Politico.com, April 13, 2010, Tuesday

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Politico.com

April 13, 2010, Tuesday

Stern's departure roils labor

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The retirement of Andy Stern, one of America's most powerful union leaders, will send ripples through the divided labor movement, setting the stage for new leaders and new directions for the nation's largest union and the movement as a whole.

Stern, 59, will officially announce this week that he is stepping down, sources said, ending a 15-year run in which he doubled the size of the Service Employees International Union and turned it into a 2.2 million-member political po-werhouse.

Beginning in 2007, Stern pushed health care reform to the top of the Democratic Party's agenda and kept it there, even in the dark days this past January, when he was the first to outline the strategy Democrats finally used to get a health care bill through Congress. His close ties to the Obama administration were reflected by the fact that he was the most frequent outside visitor to the White House during the first six months of 2009.

But Stern's political success wasn't always matched inside the labor movement. His new labor coalition, Change to Win, was composed of five unions that split from the AFL-CIO with the promise of an intense new focus on organizing. Now the group appears on the verge of breaking up amid infighting and personality conflicts, and its members are likely to go limping back to the older federation.

"There's going to be a void left here in terms of labor's political influence, and people will rush in to fill that void," said Cletus Daniel, a professor of labor history at Cornell University's Institute for Labor Relations.

Stern's allies sought to downplay the loss his retirement will mean to his wing of the labor movement and to the movement as a whole, but they conceded his central role in building the SEIU.

"No one is indispensable, but he came close," said Dan Cantor, the executive director of New York's Working Families Party, which is partly backed by the SEIU. "He had nerve, he was creative, and he encouraged a culture of organizing and risk-taking. Not every initiative was a home run, but that comes with the territory."

Stern's allies would not speak publicly about his motives before Stern makes a formal announcement, but they privately attributed the move to a combination of personal exhaustion and the desire to leave on a high note. His departure follows the health care victory, the recess appointment of a former SEIU lawyer to the National Labor Relations Board and a recent court ruling in SEIU's favor in a long battle with a renegade California local.

People close to Stern said he had also gradually lost interest in the day-to-day contract battles and internal political negotiations that are a union's bread and butter.

"He has become more and more interested in economic issues and political issues," said Kate Bronfenbrenner, another scholar at Cornell, who said Stern had come to view the intricacies of contracts as "not as important as making change on broader political issues."

Stern has readied a successor: Anna Burger, 59, currently the second-ranking official at the union and chief of the Change to Win Federation.

The shift "won't result in a disruption within the union. Anna Burger has been preparing for this role for years. She has the confidence of leadership and membership, and she'll be able to step right into the job," one SEIU insider said.

But the Washington-based Burger won't be unchallenged, and some wonder whether Stern's protégé can survive without his protection. While she could promise to carry on the union's intense focus on policy, politics and influence in the Capitol, supporters of a rival - California nurses leader Mary Kay Henry - have begun to rally votes on the union's executive board. The board will choose a new president within a month of Stern's resignation, according to bylaws.

"Leaders who were silent with their critiques in the Stern era because of reverence of Andy are directly challenging Anna," another SEIU figure said. "There is a robust organized opposition to her."

Stern's departure ends the uneasy jostling between him and new AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka for the title of America's top labor leader.

Trumka has brought new energy to the top AFL post, traditionally the de facto presidency of American labor. But Stern's close relationship with the Obama administration prevented Trumka from assuming that role.

Trumka "will now emerge as the pre-eminent leader of American labor and no longer having to contend with An-dy Stern and his special relationship with Obama," said Daniel, a Stern critic who said Trumka would most likely be able to repair Stern's "central miscalculation" of dividing the labor movement to form a new group.

"There are centrifugal forces at work which were proving too much to sustain Change to Win," he said.

Stern will very likely be judged by those outside the labor movement, however, for his central place in shaping health care legislation. Stern focused the attention of then-Sen. Barack Obama and his 2008 Democratic rivals on the issue by requiring them, among other activities, to "walk a day" in the shoes of a health care worker in order to compete for the SEIU endorsement.

Stern, union insiders say, then pushed for the union to endorse former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. But he was blocked by union officials in Chicago and New York, including Patrick Gaspard, who went on to join the Obama campaign and later became White House political director.

Edwards's campaign went nowhere, and Obama, after a surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses, faltered in New Hampshire. Stern's SEIU became the first major union to endorse the Illinois senator. The union became Obama's most important outside backer, to the tune of more than $30 million.

With Obama in the White House, Stern pressed hard to make universal health care a top priority, even in the midst of an economic crisis, and his case succeeded with the new president. When Republican Scott Brown won a special election to the Senate from Massachusetts in January and seemed to scuttle the legislation, Stern was the first to articulate a new strategy.

"There is a right choice: Break the political paralysis and go big. Giving up or scaling back reform is not an op-tion," he wrote on The Huffington Post, suggesting the House simply pass the Senate health care bill, as ultimately happened. "Let's not overcomplicate the process; let's just make it happen."

And the investment appears likely to pay off, in practical terms, for the union. As Stern noted in an interview with POLITICO last month, 30 million newly insured Americans means 30 million new patients and many more jobs for the health care workers SEIU represents.
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