SEIU head fights to merge labor unions By: Ben Smith February 18, 2009 01:00 PM EST
It’s a moment of great promise for the labor movement, with a friend in the White House and its biggest legislative goal seemingly within reach for the first time in a decade.
But Andy Stern isn't exactly pausing to soak it all up.
Instead, Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union and perhaps the labor movement's most prominent national leader, is marking these heady days for labor by jumping head-first into a nasty internecine dispute — proposing that another major union end its civil war by merging into the SEIU.
The result could mean expanding Stern’s already powerful union into a 2-million-member megalith.
Some in the labor movement question why Stern is choosing this very moment to wade into the increasingly contentious fight within the ranks of Unite HERE — suggesting that the good times are the wrong time to put forth an image of top union leaders squabbling over how best to expand their ranks.
Stern takes the opposite view. Indeed, Stern’s stomach for conflict comes in part because he sees a far more peaceable labor union scene after the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would change labor law to make organizing unions easier. Stern said he believes President Barack Obama will shepherd it to passage this year.
And that, Stern believes, will change everything, by opening up the possibility that labor union membership could grow exponentially.
“Passing EFCA would defuse a lot,” Stern said. “A post-Employee Free Choice Act world actually creates the real opportunities for unions to do what they want to do” — that is, organize within their own industries, rather than cross the industrial lines that lead to tension.
Stern said that, for instance, SEIU might move away from organizing some public workers, a drive that has expanded his union at the cost of tension with the traditional public workers’ union. That involvement with public sector power-brokers included impeached former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who received lavish support from the local SEIU.
“In a post-Employee Free Choice Act world, we would go where no one else wants to go, which is the south and Southwest,” he said, saying SEIU could “stay away from places where other unions will probably want to.”
In the meantime, labor’s allies say they’re worried about the bitter, distracting internal conflict of the Unite HERE fight, which Stern's involvement has done nothing to quell.
“There’s nothing wrong with having an internal debate in the labor movement when it’s about issues, but when it’s about power and control, you have to look at the moment and say, ‘Is this the right time?’” said Jonathan Tasini, executive director of Labor Research Association, a pro-union group. “We’re in one of the most severe economic crises in our lifetime, and also potentially an opportunity giving the winds in the White House and Congress, and this is no time for labor to be distracted.”
Stern is the man in the middle of several high-profile labor fights. He led several major unions out of the AFL-CIO, and now is in talks to reunite the federation. He’s engaged in a bitter battle for control of a giant California local whose leaders he removed last month.
But if those two were, from the SEIU's perspective, wars of necessity, the intervention in the Unite HERE civil war is a war of choice.
Unite HERE itself is the product two different unions — Unite, a wealthy union once dominated by textile workers, and HERE, an expanding service-workers powerhouse. A split in the ranks has devolved in recent weeks into open civil war as the Unite section tries to break off.
Stern has sided with former Unite president Bruce Raynor, backing the notion of a divorce between Unite and HERE.
But that’s not all. If Stern has his way, both halves would then join SEIU.
“Five years ago we said this was the wrong merger,” Stern said in his first interview on the subject. “Now they’re having a rather bitter fight because the merger did fail. Under any set of metrics, personal or operational, the merger hasn’t succeeded.”
“They spent twice as much money and got less members organized and have not seen substantial increases in contract standards,” Stern said. “They may feel better about what they’re doing, they may like having more money to spend but the members aren’t seeing the result.”
Raynor has welcomed Stern’s intervention. “It’s exactly what a labor leader ought to be doing,” he told Politico.
But the HERE faction of the union, led by former HERE president John Wilhelm, has dismissed Stern’s proposal.
Publicly, the union’s leaders sent him a polite brush-back: “As you know, Unite HERE has a democratic Constitutional process, and we trust that all Unions will respect that process and its outcomes,” they wrote. (“Wilhelm rejected it out of hand,” Raynor said of the rival faction.)
Privately, local union officials said they’re angry that Stern is meddling in their internal business, a concern the SEIU chief dismisses.
“I appreciate that people like to have their own fights in their own way but there are workers involved here,” Stern said, adding that he’ll continue to push for the merger.
“We would take either one of them but they both should be here,” he said.
A spokeswoman for Wilhelm said he wouldn’t comment for a story about Stern. But another official close to that union said its leadership is so disenchanted with Stern’s involvement that it’s considering leaving the union group in which he plays a key role, Change to Win, to return to the AFL-CIO. (“AFL-CIO is playing no role in, or getting involved in any way in, the internal matters within Unite HERE,” said Eddie Vale, a spokesman for the federation.)
Stern, for his part, predicted that that possibility would be forestalled by a grand reunification of the labor movement — something he is working to make happen now.
“One of these days,” Stern said, “there may not be another place to go.”
Stern maintains close ties to the White House. His union was by far the largest outside player in the presidential election, spending $34 million on an independent expenditure effort last cycle, and Stern was present in the president’s box on Inauguration day.
And despite jitters in labor circles, and a fierce business campaign against the bill, he said he remains confident it will pass.
“We have seen no indication that the president has changed his commitment to passing the bill this year,” he said.