Rolf Fighting For Dying Labor Movement

Rolf Fighting For Dying Labor Movement
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Rolf Fighting For Dying Labor Movement

There’s little question the modern labor movement bears little, if any, resemblance to the version idealized in song and cinema from the first half of the last century. Even its leaders concede that point.

The question is whether these changes portend a phenomenon that’s lost steam and is grinding to a halt or one morphing into something more potent—and sinister.

Overall, union presence in the nation’s private sector has generally diminished over the past several decades. In 2015, the private-sector union membership rate was a mere 6.7 percent compared to the public sector union membership rate of 35.2 percent. But overall, union membership has declined, falling from 20.1% in 1983 to 11.1% in 2015.

Despite the growth in public sector unionism, David Rolf, president of one of the largest public sector unions in the state of Washington, Service Employees International Union Local 775NW, has seen the writing on the wall.

“Rolf believes the American labor movement, as we know it, is on its deathbed,” reports The American Prospect, a progressive, labor-friendly publication that takes no pleasure in such prognostications.

In light of organized labor’s decline, Rolf argues that the remaining unions should use their resources to develop new organizational models:

“They need to build organizations that can sustain worker bargaining power for the long haul. If 20th Century-style unions as we knew them aren’t going to play that role, we’ll need to invent new forms of powerful, scalable, sustainable worker organizations if any effort to rebuild the middle class is going to succeed.”

Rolf wants any new organizing models or organizations to incorporate the same basic features that made collective bargaining successful:

“What really mattered was we created, first, the power to change workers’ lives economically; second, we created it on a scale that benefitted millions, tens of millions, of workers; and third, we created a model of sustainability so our institutions could survive even in bad economies or when our political allies weren’t in power. Those are the three things that new institutions need to do.'”

Rolf’s new model is really an effort to benefit himself. David Freiboth, former head of the King County Labor Council, hit the nail on the head when he reported Rolf “doesn’t want to screw around with bottom-up democracy. If a union is bottom up, it’s modeled to serve its existing members and can’t be strategic in focusing on growth.”

We know that Rolf’s new model starts with getting as many people unionized as possible in order to use money forcibly taken to fund his larger agenda. His biggest strategy is to keep current union members in the dark. Rolf is illegally taking current members’ dues and spending that money to help create his new model.

Rolf has demonstrated time and time again his willingness to use SEIU 775’s resources as little more than a tool with which to support candidates and ballot initiatives that further his personal agenda, not the views of his union’s members.

Rolf fears the decline of the labor movement so much that he is willing to engage in illegal and immoral activities (such as taking money from people without their consent so that he can support the $15 minimum wage campaign, Planned Parenthood, progressive/democratic candidates, etc.) to keep it afloat.

But what is Rolf’s ultimate agenda? The Guardian provides a clue:

“Some political scientists say advances like a $15 minimum wage and paid sick days will be limited to deep blue, progressive cities like Seattle and San Francisco. But Rolf foresees an expansion of deep blue geography: ‘It’s only a matter of time before we can start flipping states based on diversity and urbanization—more people of color, a growing number of young people, who polls show approve of socialism more than capitalism.'”

Fundamentally, Rolf is trying to shift the focus of union organization from representation to manipulation and coercion in order to save the ideology of a dying labor movement. And if those changes come at the expense of the Constitutional rights of his members, so be it.

He’ll use his ever-growing power to affect elections to reflect his views and ultimately his agenda—”the expansion of deep blue geography.”

David Rolf is power hungry, and he’s using SEIU 775’s government-guaranteed cash flow to impose a Leftist political philosophy starting with his union and eventually on the entire nation.      

Vice President for News and Information
jrhodes@freedomfoundation.com
Jeff is a native of West Virginia and a graduate of West Virginia University with a degree in journalism. He served in the U.S. Army at Fort Lewis, Wash., as a broadcast journalist and has worked at a number of newspapers in West Virginia and Washington. Most recently, he spent 11 years as editor of the Port Orchard (Wash.) Independent, which earned the 2011 Washington Newspaper Publishers’ Association’s General Excellence Award as the top community newspaper in Washington. Previously, he was editor of the Business Examiner newspaper in Tacoma, Wash., for seven years. Jeff lives in Lacey; he and his wife have grown twin daughters.