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The California State Employees Association is wracked by a bitter dispute over whether to disaffiliate from the Service Employees International Union. The statewide leadership of the CSEA, dissatisfied with the new activist trends in the SEIU, wants to get out. But the leaders of the CSEA’s largest section, its Civil Service Division, who support a more militant union program, are determined to stay in the SEIU. An explosive outcome seems certain.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the pro-SEIU Civil Service Division, have been fighting hard to defend their democratic rights within the CSEA itself.

The CSEA, with its 140,000 dues-paying public employees, is one of the largest and most influential unions on the West Coast; of these, 100,000 are actual union members and the other 40,000 are what they call "fair share" agency shop fee payers. With a multi-million dollar annual income, the union supports an aggressive political action program.

Like other public employee "associations" of its type, the CSEA arose as an independent lobbying organization, not oriented toward standard union collective bargaining. But in 1984, it affiliated with the SEIU to find refuge, under the AFL-CIO no-raiding rules, from challenge by any standard AFL-CIO union. It was a live-and-let-live affiliation, a bargain-basement deal for the CSEA leadership which committed them to little and allowed them to peacefully pursue the comfortable even tenor of their association-type ways. But as the years passed, and a new spirit took hold in the SEIU, the scene changed, disrupting their placid existence. Unhappy now, the statewide Association leaders are anxious to liberate themselves.

Reader beware! You may stop right here. This is not a simple story. For what follows, we must disentangle the intricate organizational structure of the CSEA.

The CSEA consists of four separate divisions:

·The California State University Division represents some 15,000 university employees, but only 5,850 are actually members of the union.

·The Association of State Supervisors has 6,252 members,

·The Civil Service Division (CSD), which represents 92,000 employees, has 55,900 actual members.

·The Retired Employees Division has 27,640 members, who originally came out of any of the other three divisions.

That’s the easy part. But the CSEA is also divided into thirteen separate "regions" with varying memberships cutting across all four divisions. And there is a multitude of separate bargaining units. Out of this melange, a statewide 25-member Board of Directors is chosen, not by division, but by region.

Note now, that the Civil Service Division has an absolute majority of the total membership with its 56,000 of the CSEA’s total membership of 100,000. Moreover, it has 65% of the total number of dues and fee payers. Of the CSEA’s one-year budget of around $40 million, Civil Service Division employees contributed almost $32 million. But by a strange gerrymandered system of representation, the CSD is allotted only 2 of the 25-member state Board of Directors.

The source of trouble is the near-authoritarian powers that are granted under the CSEA constitution to this Board of Directors which actually is chosen indirectly by a minority of the state membership.

Under this system, the Civil Service Division is barred from employing its own fulltime organizing staff. All staff is hired and fired by the state office. That staff has become a 200-person corps at the service of the state office. All dues and fees are paid by the California State government to the CSEA state office which in turn rebates a share to the Civil Service Division.

Still, up to a point, calm prevailed so long as the officers of the Civil Service Division cohabited amicably with the association-minded state Board of Directors. Nevertheless, the system remained like an unexploded land mine. The scene began to change in 1992 when some members of the bargaining team, in the Civil Service Division, campaigned against ratification of a contract endorsed by the CSEA state leadership. The insurgents were removed from office and barred from office for a year. Unquelled, they organized the Caucus for a Democratic Union and began publication of the Union Spark to "strengthen CSEA/SEIU Local 1000 from within by building a unified movement of rank and file state employees."

The CSEA state administration tried their best to get rid of these irrepressible critics. They were suspended; they were sued in state court; they were about to be expelled. But the campaign of repression failed when the insurgents won every major battle in court and before the state Public Employment Relations Board. The insurgents continued to win support until 1996 when they won control of the CSD by winning a majority of the delegates at its convention. Jim Hard is now CSD Director and Cathy Hackett is Deputy Director for Finance.

However, unable to exercise full control of division affairs by a CSEA constitution which subjects them to the authority of the state Board of Directors, the new leadership proposed to incorporate the division under state non-profit law, a move that would achieve full autonomous rights for the division within the CSEA. They won the support for the move from the required two-thirds of the divisions convention delegates. At this point, the CSEA state board is in court to try to block the move, but it is not likely to succeed. If the CSD wins full autonomy with control over its money and staff, it it will be poised for the next move: to win enough support from the other divisions to change the state leadership and revamp the whole CSEA state structure. That alone could explain why the state CSEA officers have become disenchanted with their SEIU affiliation. But there is more.

Meanwhile a new spirit has been developing in the SEIU. First when John Sweeney was its international president and now under Andy Stern, his successor, the SEIU has embarked upon an aggressive campaign to organize the unorganized, viewing this kind of concentration as vital to the very survival of the labor movement. And that takes troops of organizers, effort, appeals for public support, legal backup ... and above all money, money. The time for bargain basement dues has passed.

In order to finance its organizing drive, according to one report, the SEIU will gradually raise the per capita tax paid to the international by locals from $4 monthly to $20 in 2005. The leaders of the CSD share the organizing, activist aims of the SEIU; Jim Hard, the division director, supports the SEIU objectives and is ready to pay the dues. But, according to a report in the San Francisco Bee, Perry Kenny, the CSEA state president, views the SEIU plan as a costly "power grab." The state CSEA makes its position clear, almost as a farce. It has ordered its entire staff not to distribute or store "any items in which the SEIU logo is prominently displayed...such as T-shirts, pins, hats, pens, etc."

And so, while the state CSEA leaders take the first steps to secede from the SEIU, the leaders of the Civil Service Division, who began as insurgents, are in court to protect their autonomous rights within the CSEA and, in effect, to defend the union activism of the SEIU.

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