A History of Everything Leftist Unionism (full series)
The Old Left and the Reds | Labor and the New Left
The Rise of the SEIU | Labor’s New Coalition
The Rise of the SEIU
Among the many problems afflicting Big Labor as the Long Decline began was organizing; namely turning workers into dues-paying union members, especially in the growing service industries and the historically union-hostile states in the West and South that were reaping the benefits of post-1960s economic development. Labor’s private-sector left had held a keen awareness of the usefulness of continued organizing for at least a decade; among the Alliance for Labor Action’s goals was mass union organizing. The brief UAW-Teamsters alliance claimed, “Only as the millions of unorganized workers are brought into union membership will they win the benefits and enjoy the protection they and their families need.”
ALA was almost completely unsuccessful during its short lifetime. But the hope it inspired in labor union officials and staff cadres would long outlive its creator and the alliance itself. From the 1980s through the 2000s, the union that would prove most committed to both union organizing and political Everything Leftism would be the Service Employees International Union, led by allies-turned-rivals John Sweeney and Andy Stern.
Sweeney took office as the SEIU’s president in 1980, as the Long Decline was beginning to take hold. He would support a major organizing effort through the decade in Los Angeles and other major California cities branded as “Justice for Janitors.” The campaign was led in part by a woman whose life has epitomized Everything Leftism: Cecile Richards, the daughter of Texas Democratic politician Ann Richards. After her work with the SEIU’s janitorial organizing campaign, Cecile would rise to high positions in liberal activism, most notably working as head of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She also worked as a senior staffer for Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and as president of America Votes, a Democratic get-out-the-vote coalition.
Another of Sweeney’s Everything Leftist allies was ex-SDS organizer Wade Rathke, whose ACORN community organizing and voter-activation group would align closely with Sweeney’s (and later Stern’s) union until ACORN broke apart amid scandal in 2009. In addition to ACORN, Rathke headed United Labor Unions Local 100, which was incorporated into the SEIU during Sweeney’s presidency, an affiliation that lasted until the ACORN scandals in the late-2000s.
Over the 1980s and early 1990s, Sweeney almost doubled the SEIU’s membership to approximately 1.1 million. Some of this growth came from increasingly militant organizing in the private sector.
Sweeney, Stern, and their left-wing activist cadres developed a new style of union organizing campaigns modeled on Justice for Janitors and ACORN’s activism known as the “corporate campaign.” Shifting away from shopfloor recruiting with an eye toward winning government-supervised elections to secure recognition as bargaining representatives, corporate campaigns—now organized labor’s standard tactic—target employers, inflicting reputational damage unless they agree to negotiate with a union. Vincent Vernuccio and Trey Kovacs, two right-of-center labor policy wonks, explain:
The union’s goal is counter-intuitive. In effect, it aims to organize the employer, not the employees, by exerting public pressure on the employer to become a de facto partner in forcing union representation on employees. The most ambitious corporate campaigns try to pressure multiple companies to agree to the wholesale unionization of entire industries city or statewide. By using a corporate campaign it’s easier for a union to organize all the hotels in a city, a nationwide restaurant chain, a statewide consortium of hospitals, or the janitorial staff in a city’s downtown office buildings, far easier, that is, than by going door-to-door persuading workers at individual job sites to join the union.
These corporate campaigns often feature Everything Leftist messaging on racial and gender issues and other hot-button topics that businesses wish to avoid, in addition to more traditional forms of intimidation and leftist economic demands.
While Sweeney, Stern, and their allies claimed great success in organizing and pointed to SEIU’s growth, a substantial portion of that growth came from the SEIU absorbing unions into itself and expanding into the government sector. Major labor unions, most notably District 1199, the powerful New York State hospital workers’ union, were incorporated into SEIU, beefing up the army Sweeney and Stern would command.
In 1996, Sweeney left SEIU after winning election to take over the AFL-CIO, and Stern took the helm at SEIU. Sweeney’s election to George Meany’s old seat signaled the end of what remained of labor’s centrist wing, with the card-carrying Democratic Socialists of America member taking the most prominent union office. However, it must be noted, as Max Green did in his 1996 monograph Epitaph for American Labor, that Sweeney beat interim AFL-CIO president Thomas R. Donahue, who was in many ways an Everything Leftist cut from the same cloth as Sweeney. Green quotes Donahue as saying, “We need to be-just as John [Sweeney] has said-the force that drives the Democratic Party to the left,” characterizing Sweeney’s election as the culmination of two decades of leftward drift by the union federation.
