Stop with the politics?

It's hard this week.

While many of us are thrilled to say TGIF (even if we work the weekend, there will be fewer SEIU staff around!), many Kaiser workers are now having to think about leaving their jobs for the last time. Adding injury to injury, they also have to think about how the destruction and arrogance of the past six months mean that the official union sitting down with their bosses has shut them out, shouted them down, and sealed a worse deal than ever before. And then yesterday, Perez heard that SEIU staff called security on a group of laid off workers who were crying in the hallway at their hospital.

It must be so much easier to "stop the politics" on a Friday if the union is just a game to you, a career, a business opportunity - rather than your best hope of being on an equal footing with the bosses who direct most of your waking hours. And it must be extra easy if you have a nice little place to get away to, preferably one that's paid for with members' dues money.

Just a dream? Not if you're Andy Stern, Eileen Kirlin, and husband and SEIU war room head Steve Rosenthal, who share a beach house on the East Coast. Easily affordable if you put Stern and Kirlins's salaries together with the $893,760 SEIU paid Rosenthal's company last year. Seems like a million miles away, doesn't it?

But there's nowhere Perez would rather be than in Californiraq with his friends at Kaiser and everywhere else. Money can't buy you love (and it can't buy you sunshine either)!

TGIF.