National Public Radio (NPR), April 14, 2010, Wednesday

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National Public Radio (NPR)

April 14, 2010, Wednesday

Head of Service Employees Union to Step Down

BODY:
RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning.

A man who shifted the direction of the American labor movement is leaving his job, maybe as soon as this week.

MONTAGNE: Decades ago, organized labor found its greatest strength inside big industries, like autos, coal, steel. Those industries faded when the economy shifted and it was Andy Stern who led a drive to organize more low-paid workers in service jobs.

INSKEEP: He's the head of the Service Employees International Union. He became a big player in Democratic politics and a leader of intense battles within labor itself.
NPR's Don Gonyea reports.

DAVID GREENE: Andy Stern will leave office at a relatively young age for a union president - he's just 59 - and it's not clear what he'll do next.

But Cornell University's Kate Bronfenbrenner says she's not surprised by the news, because Stern was already making a shift away from some of the traditional day-to-day things union presidents do.

Professor KATE BRONFENBRENNER (Director, Labor Education Research, Cornell University): He's talked about saying that his policy to get away from grievances and be more focused on issues. He's got a much more national focus in national politics.

GONYEA: Indeed, Stern is an important figure in Democratic politics. He worked hard for candidate Obama and the Democrats in '08. And while he expressed frustration that the health care bill didn't contain a public option, he and his union pushed hard for passage. Since then, Democrats who voted against the bill have been put on notice that they'll get no help from the
SEIU in this year's elections.

Stern made his reputation some two decades ago, well before he was SEIU president. He was a key leader in the highly successful Justice for Janitors Campaign, which resulted in huge organizing victories.

Labor historian, Nelson Lichtenstein, says Stern helped change the face of organized labor, literally.

Professor NELSON LICHTENSTEIN (Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara): He had just a strategic vision about, you know, the nature of industry, the where it was possible to organize workers in the ser-vice industry, how you go about organizing home health care workers and janitors and fast-food workers. He was smart about that.

GONYEA: By 2005, Stern had been president of the SEIU for a decade and was frustrated by the nation's leading labor organization, the AFL-CIO. He said it was shrinking, losing clout and not organizing effectively. He led a contro-versial split in which the SEIU, the Teamsters and three other unions left to form a rival federation called Change to Win.

He spoke to WHYY's FRESH AIR in 2006.

Mr. ANDY STERN (President, Service Employees International Union): I've said at times, and this is somewhat of a caricature, but that the labor movement was a little bit too male, and too pale, and too stale. And we're not really reaching out to people in the new workforce in the service industries: women, people of color, and immigrants. And so, you know, part of our problem was not being a welcoming organization.

GONYEA: That vision is what inspired Stern's supporters in the movement. But critics say it came at too great a cost. They question whether the split from the AFL-CIO was really necessary and they point to a more recent, no less bitter, labor fight within California.

Kate Bronfenbrenner says the recent internal battles have been costly to Stern.

Prof. BRONFENBRENNER: He's had a rough year. Everything has been focused on what he's been doing wrong, and nobody is talking about the things that he wants to talk about. And the only way people are going to talk about things he wants to talk about are if he leaves SEIU.

GONYEA: Stern's supporters say he's leaving because it's time to move on to other things now that the health care battle is over, and that he believes it's important that the job turnover. They also predict he'll still be a prominent face of the labor movement, even without a two million-member union behind him.

Don Gonyea, NPR News, Washington.

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