We told you, a couple of weeks ago, that following the release of SEIU’s internal “Contract Campaign Manual” we’d continue exploring the tactics and dirty tricks it exposed. And we feel we owe it to you reader (and USAS members, if you’re still around) to give you a little background on this internal manual. For that reason, we’d like to share with you a few extracts from a Labor Watch report on the SEIU that provides an extremely accurate and relevant insight into the development of the union’s tactics.

First, let’s give a little context to the highly controversial manual. It appears that the tactics it teaches are not exactly new in America. Beyond pure politics, their first widespread use began with the rise of the “New Left” in the 1960′s and campus-based activists groups such as Students for a Democratic Society. But for the introduction and systematization of corporate campaigns among unions’ repertoire of strategies, we must turn to John Sweeney, SEIU’s president between 1980 and 1995.

John Sweeney had the brilliant idea of taking the concept of corporate campaigns and structuring and formalizing it in a way that could be systemically useful for unions’ seeking recognition. In the process, he penned the “Contract Campaign Manual” we – and others – previously exposed on this blog. As a 2002 report by Labor Watch and the Capital Research Center put it:

“Corporate campaigns are coordinated assaults on a company’s reputation. The union goes outside ordinary procedures for seeking representation or pressing its grievances. Instead, it mounts a full-scale political and public relations campaign, often enlisting other social and religious groups as allies and threatening the employer with an economic boycott. The implicit threat: We unionize your workforce or we destroy your reputation. Under Sweeney, SEIU helped bring corporate campaigns into the mainstream of union organizing tactics.”

These few sentences could hardly do a better job at summing up what the SEIU has been all about in its campaign against Sodexo. The grand strategy is here: coerce by any means possible a company into recognizing a union by directly pressuring management instead of trying to convince employees. And the Contract Campaign Manual is at the center of this strategy, just look at how the tactics it outlines are relevant to the campaign:


“Its tactics take many forms: feeding news to the media alleging company wrongdoings, sending letters to stockholders deriding management and the company’s financial health, complaining to regulatory agencies, and good old-fashioned leafleting and picketing.”

Basically, as any apprentice, SEIU has provided us with a textbook example of the direct application of the tactics it prescribes. We can hardly blame them for that. After all they wrote the book on corporate campaigns. What’s more astounding is how peripheral organizations in the campaign – such as USAS – have come to apply very similar tactics. We wouldn’t be surprised to learn there are a few copies of the Contract Campaign Manual laying by the bedside tables of USAS members. After all:

“In corporate campaigns, unions enlist supportice third parties to attack the company. Environmental, consumer, religious and human rights groups […].”

That hardly needs to be repeated. Our researchs have shown it, Sinaltrainal, United Students Against Sweatshops and Transafrica Forum have all benefited from the financial prodigality of the SEIU. It doesn’t really matter how they put it, these organizations were paid to join the campaign, and there’s a very obvious reason behind it:

“Their image as nonprofit ‘public interest’ advocates obscures union self-interest, and helps seize the moral high ground against employers.”

It’s really just a confirmation of the analysis we’ve been defending for quite some time now. Peripheral organizations involved in the campaign are just here to serve as both a smoke-screen for SEIU’s final interest and add legitimacy to the campaign. Though, looking at the machiavellianism of the tactics, we have a hard time saying SEIU and friends are on the moral high ground.

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