See also: Andrew Stern John Sweeney
The earliest roots of SEIU date back to 1921, when seven small
janitor unions combined to form the Building
Service Employees International Union (BSEIU), whose members were
mostly immigrant workers. Over time, BSEIU began to organize other
types of service workers as well, including doormen, elevator
operators, nonacademic school employees, healthcare workers, public
employees, and people employed in such venues as bowling alleys,
stadiums, and cemeteries. In 1968, BSEIU changed
its name to the Service Employees International Union
(SEIU).
With 2.2
million members across the United States, Canada, and Puerto
Rico, SEIU is today the fastest-growing
union in North America. Representing both public- and private-sector
employees, its mission
is "to improv[e] the lives of workers and their families and
creat[e] a more just and humane society,” particularly for “people
of color,” who make up 40
percent of the union's membership. In its quest to recruit new
members, SEIU aggressively pursues
unskilled, low-wage service workers, who constitute the vast
majority of its members.
By and large, most SEIU members
work in three
key service sectors:
Under John
Sweeney, who served as SEIU's president from 1980-1995, the union
initiated the use of "Muscle
for Money" (MfM), an Alinsky
strategy featuring highly aggressive, organized efforts not only to
discredit and intimidate opponents, but also to pressure business
leaders and public officials to support the union's agendas -- i.e.,
its desire to unionize additional workforces. MfM campaigns include
such tactics as congregatingattending
and disrupting company functions like banquets.
Moreover,
SEIU parlayed MfM into aggressive "corporate
campaigns" -- coordinated assaults, often conducted in
alliance with social and religious activist groups, against the
reputations of companies resistant to unionization. Such campaigns
typically feature boycotts, picket lines, public demonstrations,
literature distribution, letter-writing, and negative-publicity
initiatives in the media. Corporate campaigns of this sort originated
in the 1960s with "New
Left" organizations like the Students
for a Democratic Society.
SEIU would continue to employ
tough,
even violent,
tactics long after John Sweeney's departure in 1995. In April 2009, California
Nurses Association executive director Rose Ann DeMoro condemned
the union's "ugly pattern ... of physical abuse and tactics of
intimidation that have no place in either our labor movement or a
civilized society."
outside the private home of a company official to embarrass and
intimidate his or her entire family, or
By the end of Sweeney's tenure as
SEIU president, the union hierarchy was thoroughly saturated not only with his
penchant for ruthlessness but also with his far-left politics. Indeed, as the
socialist New
Party was becoming established in the mid-1990s, the national
newsletter of the Democratic
Socialists of America characterized the young organization as
essentially the “electoral
arm” of ACORN
and its allied SEIU locals.
Sweeney was succeeded as
SEIU president by the former New Leftist Andrew
Stern, who filled the post from 1996-2010. Under Stern’s
leadership, the union's membership grew
by more than 1.2 million.
Designated as a “527
organization,” SEIU in 2003 became a national
partner in the America
Votes (AV) coalition. AV, in turn, belongs to the so-called
Shadow
Democratic Party, a nationwide network of leftwing unions,
activist groups, and think tanks engaged in supporting the Democrats.
To view SEIU's fellow partners in America Votes, click here.
In
November 2003, SEIU dispatched thousands
of volunteers to work on the presidential campaign of Howard
Dean. After Dean dropped out of the race in early 2004, Andrew
Stern played a major role in persuading
the Democratic nominee, John
Kerry, to select John
Edwards as his running mate. By June 2004, SEIU had already
committed
$65 million to voter-registration, voter-education, and
voter-mobilization initiatives on behalf of the Kerry-Edwards
campaign. Moreover, the union pledged to assign 50,000 of its members
as get-out-the-vote “volunteers” just prior to, and on, election
day.
In September 2005, SEIU and six other unions -- the
Teamsters, UNITE
HERE, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Laborers, the
Carpenters, and the United Farm Workers -- broke away from the AFL-CIOformed
the Change
to Win federation.
In 2006, George
Soros's Open
Society Institute awarded a $100,000
grant
In 2008, SEIU spent approximately $60.7
million to help elect Barack
Obama to the White House, deploying some 100,000 pro-Obama
campaign volunteers who "knocked
on 1.87 million doors, made 4.4 million phone calls … and sent more
than 2.5 million pieces of mail in support of Obama." During his
campaign, Obama told
an SEIU audience: “Your agenda has been my agenda in the United
States Senate.... Just imagine what we could do together...Imagine
having a president whose life’s work was your work...” After
Obama's election, the SEIU became an enormously influential force in
his administration:
and to SEIU.
SEIU's positions on political issues of import invariably fall under the heading of doctrinaire leftism:
To boost its effort to create an ever-expanding supply of social
activists and labor-union leaders, SEIU has established “Institute
for Change,” a program that seeks “to advance social and
economic justice by helping SEIU locals develop their leaders,
strengthen their organizations, and increase the power of the labor
movement.”
A noteworthy affiliate of SEIU is its powerful
and militant, New York City-based Local 1199, which has more
than 300,000 members and is the world’s largest union local.
Sixteen years after its 1932 founding, 1199 was investigated
by the House Un-American Activities Committee on suspicion of
Communist "infiltration." When the Communist
Party USA (CPUSA) split in 1991, several officials of Local 1199
took
many comrades with them into the breakaway group, the Committees
of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. One of those
officials, Rafael Pizarro, also went on to
help establish the New
Party, a socialist organization that Barack Obama
would join in 1995. At a March
2007 meeting, 1199's executive vice president Steve
Kramer spoke
enthusiastically about the role which CPUSA had played in
building up his union.
SEIU has extensive
ties to the community organization ACORN:
In the fall of 2009, SEIU's Anna
Burger told a congressional
hearing that her union had "cut all ties to ACORN." But
according to
a House Oversight Committee report, when ACORN changed the names of a
number of its affiliates later that year, it transferred significant
resources to several SEIU chapters.
Between 1989 and 2010,
SEIU gave $29,140,232
to political parties and campaigns. Of that total, 95 percent went to
Democrats and 3 percent went to Republicans. For a list of these
recipients, click
here.
Mary
Kay Henry, who has worked with SEIU since 1979, succeeded Andrew
Stern as SEIU president in 2010. She is a founding member of SEIU's
gay and lesbian Lavender
Caucus, whose purpose is "to facilitate open and respectful
communication between the L/G/B/T
community and the labor movement." She is also a member
of the executive board of Families
USA.
In February 2011, SEIU took part in a “Rally
to Save the American Dream” (RSAD), which was organized as an
expression
of solidarity with Wisconsin public-sector union employees. For a
list of other key participants
in the RSAD rally, click
here.
SEIU sponsored a May Day 2011 rally in Los Angeles, where many participants displayed banners openly advocating communism.
Also in 2011, SEIU sponsored the national conference of Netroots Nation. To
view a list of other notable organizations that have sponsored NN conferences, click here.
In 2012, SEIU campaigned aggressively in an effort to help President Barack Obama win reelection over Republican challenger Mitt Romney. In October of that year, for instance, the union bussed protesters to the site of a pro-Romney rally in the key swing state of Ohio and paid them $11.00-per-hour to carry anti-Romney placards and chant slogans like “Romney go home!” and “We don’t need no bad economy.”
SEIU has had many affiliations, past and present,
with prominent leftist organizations and coalitions. For example: