SEIU: Cracking the White (and Pink) Collar Ghetto

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow makes all the right inferences from this CNN story on SEIU’s wanting to organize employees of banks involved in the $700 billion bailout: "The powerful and innovative Service Employees International Union is trying to unionize bank workers, saying that if the banks are going to get a public bailout, workers should have a seat at the table."

SEIU’s brilliant move was to realize that most service-industry jobs can’t be shipped overseas; employers at, say, janitorial firms can’t simply avoid unions by shipping their facilities off to the first tinhorn dictatorship they could find while they themselves stayed in their gated communities in the good old US of A. Likewise, while the financial industry can, has, and will continue to try to offshore as much as of its workings as possible, it can’t offshore everything.

Organizing the workers at the lower rungs of the white-collar ladder will help make a lot of these folks realize that we’re all in this together. Furthermore, getting the denizens of the pink-collar ghetto into the SEIU orbit will bring some much-needed female representation and insight into the traditionally-male-dominated union movement. It’s all good.