- One of the largest labor unions in North America
- Donates millions of dollars to Democratic lawmakers and politicians who promote government expansion and higher taxes
- Assets: $69,750,737 (2009)
- Grants Awarded $0 (2009)
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 nameto 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:
- Healthcare: With more than 1.2 million members employed in this industry, SEIU is America's largest health-care union.
- Public Services: Representing more than a million local- and state-government workers, public-school employees, bus drivers, and childcare providers, SEIU is the second-largest union of public-service employees.
- Property Services: Representing more than 225,000 workers who protect and clean commercial and residential office buildings, SEIU is the largest property-services union in America. It is also the largest security union, with 50,000 private security officers and public-safety workers on its membership rolls.
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 congregating, attending 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-CIO and formed the Change to Winfederation.
In 2006, George Soros's Open Society Institute awarded a $100,000 grant to SEIU.
Also in 2006, during the administration of Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm, SEIU Healthcare Michigan (a Michigan branch of the SEIU) lobbied successfully for a rule that classified unpaid family members caring for their sick or disabled relatives as “home health care workers” – and classified the healthcare recipients as “employers.” This arrangement forced the caregivers to join the SEIU and pay union dues, which were collected automatically from the care recipients' Medicare or Medicaid checks. Between 2006 and 2013, SEIU Healthcare Michigan reaped nearly $35 million in this manner from the state's elderly, sick, and disabled. After the measure was abolished in 2013 by Republicans (including Gov. Rick Snyder, who was elected in 2012), more than 44,000 of SEIU Healthcare Michigan's 59,000 home-based healthcare workers voluntarily and eagerly parted ways with the union.
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.
- Former SEIU lobbyist Patrick Gaspard served as the Obama campaign's national political director and as transition deputy director of personnel.
- SEIU played a key role in promoting the appointment of two Obama cabinet appointees: Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Labor Department secretary Hilda Solis, the latter of whom had previously received both money and ground support from SEIU during her first congressional campaign in 2000.
- SEIU secretary-treasurer Anna Burger was appointed to Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
- In May 2009, California officials reported that the Obama White House had given SEIU an unprecedented degree of influence in the negotiations over federal stimulus funds.
- As of October 30, 2009, SEIU president Andrew Stern had visited the White House 22 times since Obama's inauguration -- more than any other individual.
SEIU's positions on political issues of import invariably fall under the heading of doctrinaire leftism:
- Representing more immigrants than any other union in the United States -- approximately one-fourth of its members are Hispanic immigrants -- SEIU supports a path to citizenship for illegal aliens and has emphasized the need "to build a powerful, new immigrant electorate" that will support progressive candidates and causes. SEIU Local 1877 provided security for the massive pro-amnesty marches that were held in Los Angeles in 2006. At a June 2009 Washington conference sponsored by America's Future Now!, Eliseo Medina, SEIU's international executive vice president, said: "We reform the immigration laws, it puts 12 million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters."
- SEIU advocates a taxpayer-funded, government-run health-care program. In 2009, former SEIU organizing director Margarida Jorge was employed as a national field director with Health Care for America Now.
- Viewing the United States as a nation where discrimination against nonwhites and women is widespread, SEIU in 2000 endorsed Pay Equity Now! -- a petition jointly issued by the National Organization for Women and two other organizations to "expose and oppose U.S. opposition to pay equity" for women.
- SEIU supports the Employee Free Choice Act.
- In 2004, SEIU endorsed the Civil Liberties Restoration Act, which was designed to roll back, in the name of protecting civil liberties, post-9/11 national-security policies such as the Patriot Act.
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 toa 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:
- Beginning in 2007, SEIU was a member organization of Americans Against Escalation in Iraq. Other members includedAmericans United for Change, Campaign for America's Future, Campus Progress Action, the Center for American ProgressAction Fund, MoveOn.org, the United States Student Association, USAction, Vote Vets, Win Without War, and Working Assets.
- As of December 2008, SEIU was a partner of the Democracy Alliance, along with such key organizations and individuals asthese.
- SEIU is an endorser of the Apollo Alliance, along with ACORN, the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Greenpeace, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Sierra Club, among others.
- SEIU is a member organization of Alliance For Justice (AFJ). To view profiles of other prominent AFJ members, click here.
- SEIU has worked collaboratively with By Any Means Necessary on a number of pro-affirmative action initiatives.
- SEIU is a member group of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCCHR), a coalition of more than 200 national organizations. To view profiles of some fellow LCCHR members, click here.
- SEIU endorsed the October 2, 2010 “March on Washington” organized by One Nation Working Together, an event whose purpose was to inspire “an intensive voter-mobilization program for Election Day 2010.” For a list of other notable endorsers, click here.
- SEIU is a partner organization of the Global Campaign for Climate Action. For a list of additional GCCA partners, click here.
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