Love, Labor, Loss A Child's Death Stirred Andrew Stern To Challenge Himself -- and Unionism http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/02/AR2006010201466.html
By Lynne Duke Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, January 3, 2006; C01
A daughter's death left an unexpected gift. After the sorrow ripped his heart and the confusion left him dazed, Andrew Stern began to discover it -- began to see what Cassie, his 13-year-old, had passed on to him.
She had been so fragile, even confined by a back brace for a time, yet so very much alive. Frail but fearless -- that was Cassie. And that was her gift to her father.
It is but one facet of a man's life -- certainly not his sum total. Stern, 55, president of the powerful Service Employees International Union, has been a labor activist and innovator for more than 30 years and, in fact, had been fomenting rebellion in big labor for years.
And, yet, after Cassie passed away 3 1/2 years ago of complications from spinal surgery, and after he cried in the shower every day for months, torn apart by the memories, such as jumping little waves at the beach with his daughter in his arms -- after all that, Stern realized that something in him had awakened.
"Cassie gave me the courage to have the voice," he explains carefully. He's talking about the voice to articulate his controversial vision.
He began speaking more stridently, and sometimes unwisely, he says. "I lost a lot of my concern about what people thought of me," he says.
He's seated in his office, calming in its monotone whiteness, overlooking a snow-covered Dupont Circle. Cassie is a smiling sprite of a girl in an array of photos on Stern's credenza, along with her big brother Matt, now 19.
"My greatest fear," Stern is saying, "is not having the courage" to take on a fight, "whether it's the labor movement, the Democratic Party or anybody else who stands in the way of workers doing well."
After Cassie, the question taunted him: "What am I so scared about?"
Last summer, he stunned the American labor movement when he led the SEIU and six other unions to defect from the AFL-CIO. He had effectively split the "house of labor" in two, peeling off about 40 percent of its membership.
History one day will record Stern as the impetuous, power-hungry man who accelerated the decline of the American union movement. That is one view, taken by some of his embittered former colleagues at the AFL-CIO.
Or, his supporters say, Stern will go down in history as the courageous, visionary leader who charted a bold new course for American unionism just in time and helped spark a labor movement to fight for workers in the world economy.
Stern, of course, would pick the kinder rendering, for he believes firmly that he is right. Labor needed to be shaken up, and no more harm could come from an AFL-CIO breakup than from the inertia that gripped it, Stern says.
Low numbers speak of the high stakes: Only 12 percent of the American labor force is unionized these days, down from 35 percent three decades ago. Surveys show that Americans want unions but are afraid of how bosses will react, because organizers often are fired illegally for their activities. Workers, Stern says, are devalued, and he is trying to change the way Americans view labor and the economy as a whole.
In the world according to Stern, low-wage workers too often succumb to a form of economic Darwinism. Stern travels the country delivering that message in speeches and rallies. He talks about how the global economy has made things worse, with multinationals competing to find the cheapest labor, minus unions -- the Wal-Mart effect. For workers to thrive, big labor has to act as big business does: Go global, recruit without borders, unionize workers across entire economic sectors.
He has rankled many by calling big labor a "lap dog" for the Democratic Party. Labor, he says, should follow a political agenda that's good for workers, regardless of party.
And he caused a firestorm at the 2004 Democratic National Convention when he said a John Kerry victory would be bad for big labor, would give it a false sense of power, and paper over its fundamental problem of flagging union membership. As it turned out, of course, Kerry lost. Big labor could not muster enough troops -- a fact that also sparked a rethinking in the movement.
Beyond such macro issues, though, Stern has even drawn suspicion just for being who he is. Some old-line, blue-collar unionists are annoyed with his white-collar, Ivy League background. Tom Buffenbarger, leader of the machinists and aerospace workers, virtually spat out the words "Wharton School" in deriding Stern's educational background.
And yet Stern has pushed big labor, challenged it, lined up some of its big names behind him. He has taken the labor movement to the brink of a new era, for better or worse, while an interior dialogue of grief and loss has shaped his leadership, adding volume to an already voluble voice. 'Male, Pale and Stale'
He's in Philadelphia one November day, at the ornate Union League building on Broad Street, about to address the nabobs of the local chapter of the World Affairs Council and introduce them to his vision of the world of labor.
He's come home, in a way, for he attended college here, the University of Pennsylvania. He first joined a union here, back in 1972. And Cassie died here, over at Children's Hospital, which he'd passed on the train ride up from Washington.
"Lot of memories," he's saying in a corridor before his speech. "I actually couldn't ride the train for a while [after Cassie] because it passed right by the hospital."
But that is his internal landscape. Onstage, before a sea of well-appointed Philadelphia business and civic leaders, he is telling the crowd of his life's work, of the question that has vexed him for years and years.
"How is hard work valued and rewarded in America?" He is speaking, as he so often does, for the blue-collar American workers, those folks whose plight outrages him.
He's telling of a woman named Flora Aguilar. She's a janitor in Houston, among the janitors that Stern's SEIU has just recently organized. She works four hours a day for one of the largest cleaning firms in the country, he says, cleaning "30 offices, two hallways, 29 toilets. And she goes home with 20 bucks. That's Flora Aguilar's life."
And yet workers like Aguilar -- increasingly the backbone of the service economy -- have been overlooked, deemed too hard to organize by a labor movement whose mentality is stuck in an industrial, manufacturing past that has been exported and globalized.
That's why he calls the labor movement "male, pale and stale."
"We thought we could go into the future by looking into the rear-view mirror, but it just doesn't work," Stern is saying, using one of his oft-repeated images of labor stuck in the past.
The largely white male crowd applauds politely.
An hour later, Stern is down in South Philly peeling off his suit jacket and tie, pulling on a purple SEIU windbreaker and marching across a rain-swept parking lot to join a sea of purple-clad protesters converging on a local Wal-Mart.
He loves this, loves the fray. He used to take Cassie and Matt to protests once in a while, as well as labor conventions, when Cassie was well enough to go.
Here, he is with a family of a different kind. He is chairman of the Wal-Mart Watch advocacy group, and these protesters -- white, black and brown home-care workers and janitors -- are from SEIU Local 668, where Stern got his start. Now he's plunging into the crowd to show his solidarity, chanting "Hey-hey! Ho-ho! Wal-Mart has got to go!"
From Success, Criticism
Stern wanted to overhaul the AFL-CIO and its more than 60 affiliated unions. And as the leader of the largest and fastest growing union in the group, his voice was heard.
He wanted the federation to merge some of its small unions with larger ones. He wanted it to recruit more aggressively and across entire sectors (all janitors, home-care workers, security guards, etc.), not just at individual workplaces. And he wanted to bring businesses on board by dispelling their fears, in labor negotiations, of being undercut by competing workplaces.
It could be done, he believed, for his own union has done it. In the SEIU, membership has tripled since the 1980s to 1.8 million. The union represents health care workers, janitors, security guards and other service workers often deemed difficult to organize because many are part-time or contract workers.
By gathering the support of local political and religious leaders, the SEIU recently unionized 5,000 janitors in Houston across several workplaces. It also won a recent battle to organize 49,000 child-care workers in Illinois.
More at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/02/AR2006010201466.html
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