SMART Activities
To voice its demands for increased union democracy, SMART members have mobilized demonstrations against local mergers and trusteeships, engaged in member outreach and awareness, and maintained a website for communication and coordination between service employees throughout the country. SMART has also conducted workshops to assist reform-minded rank-and-file members planning to run for local union offices. In June 2008 SMART members attended SEIU’s convention in Puerto Rico forming a delegation of reformers who gave speeches criticizing and questioning international union policies. Convention delegates representing SMART also proposed constitutional amendments opposing employer partnerships that limit rank-and-file participation in bargaining units.
Although reform-minded delegates did not have the numbers to win passage of their proposed amendments, activism at the Puerto Rico convention has sparked further interest in and mobilization for SMART’s goals. Since the convention, a growing number of labor movement progressives outside SEIU, students labor activists, and community leaders have criticized the international’s policies. While SMART members continue to work for a louder voice within their union and increased participation in contract negotiations over their wages and benefits, the internal reform movement extends beyond SEIU. SMART members offer a revisionist vision of the organizing model that SEIU pioneered—a vision that couples union growth with rank-and-file empowerment. As one rank-and-filer explained, “at this table, there’s got to be a place for a regular old worker who has worked for thirty years to grow this union.”
Read more about this topic: SEIU Member Activists For Reform Today
Famous quotes containing the words smart and/or activities:
“Among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Juggling produces both practical and psychological benefits.... A woman’s involvement in one role can enhance her functioning in another. Being a wife can make it easier to work outside the home. Being a mother can facilitate the activities and foster the skills of the efficient wife or of the effective worker. And employment outside the home can contribute in substantial, practical ways to how one works within the home, as a spouse and as a parent.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)