Andy Stern

President of the 1.9 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Andy Stern is leading a resurgence of organized labor after decades of decline. With Stern at the helm, the SEIU has unionized some of the lowest-paid, least visible workers in the economy like janitors, security guards, home health care workers, winning them pay increases, health insurance and benefits they had never known before. In the process, he is re-creating the labor movement for a global economy. When Andy Stern joined SEIU in 1973, he was a 21-year-old social worker, fresh out of the University of Pennsylvania. He soon became head of his local, and by age 29, he was the youngest member of the SEIU Executive Board. Unlike other union officers, he spent most of his career in the field, organizing workers. In 1996, he won the International Presidency of SEIU in a hotly contested struggle. Over the last 50 years, organized labor in the United States devoted much of its resources to lobbying and electioneering while union membership fell from over a third of the workforce to less than ten percent. When he could not persuade the AFL-CIO to abandon the failed policies of the past, Stern withdrew SEIU from the national labor federation. He founded Change to Win, a new alliance of seven major unions with six million members, including the Teamsters, Laborers, Carpenters, Farm Workers, United Food and Commercial Workers, and Unite Here, which represents workers in the garment and textile industries, as well as those employed in hotels and restaurants. In his book, A Country That Works, Stern lays out an expansive vision for the future. He believes that the model of local union organizations, created in the 1930s, is at odds with the reality of the modern economy. Multiple unions with overlapping jurisdictions in the same industry should be replaced, he suggests, with fewer, larger unions that can organize entire industries, rather than targeting individual companies. He proposes that unions assume a larger responsibility for training, health insurance and pensions, relieving American business of major obstacle to international competitiveness and creating a more prosperous and equitable society for all. At a time when the power of organized labor in the United States was declining rapidly, one union bucked the trend. Under the leadership of President Andy Stern, it has become the fastest-growing union in the country and a force to reckon with in national politics.