that’s spreading across the country today. “Red for Ed” came from teachers.

These battles were successful because they tapped into rank-and-file creativity. They’re a reminder that the best sources of innovation and power are found within our own ranks—even though too many of our leaders are always looking elsewhere.

SEIU’s David Rolf Joins Andy Stern in Pimping for Uber

Andy Stern and Andy's "Mini-Me" David Rolf

Remember when SEIU President Emeritus Andy Stern began working as a consultant for Airbnb, Handy, and other tech firms to help them try to undermine gig-economy workers’ right to be treated as regular employees?

Well, another SEIU official is now following “Handy” Andy’s lead.

Last month, SEIU Local 775 President David Rolf (a.k.a. Andy Stern’s “Mini-Me”) signed an open letter with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer. 

The letter calls on “business, labor and government in Washington state to join us” in an effort to push state legislation that reportedly would consign gig workers to a second-class status as independent contractors without the right to overtime pay, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, Social Security, meal and rest breaks, etc.

For years, Uber drivers and other gig-economy workers have been fighting to force tech companies to treat them as regular employees. They’ve filed class-action action lawsuits seeking millions of dollars in back pay. And in Seattle, Uber drivers and Teamsters Local 117 successfully passed a law allowing Uber drivers to unionize.

Uber executives have been aggressively fighting workers’ organizing efforts in the courts as well as by launching an anti-union campaign in Seattle consisting of TV ads, online ads, text and e-mail blasts to drivers, anti-union meetings, and even an anti-union podcast.

And, in case workers are successful, Uber is also trying to do an end-run around workers’ efforts by trying to pass state laws that would permanently legislate gig workers into “independent contractor” status and create a second tier of so-called “portable benefits” for them.

That’s where Stern and Rolf come into the story.

In 2016, the tech companies hired Andy Stern as a lobbyist to help them try to pass such a bill in the New York legislature. Fortunately, that effort stalled due to opposition.

Following their failure in New York, the tech companies are now trying their luck in Washington State… with the help of David Rolf and Andy Stern. According to Uber’s website:

Last year, Uber approached David Rolf with SEIU 775 and entrepreneur Nick Hanauer about working together on the creation of a portable benefits system in Washington state… Following several productive discussions, we developed a joint letter calling on business, labor, and government to work together to address this important problem.

On January 23, 2018, Uber published a letter signed by Uber’s CEO, SEIU’s Rolf, and the venture capitalist. At the top of the letter is Uber’s logo alongside SEIU’s.

So, how are people responding to Rolf’s so-called “innovative” deal with Uber?

Here’s a sample, according to Bloomberg. (Josh Eidelson, “Uber-Union Proposal on Benefits Met With Skepticism From Labor,” Bloomberg, January 25, 2018).

New York Taxi Workers Alliance Director Bhairavi Desai told Bloomberg: “Selling out to the bosses is not innovative—it’s as old as capitalism."

Desai continued: “This type of bogus agreement only gives them [tech companies] cover for exploitation.”

Damn right!

In fact, Rolf has even been criticized by an official inside his own union, according to Bloomberg:

“This is just a facelift by Uber to be able to look like they actually care about the people who they hire for the services they provide,” said Hector Figueroa, who is president of SEIU’s East Coast property services affiliate and serves with Rolf on the international union’s executive board. “I just cannot comprehend how today, as a labor leader, I would be encouraging the spread of ‘independent’ work.”

Interesting, right?

Why is Rolf’s help so important to Uber?

First, Rolf’s union is one of the largest in Washington state and he's developed lots of relationships with politicians. If Uber is successful in passing its legislation in one state, it can then push similar legislation nationally, says Bloomberg’s Eidelson.

Uber hopes working with Rolf and Hanauer to pass legislation in Washington will change the national conversation on these issues, showing how benefits can be decoupled from traditional employee-employer status, and opening a less adversarial phase in the debate over how laws should treat gig-economy workers, a spokesperson said.

The trio, and whichever additional allies they can muster, will try to get a first-of-its-kind system passed into law in Washington state, which is Rolf and Hanauer’s home as well as one of the few places where Democrats have unified control of government and legislation on the issue is already being debated.

