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LaStrega Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat May-24-08 11:26 PM
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LA Times: The battle for labor's future
LA Times: The battle for labor's future

The SEIU's Andy Stern has an ambitious plan. Not everyone is on board.

By Nelson Lichtenstein
May 22, 2008

When an internal fight at a trade union erupts into the news, American culture has a ready frame. It's Marlon Brando versus Lee J. Cobb in "On the Waterfront" once again, perhaps updated by a recent episode of "The Wire," set among the corrupt and gritty longshoremen of the Baltimore docks. Or it's a modern-day retelling of the Jimmy Hoffa/Teamsters story, destined to end in another mysterious gangland murder.

But there are no shiny suits or pinkie rings in the conflict at the Service Employees International Union, the big, fast-growing organization of janitors, hospital workers and public employees that has more than 650,000 members in California alone. All the dramatis personae are idealists who came out of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and although turf battles and dues money are certainly on the agenda, the real question they are debating is the road forward for the American trade union movement.

Leading the cast is Andy Stern, the SEIU's national president since 1996. A Pennsylvania SEIU activist in the 1970s, Stern was put in charge of union organizing efforts in the 1980s, just as President Reagan and other resurgent Republicans helped stiffen corporate management's hostility to trade unionism. The SEIU was one of the few unions that continued to grow in those difficult times, sparked by militant organizing campaigns such as the Justice for Janitors movement, which had its epicenter in Los Angeles.

Stern, now 57, has been a bold, impatient leader, which has earned him a spot on the cover of almost every mass circulation magazine, including Business Week under the query "Can This Man Save Labor?"

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