The Strange Case of SEIU
Do unions prefer civil war to immigration reform?
By Carl F. Horowitz

If numbers were all that mattered, Andrew Stern would be America’s most successful labor leader, hands down. For over two decades, he’s led the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — first as president John Sweeney’s chief strategist, and since 1996 as Sweeney’s successor. Under Stern, SEIU’s membership has nearly doubled to around 1.9 million, a feat all the more remarkable given that most unions during that period shrank or held steady. Union members held nearly a third of all non-farm private-sector jobs between 1950 and 1965; now they hold about 12 percent, and a mere 7.5 percent of private-sector jobs.

SEIU’s dramatic increase has persuaded Stern that he’s found a model for organized labor to regain its clout at the bargaining table and in the corridors of power — what he calls a progressive business model, a rough hybrid of Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs. By working with rather than against employers, Stern believes, unions can regain their long-declining share of the U.S. workforce.

A focus on organizing rather than political activism is the key, Stern argues from his Washington, D.C., headquarters. Lobbying and public advocacy are mostly futile, as long as unions lack the numbers to cause fear at the ballot box. Stern’s strength-through-numbers evangelism led him to break, very publicly, with his former mentor Sweeney, now president of the AFL-CIO. He and a half-dozen other labor leaders, including James P. Hoffa of the Teamsters and Terence O’Sullivan of the Laborers, announced in the summer of 2005 that their unions would split from the AFL-CIO and form their own federation, Change to Win. At the group’s kickoff conference in St. Louis that September, Stern declared: “We pledge to devote the vast majority of our resources to uniting the strength in modern, growing, strong, powerful organizing unions.â€