While the letter is light on details, the spokesperson said Uber wants to gather additional stakeholders and formulate a proposal that could be introduced in next year’s legislative session. Among the things a bill should do, the spokesperson said, is make clear that workers like Uber drivers are not employees.

Uber drivers protesting low pay

Meanwhile, Stern is working other channels to help Uber and tech companies permanently relegate their workers to independent-contractor status.

In December 2016, Stern co-authored a proposal with Eli Lehrer (President of the right-wing “R Street Institute” in Washington DC) calling on the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress and White House to grant “waivers” to states to allow them to escape the requirements of federal labor laws. The waivers would be a boon to tech companies, which Stern calls “sharing-economy companies” with “innovative business models.”

Stern, a master of deception and disinformation, entitled his proposal: “How to Modernize Labor Law.”

Does SEIU have no shame?

SEIU Joins Hands with Uber CEO and Tech Titans as "Gig" Workers Suffer

SEIU's Andy Stern with Honeywell CEO David Cote

We’ve seen it again and again: SEIU officials leaping into bed with CEOs to proclaim "maverick" partnerships that (you guessed it) toss workers under the bus.

Here's the latest.

SEIU’s Andy Stern, David Rolf, and Laphonza Butler are drawing fire from worker advocates for their recent deal with the CEOs of Uber, Lyft, Handy and other so-called "gig economy" companies.

The tech titans are using a classic scheme to boost their profits by ripping off workers.  How?

They misclassify their workers -- including Uber drivers and Handy maids -- as "independent contractors" rather than employees.  As such, the workers have no access to health insurance, vacation, holidays, retirement, and other benefits; no access to unemployment insurance and workers compensation; and no company contribution to Social Security and Medicare. And the workers are unprotected by most federal, state and local minimum wage laws and other labor protections. And they can’t form unions.

It's the same scam used by FedEx, trucking companies at ports, and other greedy companies.

In California, Uber drivers are suing their $62 billion company to be reclassified as employees and to collect millions of dollars in mileage reimbursement and tips, which the company has never paid to drivers. The suit could affect 160,000 workers.

SEIU officials -- rather than backing the workers -- decided to become BFFs with the CEOs of Uber, Lyft, Handy and other such corporations. Earlier this month, they co-signed a lame, milk-toast letter that fails to take these corporations to task for ripping off their workforces.

Instead, SEIU’s joint letter offers hollow platitudes and vague proclamations -- with no concrete commitments or funding from the corporations -- that are summed up in the following excerpt from the joint letter:

Everyone, regardless of employment classification, should have access to the option of an affordable safety net that supports them when they’re injured, sick, in need of professional growth, or when it’s time to retire.

Worse yet, SEIU's joint letter pointedly criticizes workers for suing their billion-dollar bosses for ripping them off. The letter states: "We believe these issues are best pursued through policy development, not litigation…" (emphasis added)

SEIU is the only union to sign the letter… which was also signed by Eli Lehrer, the President of "The R Street Institute," a right-wing think tank inspired by Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek.  By the way, the R Street Institute is reportedly pushing for legislation to make it easier for companies to classify what their workers as "independent contractors."

SEIU's David Rolf

SEIU’s lame-ass sell-out of precarious workers is what prompted worker advocates to publish a recent critique entitled "When Labor Groups and Silicon Valley Capitalists Join Forces to ‘Disrupt’ Protections for Employees" (In These Times, December 4, 2015).

The authors -- Jay Youngdahl and Darwin Bondgraham -- include a quote from Shannon Liss-Riordan, a labor attorney who represents 160,000 Uber drivers in their class-action lawsuit against the company:  

I’m concerned seeing labor groups on there. … I’m wondering whether they’re fully informed as to what they’re putting their names on.

Unfortunately, cozying up to the boss is par for the course at SEIU. 

Readers will recall similar episodes such as Andy Stern’s dirty deals with Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott; pension-slashing venture capitalist Gina Raimondo; Honeywell CEO David Cote; Andy’s billionaire patron Ron Perelman; and the anti-teacher Broad Foundation.

SEIU Launches For-Profit Unionism from Tech-Styled "Business Incubator"

A scene from The Workers Lab "Summer Institute"

"You can't make this sh*t up," says one reader about the following story.

