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SEIU's Burger campaigns on White House ties [by Ben Smith]
The departing president of the Service Employees International Union -- the country's biggest union, and arguably its most powerful independent political organization -- wrote last week that leaders should take choose a replacement who can maintain his tight relationships with the Obama administration and other elected officials.
"SEIU needs a leader who will be true to carrying on our members’ decisions to win Justice for All, and continue critical relationships inside and outside of our union," wrote retiring SEIU President Andy Stern in a memo to the union's executive board, provided to POLITICO by a labor source. "One of our key strengths is the relationships we have with the Obama Administration, Cabinet Members, Governors, other union leaders and allies nationally. For our private and public employers it is an ingredient in their calculations on how to deal with our members. It offers incentives to meet, partner with us for mutual gain, and a warning that they can be held accountable when they act contrary to the greater good."
Stern was a pioneer in leveraging political relationships into contract negotiations, but the fight to succeed him pits his Washington-based protege, Anna Burger, against a California-based labor leader, Mary Kay Henry more focused on the union's traditional role.
In her own Sunday letter to the board, which will decide a successor, Burger wrote that she would lead the union to "challenge our President to be the best that he can be."
"As we build political power we can partner with the President and agitate and turn up the heat all at the same time. We won’t be a lap dog or a mad dog but we will be a bull dog for change constantly," she wrote in the letter, provided by the same source.
Burger wrote that health care legislation, which will expand the number of insured patients, offers a major growth opportunity to SEIU, and proposed to "take advantage of the moment and use Health Care Reform to build massive efforts through Partnership for Quality Care [an alliance with hospital employers], building on experiences in NY and Boston and make being union an asset not a problem."
Burger also drew a tacit contrast with Henry, whose backers, in a letter, stressed her ability to bring peace between SEIU an its bitterest rivals, a California health care union and the hotel workers union UNITE HERE.
In her letter, Burger gave no ground on those internecine fights:
"I believe we must take advantage of this moment of change and bring an end to the attacks from HERE and continue to act decisively to make sure NUHW is never a threat to building one Health Care Union," she wrote, warning that, among challenges, "the economy is a mess, our labor movement in decline, divided by ideology ? lacking strategy and a commitment to each other."
UPDATE: Juan Gonzalez, who knows the players well, suggests that New York SEIU leader Dennis Rivera -- a powerful figure who's vanished behind the scenes in recent years -- may also be in the running.