Andy Stern’s replacement as president of SEIU is Mary Kay Henry. Henry said in her acceptance speech that the most important challenge for her organization is the race for governor in nine states this fall. California is one of those nine. The SEIU’s guy in the race is Jerry Brown. (He’s running against Meg Whitman). Brown has already served as California’s governor, and would continue to lead the state down the fiscal rathole that he helped dig.
California SEIU Local 1000 President Yvonne Walker said at SEIU.org, “We [public employee unions] have the opportunity to elect our bosses—the governor and the Legislature—and we need to use this opportunity to elect leaders who support state services and the workers who provide them. No one knows state government better than our members. It’s our responsibility to elect leaders who will help us improve the operations of the state.” Maybe someone should remind Ms. Walker about the half-a-trillion-dollar deficit her state is running. How is big-spending Jerry Brown going to help out with that?
Union leaders like Mary Kay Henry and Yvonne Walker of SEIU fail to understand the virtue of service. As perhaps the greatest management thinker of our time, Peter Drucker, said, “Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.” In contrast, for SEIU leadership, service is about delivering the votes to progressive politics for the promises of work and protection from competition.
California’s Jerry Brown is more than happy to play along. He is trying to curry favor with the unions as the “green jobs” candidate. Brown has unveiled a plan for adding 500,000 “green jobs.” As Steven Greenhut of CalWatchDog.com writes, “In reality, the whole green jobs shtick is a bit of a scam—it’s a highly subsidized industry that is more about flash than reality. In many cases, green-job advocates simply reclassify current jobs as ‘green’ and then, voila, the oldest tech industry becomes a new, cutting-edge deal.”
Clearly with SEIU leadership keying in on the gubernatorial race in California, they will hold no punches as we get closer to November. Meg Whitman will need to continue to spend a fortune to win it. It’s shocking to me how close the race actually is, considering California’s fiscal wreck of state. For union leaders like SEIU president Mary Kay Henry and SEIU Local 1000 President Yvonne Walker, it’s full speed ahead for their guy, big-spender Jerry Brown.