Last year, Tasty reported that SEIU decided to plow millions of dollars into a Silicon Valley-styled "business incubator" as part of SEIU’s "innovative strategy" to "revitalize" the labor movement by, uhh, adopting more capitalist money-making schemes into SEIU’s operations.

So long, class struggle.

Hello, google capitalism.

SEIU's "business incubator"-- which is modeled after venture capital firms -- is up and running in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

It's called "The Workers Lab" and is headed by President David Rolf (also the president of SEIU Local 775) and CEO Carmen Rojas.  

So what's SEIU’s Workers Lab actually doing?

 

SEIU's David "Google" Rolf

According to an article published earlier this month by "BuzzFeed," the Workers Lab is buzzing with discussion of "smart phone apps," maximizing revenue streams, profit making, "monetizing" the membership, and using members for "data mining," among other topics.

For example, the center’s staff is excitedly discussing how unions and other organizations can "monetize" their members by using apps to "mine" and then sell a variety of personal data captured from workers. 

The article notes that "low-income to middle-class workers are… a demographic that plenty of outside groups with deep pockets, especially in politics, are looking to learn more about…"

Tasty won’t be surprised when SEIU President Emeritus Andy Stern and his billionaire buddy, Ron Perelman, make their appearance at "The Workers Lab" sometime soon. 

Ben Geyerhahn, the CEO of BeneStream -- which is one of Any Stern's for-profit ventures -- currently serves on the Workers Lab's board of directors along with SEIU President Mary Kay Henry.

Here are some excerpts from the BuzzFeed article. The full text is available here.

The Workers Lab wants to train labor organizers in the language of Silicon Valley, and outfit them with the dark arts of business school, in hopes of reinvigorating what is widely seen as a dying labor movement…

It’s the last day of The Workers Lab summer institute, a two-day workshop for aspiring entrepreneurs looking to turn their big ideas for empowering workers into sustainable businesses. Though Workers Lab CEO Carmen Rojas and president David Rolf are both present, the man of the hour is clearly Stanford Business School lecturer Michael Bush. Bush has been called in as a consultant to walk the five participating projects through his nine building blocks of revenue-generation. He wears a gold watch on one wrist and a gold bracelet on the other… He says he always starts the class with the same announcement: “I’m going to talk about money.”

The Workers Lab receives funding from the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation, but at heart, it’s a project of the Service Employees International Union. David Rolf is president of both the lab and the SEIU’s Local 775 in Seattle, the project’s major financial backer. Rolf has been public about his lack of faith in traditional organized labor’s ability to defend the American workforce going forward into the 21st century. He says he’s committed to finding a better solution.

A big part of that commitment is The Workers Lab, an experimental, five-person organization studying whether the principles of capitalism and the structures of startup culture might produce better outcomes for workers today…

"Are you going to be for-profit?” Bush asks Chelsea Sprayregen, one-third of the founding team of a child care project that came in named “Work Hard, Play Hard” and left as “Provide.” After a second’s hesitation, she replies in the affirmative. 

“Good,” Bush said. “I like that." ...

“We need to teach people that empowerment and power are actually different,” [SEIU’s David] Rolf explains. Empowering workers, [CEO Carmen] Rojas says later, means giving them a voice, or advocating for improved conditions. Power, on the other hand, means collective action or access to capital. If that means adopting the tactics of the opposition — from dark money funds to data mining — so be it.

Clueless in Seattle II

SEIU's David Rolf

Remember SEIU’s “21^st century” strategy for rebuilding the U.S. labor movement?

In April, Tasty posted an e-mail from SEIU’s David Rolf in which he detailed the Purple Palace's latest visionary idea:  establishing a business incubator funded by “venture-funders” and “investment/business partners” to dream up “innovative” ideas that’ll transform the labor movement.

Last week, Rolf began actively pimping this harebrained idea in the pages of “The Nation.”

In a piece titled "What if We Treated Labor Like a Startup?," Rolf begins dialing for dollars for the purple incubator. 

