It’s been a long time since an American union leader was a media regular. But in the last two years, Andy Stern, head of the 1.8 million strong Service Employees International Union, has become somewhat of a celebrity, making the cover of Business Week and the New York Times Magazine, profiled in Fortune, and appearing on CBS’ 60 Minutes, Comedy Central’s Colbert Report and WNBC’s Wall Street Journal Report. Now he’s getting local press as well, as he tours the country promoting a new book, A Country That Works: Getting America Back on Track.

Within the union movement, Stern is regarded either as the visionary who’s leading the rebirth of American labor, or the villain who caused labor’s biggest split in 50 years — last year’s exodus of five big unions from the AFL-CIO.

SEIU is concentrated in the public sector, health care, and building services, like janitors and security guards. Since Stern was elected president 10 years ago, SEIU has grown by 800,000 members, four-fifths of that through new organizing. Now SEIU has plans to try to unionize the South.

In his book, Stern describes his rise to power within the SEIU. He gives a peek into the behind-the-scenes workings of national Democratic Party politics, and he details the power struggles within the AFL-CIO that led to the decision by SEIU and several other unions to leave and form a new federation, Change to Win.

Stern was in Portland Oct. 17 to meet with SEIU members and talk about his book at Powell’s Books, and answered some questions from NW Labor Press associate editor Don McIntosh about the split, foreign trade, health care, and politics.
 

Labor Press: Some local affiliates of other unions have stayed in local AFL-CIO bodies. Is SEIU going to allow locals to continue to affiliate through ‘solidarity charters’ after this year?
Andy Stern: We don’t know yet, we don’t know if solidarity charters are going to continue. So far we’ve let every local make its own choice. I think there’s a more fundamental question, which is, ‘Why don’t we create a new mostly-political local solidarity organization, with the NEA [the big teachers union], Change to Win, the AFL, the independent unions, and maybe groups like America Votes and ACORN. Because we need to create the highest level of unity possible, and it’s a rather limited debate what percent of the 11 percent of American workers who are unionized are going to be in a certain group.

What’s the likelihood of SEIU or other Change to Win unions returning to the AFL-CIO?
Highly unlikely.

What do you think America ought to do vis-a-vis China that would protect working people in this country?
I don’t think you can build walls. I think we need to recognize we live in a global economy. That doesn’t mean America can’t have a plan. We would fire the negotiators of NAFTA and the WTO if they were union leaders. We would unelect them. Because they really didn’t protect America’s interests. We protected patents and intellectual property but we didn’t protect against China manipulating its currency. I think every country needs an economic plan. Ours needs to start with the most simple security issues. It’s outrageous that we can’t fix American battleships with American steel. And clearly there are ways to hold countries accountable to agreements they have signed.

You’ve talked about taking service- sector jobs that can’t be outsourced and making them good jobs. But my sense is that producing things is the foundation of any kind of prosperity. We can’t all be serving each other lattes. Somebody’s got to grow the beans and make the cups.
We have to reconceptualize what making things is. I’m not sure if you think Google is making things or not, but it’s a huge portion of the economy.

But it doesn’t employ hardly anybody.
Yeah, but you can go on. I don’t know if mapping the genome is making something. It is much better for a country to make things. It’s a much more robust economy.

How long before SEIU has Chinese locals?
They won’t let us have SEIU locals.

Should America do business with countries where the workers aren’t free?
I think they’re going to anyway. But I think we should ask ourselves some questions about how free American workers are, and not just on paper. It’s a pretty depressing moment — now we’re telling nurses they’re supervisors. We’re telling security guards they have no union. I’m not trying to make any excuses for China, but I think we should think about American workers’ ability to have a union. When the Wal Mart workers say they want a union, and corporate jets fly out of Bentonville and surveillance cameras go up, you’d say ‘This isn’t the country we love.’” If the Employee Free Choice Act [a union-backed labor law change] passes, I would guarantee you we could organize a million workers a year.

Do you think that if the Democrats win the House this year, that the Employee Free Choice Act could pass the House?
It’s going to put them to a very interesting test, because it was easy to sign on when it wasn’t going to pass.

In the book you write that you feel treated like an ATM machine by the Democratic Party, and don’t necessarily feel respected for it. You write, “Our members rightly saw us as too wedded to the Democratic establishment, a political party with no united agenda on workers’ issues.”
I became president in ‘96, and in my acceptance speech, I promised the delegates we were going to build a new independent political program based on one simple and profound principle, which was ‘What is in the best interest of our members and all working families.”

And SEIU hadn’t done that before?
No, I would say we were an adjunct, a very Democratic organization. It takes a lot of work to get the union aligned independently. We just had a conference two weeks ago in Washington of 100 leading Republican members of SEIU for the first time, including some presidents of locals. They were pro-SEIU and pro-Republican. We have to see what role they want to play in the Republican Party. We want to rate candidates on the issues, not on the parties. So it’s good to have people call you when they think you’re changing the questionnaire in a way that looks at certain votes and not others. The good thing about members is they’re smart. If you involve them in the process, they can see when something doesn’t meet the smell test.

When you were on the Colbert Report, the line that got the most applause was a call for universal health care. Is SEIU or Change to Win going to spearhead a campaign for national health care of some kind?
We’re working on a number of fronts. I wrote a letter in the Wall Street Journal about our horse-and-buggy health care system, and sent a letter to the Fortune 500 CEOs. And some of them actually called and wrote back. Steve Byrd (head of Safeway) said in a Chamber of Commerce meeting a month ago: ‘I could have written the editorial Andy Stern did.’ Lee Scott, the head of Wal-Mart, said on Charlie Rose that business and labor should work together to solve the health care crisis. So there’s a moment coming. You can see the increasing cost, the lack of coverage, the problems it’s creating in our economy by putting the cost of health care in the price of a product. I think CEOs are sick of it, because they can’t manage it and it’s not part of their business. The legacy costs are killing some of our biggest employers, and the only way they can solve the problem is through bankruptcy, which is disgraceful for what happens to the workers. So I think we’re heading toward a moment. The question is, ‘Is the perfect going to the be the enemy of the good?’ Is there going to be enough sense as Americans that this is not about Democrats or Republicans or the insurance industry or unions’ trust funds, it’s about whether our kids and grandkids are going to live in a country where we have access to the greatest medical technology in the history of the world.

In the late ‘90s, your ex-wife Jane Perkins was instrumental in a failed attempt to get the AFL-CIO to endorse U.S. passage of the Kyoto Protocols on global warming. Do you think unions are going to come around on that issue, and join with environmentalists to work on global warming?
I hope so. I think Al Gore has done a phenomenal job raising popular awareness of what many people have known. Now it’s just very clear what are the disastrous consequences of continuing to ignore this.