Sweeney took office at the AFL-CIO with a bold vision of expanded organizing and partnership with progressive organizations to revitalize Big Labor to its mid-century heights. His tenure would prove mostly unsuccessful (in part due to Stern picking a massive fight within the labor movement), and his legacy would be a labor union movement both smaller and more politically dependent on broad-spectrum progressivism even than the one he inherited.
Stern’s Obama Gambit
Andy Stern succeeded Sweeney as leader of the SEIU after a brief internal power struggle. He would expand the merge-and-absorb growth tactic, employing it within SEIU to much controversy to reorganize local unions into “mega-locals” whose leaders owed allegiance to him rather than to union members.
Like Sweeney, Stern was a committed progressive with a big ego and a stated desire to commit labor unionism to broad-spectrum organizing. The House of Labor’s chief federation would prove not to be big enough for both men. After left-wing institutions including Sweeney’s AFL-CIO failed to unseat President George W. Bush in 2004, Stern made his move.
Stern announced the formation of a new splinter union federation alongside the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and left Sweeney’s AFL-CIO to create Change to Win. At the time, there was much commentary that Stern wanted his new federation—which would be joined by the newly merged Unite Here and the United Food and Commercial Workers, among other unions—to focus on organizing instead of politics.
But Change to Win was about organizing through politics. Stern joined the SEIU, always the dominant force throughout Change to Win’s ascendancy, to the Democratic Party at the hip. The SEIU supported the election of Democratic governors who instituted “dues skim” schemes under which home health aides paid by Medicaid would be considered “employees” subject to unionization by SEIU.
At the federal level, SEIU and Stern were key allies of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, spending over $60 million by Stern’s own statements to secure the 44th president’s election. The union’s principal goal was the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), legislation that would have instituted several policies to ease union organizing, most notably compelling union recognition by majority signatures on union cards (known as “card check”). Stern received considerable face time with senior administration officials and President Obama himself early in the Obama administration, being one of the most frequent outside visitors to the White House. Patrick Gaspard, an alumnus of 1199SEIU’s political operation, became a senior aide to President Obama.
Despite its scale, Stern’s gambit would not pay off. President Obama and the Democratic congressional supermajorities that he ushered into power in 2009 chose not to make EFCA their priority. Instead they chose to use their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate between the seating of Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) and the election of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) to enact the Obamacare health-insurance regulation-and-subsidy package that SEIU and most of Big Labor backed despite reservations about its “Cadillac Tax” on high-value health care plans.
Meanwhile, Change to Win, Stern’s would-be rival to the AFL-CIO, came apart following the very messy divorce between the former UNITE needle-trades unions and the HERE hotel, restaurant, and casino unions that had merged to form Unite Here. Bruce Raynor, the leader of the UNITE faction described as “a child of the ’60s left” by left-wing labor journalist Harold Myerson, headed the merged union in a duumvirate with HERE faction leader and fellow 1960s radical John Wilhelm that was set to conclude in 2009. As the power-sharing agreement was set to end, Raynor and Wilhelm went to war with each other, and Stern took Raynor’s side, offering to incorporate Unite Here into SEIU.
Stern won a Pyrrhic semi-victory when Raynor disaffiliated his faction from Unite Here to form a new SEIU division called Workers United, but the now-Workers United and the rump Unite Here would fight one another over control of Amalgamated Bank for years following. While SEIU would win that fight, it came at a cost for Stern, who had to step down as SEIU leader and could not pass the torch to his protégé Anna Burger. And Change to Win saw multiple unions re-defect back to the AFL-CIO.
By the retirement of Stern’s successor, Mary Kay Henry, in 2024, Change to Win had effectively dissolved, reorganizing itself as the Strategic Organizing Center, with only the SEIU, the tiny United Farm Workers, and the AFL-CIO-affiliated Communications Workers of America as its member organizations. Even the Teamsters left the alliance with the end of James P. Hoffa’s term in office, and a new Teamsters regime de-aligned with Everything Leftism, at least at the national level.
Stern’s gambit to take over the House of Labor had conclusively failed. Rather than gaining independence from the Democratic Party and liberal movement, the SEIU had become even more closely wedded with its coalition allies.
In the next installment, the Everything Leftism–Big Labor alliance is formalized.