The labor movement should stop investing the bulk of its funds in an infrastructure that has failed us and take a cue from an unlikely place: Silicon Valley. Allocating even a small portion of labor’s assets to experimental initiatives could produce massive results. Silicon Valley venture capitalists know that to find the next Google, they need to invest in a range of start-ups. If even a tiny fraction of their investments make it big, they will reap enormous rewards.

Rolf, who apparently spends far more time playing with his iPhone than talking to workers, exhibits an unrivaled capacity for cluelessness. He continues:

Progressives should take a cue from business and enter an era of innovation… Technology like WhatsApp could be parlayed into applications that enable workers to anonymously rate their employers… When combined with savvy public-awareness campaigns, [online] petitions to support worksite actions can draw national participation and change working conditions.

 By striking out into complexity instead of retreating back to what is familiar, progressives can seize this moment of crisis and win enormous victories for workers.

Totally pathetic, right?

Check out some of the comments from readers, who give Rolf a serious smackdown.

I can't believe I've been such at idiot. I've been blaming the decline of labor on corporate attacks on unions, institutional corruption and the disengagement of the rank-and-file...when the answer to class struggle has been in a global text messaging app. Workers of the world--text!

It's worse than I thought: online petitions, apps to share info.....

How about abandoning class collaboration?

 SEIU is the perfect organization for a moron like David Rolf. As a reward for his blind loyalty, he was appointed head of the Los Angeles home care local by Andy Stern and quietly moved aside to make room for another Stern gigolo, Tyrone Freeman - now sitting in federal prison for his crimes while head of the now statewide local. Rolf was the appointed to his current lucrative gig as head of the Seattle long term care workers union where he proposed a 10-year contract during which the workers could never strike.

 This article is a symptom of the total colonization of the labor mind by tech bullshit.

 The lack of vision and imagination, the aggressive use of business jargon, the desperate, pathetic desire to be seen as important, to be some type of boss: it's like The Nation asked this guy to channel everything that's wrong with organized labor's leadership and he jumped at the chance.

 Leverage, scalable across geographies, incubator, the next Google - it's all here.

 Maybe Mr. Rolf should spend less time hanging with his buddies in the 1% and more time organizing alongside his own members.

 SEIU 775 bought a new headquarters building a few years ago, moving into what had been the headquarters for the Chamber of Commerce?  No comment necessary.

Clueless in Seattle

David Rolf

A reader in Seattle sent along this story. On Friday, labor journalist Steve Early had a book-signing event at a Seattle book store attended by NUHW’s Sal Rosselli. After the event, about 40 of the attendees walked over to a pizza parlor to get some food and continue the discussion.

On their way to the restaurant, they ran into 10 purple-shirted organizers from SEIU Local 775NW. Apparently, Dave Regan had told David Rolf, the pre-pubescent president of SEIU Local 775NW, to send the 10 organizers to picket the pizza restaurant and try to bully the people involved.

Rolf, of course, didn’t have the guts to show up at the event. Too bad… because Tasty hears Rolf would’ve learned a thing or two. It turns out that some of the rank-and-file members from Rolf’s own union were at the event and shared some interesting perspectives about Rolf and SEIU.

You see… all of SEIU Local 775NW’s 40,000 members are low-paid homecare and nursing home workers who mostly earn $8-$10 an hour. And like many low-wage workers, they’ve been hit hard by the Great Recession. Well… everyone has been hit hard except for King Dave Rolf. In 2009, Rolf pocketed a $25,000 pay hike (courtesy of workers' dues dollars) that boosted his annual pay to $175,941. Rolf’s $25K pay hike is, by itself, more than what many of his union’s members earn in an entire year.

2008

2009

Two weeks ago, Local 775NW held its annual leadership conference, which -- ironically -- was dedicated to fixing inequality in the US economy (whoops!). Local 775NW’s website is filled with super cool quotes from Dave: “Our country has more overall wealth than ever, but people are struggling… It’s a crisis of consciousness and a crisis of leadership.”

Oh… and Tasty also likes this one: “It will take an army of people to win the Fight for a Fair Economy, and building the army starts with us.”(Does that make Dave the high-paid Field Marshal of his army of poor people?)

Well, Tasty has a few words of advice for King Dave:  Next time, you might wanna actually listen to the workers who pay your salary… instead of bullying them.