Writing in today's Sunday opinion section of the San Francisco Chronicle, Susan Wolbarst is good and hacked off about striking hospital workers outside using bullhorns, chanting loudly, and successfully encouraging cars to honk in support, while patients such as her brother, a carpenter badly injured in a work accident, are struggling to recover inside. The hospital workers, it so happens, belonged to the Service Employees International Union, famed for using scorched earth tactics at nearly every turn.

After sitting in his room for many hours, I have to tell you that the experience of watching quantities of my brother's blood soak through piles of his bandages into the bed is not enhanced by listening to strikers endlessly repeating chants like: "What do we do to a scab? Pick it off." I was especially dismayed by a tactic I first noticed on Sept. 19 on busy Castro Street, where strikers held signs saying: "Honk If You Support Healthcare Workers" and "Lay On Your Horn." My brother complained that the bullhorn woke him up on Tuesday "while it was still dark."

As a person who once helped organize a labor union, I am confused by this strategy. Who are the strikers attempting to get on their side by creating such a barrage of irritating noise in a place where severely injured people are attempting to rest and recover? I have to wonder if strikers think the shattered friends and relatives visiting these patients will be made more sympathetic to their cause by listening to marchers chanting: "We are the union, the mighty, mighty union ..." and other sentiments reminiscent of children's summer camp.

...If they care about patients, they might show a little courtesy and respect to those suffering inside the hospital, instead of adding in any way, no matter how small, to their misery.

Labor unions once had a vital function. Now, by and large, they have morphed into an institutionalized shakedown program and political arm of the Democratic party. Every now and then, a union has a legitimate beef over something, but their movement has squandered its political capital with ordinary Americans in ways large and small, for several decades now. The SEIU's noisy hospital picketing in San Francisco is one more compelling example of how little American labor unions actually care about "jes folks."

TECHNORATI TAGS: LABOR UNIONS, SEIU, HOSPITAL PICKETING, SAN FRANCISCO

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Posted by Matt Rosenberg at September 25, 2005 10:55 AM