An Interview with SEIU President Emeritus Andy Stern

Abstract

Labor editors Leon Fink and Jennifer Luff interviewed Andy Stern—for fifteen years the most influential labor leader in the United States—two months after he stepped down from the presidency of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in May 2010. Here Stern ranges widely, recalling his days as a young social worker and organizer, then as the national organizing director, his involvement in the Beverly Enterprises and Justice for Janitors campaigns, and his emergence in the mid-1990s, in a cadre of other advancing organizing directors, into the leadership of his international union. Despite Stern's intense strategic planning and high hopes for change within SEIU, the AFL-CIO, and, after 2005, Change to Win, he unabashedly faces the limits of what his union was able to accomplish. While generally defending his own actions in internal controversies that swirled around his leadership, he delivers a surprising critique of ruling-class power in America as the chief source of labor's current predicament.

Institutionalization in the Context of Institutional Pluralism: Politics as a Generative Process

“…In an interview with the journal Labor , Andy Stern, SEIU’s president during 1995 to 2010, attributed these developments to having figured out ‘how to merge politics and organizing’, a central principle of the social movement logic:We probably thought that [the 2008] election allowed us to take the work we had done about how to merge politics and organizing – that we had done at least in SEIU so successfully in states – and see if we could apply it in the ultimate moment of opportunity, which was to have Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress …. (Fink & Luff, 2011)…”

“…We probably thought that [the 2008] election allowed us to take the work we had done about how to merge politics and organizing – that we had done at least in SEIU so successfully in states – and see if we could apply it in the ultimate moment of opportunity, which was to have Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress …. (Fink & Luff, 2011)…”