When Mary Kay Henry graduated from Michigan State in 1979 with a degree in industrial labor relations, it took her the better part of a year to land a job with a union, chiefly because most unions in those days hired few if any women. During that time, she worked as a clerical employee in a hotel and as a night janitor. She hit bottom, she told me during an interview on Monday, when she took on a second job as a grill cook, and, in her sleep-deprived state, "fell asleep inside a freezer."
All of which, some might argue, was merely suitable preparation for a career inside the Service Employees International Union, a famously demanding employer. Hired as a researcher by SEIU, she built a reputation as a crack organizer who became the union's organizing director and then head of its health-care division during the presidency of Andy Stern. On Saturday, having waged a successful underdog campaign against Secretary Treasurer Anna Burger to succeed Stern, Henry was elected SEIU's new president.
Following Saturday's meeting, SEIU's local and national leaders clearly welcomed what they saw as Henry's vision of collective leadership. While everyone I spoke with acclaimed Stern's leadership, they also expressed almost a sense of relief that Stern's acknowledged genius no longer dominated their proceedings. "Today's meeting was much more participatory and inclusive," said one leader of a major local. "Mary Kay has a very inclusive style, which excites people at a lot of different levels in the union," said Bruce Raynor, an executive vice president who led the apparel workers into SEIU. "More people will be involved in our decision-making," said a third leader. "Mary Kay ran and won on that."
"This is the first time in two years that I've said anything in a board meeting," another SEIU leader remarked. "Before, it was the Andy and Anna show. All of us were called on to execute, but not all of us were asked to form the policy we were executing."
The organization that Henry now heads is by every conceivable standard the most prominent American union. During the terms of her two predecessors, John Sweeney and Andy Stern, SEIU grew from a little more than 600,000 members to roughly 2 million, at a time -- the past three decades -- when other unions were either treading water or shrinking. During Stern's presidency, SEIU also became the single most potent liberal force on the American political landscape -- spending more money on elections and turning out more precinct walkers than any other organization. Over the past year, moreover, SEIU converted its political operation into a pressure group for health-care reform -- the enactment of which gave Stern, who'd long wished to leave the presidency, a high note on which to depart.
But the Stern years also saw SEIU increasingly isolating itself from other unions. In 2005, Stern led several prominent unions out of the AFL-CIO to form a new federation, Change to Win. For the past year, SEIU has been locked in a struggle against UNITE HERE, the hotel workers union, a minority of whose members (the apparel workers) left to join SEIU. And for the past several years, SEIU has battled the former leaders of a large Northern California local, whom it stripped from power, in a series of elections to see whether SEIU or the former local leaders (who have formed a rival union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers) should represent the workers in the facilities that both the local and SEIU had represented.
These battles have taken their toll, and Henry was elected partly on the promise of bettering SEIU's relationship with the rest of the labor movement. That does not mean curtailing the fight with the NUHW, Henry emphatically declared. Like the rest of SEIU's leadership, she sees this as an internal struggle. Nor does it mean returning to the AFL-CIO -- a topic, several board members noted, that didn't even arise during Saturday's board meeting where Henry was elected. But it does mean reaching a quick settlement with UNITE HERE, and it means that Henry will spend May talking with the other major unions in the Change to Win federation and other AFL-CIO unions, about, in her own words, "expanding organizing in communications, for instance, or charter schools. Our members want us to be full partners in a labor movement," she adds, "by helping promote a coordinated and aggressive organizing agenda" -- even if that means helping other unions organize.
On Saturday, SEIU's board took a concrete step in this direction, setting aside $4 million for a fund for innovative organizing. The organizing, says one SEIU leader, "could be ours, it could be another union's, it could be a community-based organization's, with the sole stipulation that it's organizing to help working-class people." As such, the plan exemplifies some of the ideas put forth by SEIU Executive Vice President Gerald Hudson and onetime Justice for Janitors strategist Stephen Lerner, who have both argued recently that SEIU needs to seed a larger progressive movement.
One non-collective bargaining campaign to which SEIU committed itself on Saturday was the battle for immigrant rights -- a campaign in which SEIU has already played a critical role. Long a bastion of immigrant workers, particularly the janitors who clean the skyscrapers in America's downtowns, SEIU, along with the hotel workers, led the successful 1999 fight to get the AFL-CIO to reverse its historic opposition to immigrant rights and has been the chief funder of groups that have naturalized, registered, and turned out the vote of immigrant workers. SEIU Executive Vice President Eliseo Medina, who has led SEIU's fight on behalf of immigrant workers, said after Saturday's board meeting that the union's increased involvement in the immigrant-rights wars "offers us a blueprint for how we can unite diverse communities. It turbo-charges our political program to go beyond tree-top alliances to real grass roots."
Henry still envisions that the bulk of SEIU's organizing will be in sectors where it has already won considerable representation: hospitals, nursing homes, home care, security guards, and food services (though jurisdiction in food services is likely one of the issues that needs to be worked out with UNITE HERE). The initial supporters of her presidential bid included some, like Hudson and Medina, who favor broadening the scope of SEIU's organizing, and others, like Executive Vice President Tom Woodruff, who also heads the Change To Win Organizing Center, who favor a renewed emphasis on more traditional organizing. The two groups aren't inherently opposed to each other, but in Medina's contrast of "tree-top alliances" to grass-roots organizing, there's an implicit critique of Stern's increasing willingness, for instance, to partner even with union-busting firms like Wal-Mart in the battle to win health-care reform.
Does Henry's emphasis on collective leadership mean that she will stop Stern's practice of consolidating locals into larger groups that may have more clout -- a practice that estranged some local leaders? Not necessarily. When I asked her about further local consolidations, she answered, "We need to unite workers -- in geographic regions so they have more political power, and in particular sectors so they can lift their wages and benefits during bargaining."
Unsurprisingly, Henry has nothing but praise for Stern, whom she called "her biggest mentor," and whom she credits with "creating a chance for me to lead in ways I never imagined." But she also credits a sisterhood of leaders who inspired and championed her including Sister Nancy Sylvester, who taught her in high school, Marge Bursie, an African American community organizer she worked for in college, and union legend Elinor Glenn, a onetime leader of an SEIU local in Los Angeles and a founder of the Coalition of Labor Union Women. "The first day I was hired by SEIU," says Henry, "Elinor called me -- and I had no idea who this woman was -- and said, if you have any trouble, just call me. I later learned that she called every woman that SEIU hired and committed herself to watch out for them."
Now it's Henry's turn, not just to watch over SEIU but to reintegrate it within the American labor movement and to spark the battle to win more power for the nation's beleaguered workers.
