Ringo Chiu via AP
SEIU president Mary Kay Henry speaks as California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs AB 1228, which granted a $20 minimum wage to California fast-food workers, September 28, 2023, in Los Angeles.
Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has announced that she will step down as president at SEIU’s convention this summer. Hers has been a remarkable 14-year tenure, which significantly bettered the lives of millions of American workers and helped move the Democratic Party leftward on economic issues, while at the same time proving unable to arrest the overall decline of American unions.
Only a handful of American labor leaders have ever been able to raise the wages and living standards of the bulk of the nation’s working class. By funding the rise of industrial unions in the 1930s, the Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis and the Clothing Workers’ Sidney Hillman could make that claim. By virtue of the groundbreaking contracts that they won for their members in their respective, massive unions, so could the UAW’s Walter Reuther and the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa. From roughly 1950 through the 1970s, the standards set by those contracts were often at least partly matched by employers not subject to those contracts, for fear of losing their workers to higher-paying jobs in other companies.
Henry, however, is the first union leader who can justly make that claim while working in a time when labor law has become almost completely dysfunctional. For decades, the largely court-created loopholes in labor law have permitted employers to illegally fire workers seeking to join unions while incurring virtually nonexistent penalties. As we’ve seen in recent years, when employers can’t really fire workers because they can’t readily be replaced—such as university teaching assistants, hospital interns and residents, professionals working for NGOs, and so on—those workers can and do unionize. But for the vast majority of American workers, in retail, transportation, food services, manufacturing, and so on, firing workers during organizing drives is the norm, which is why organizing in such sectors has all but ground to a halt.
A little over a decade ago, when a community-based organization joined up with an SEIU local to try to organize workers and raise wages at a McDonald’s in Brooklyn, Henry decided that SEIU should go all in. The national union invested millions of dollars in a campaign for $15 hourly wages and a union for fast-food workers. Within several years, it became apparent that there was a legislative route to getting workers that raise, but no such route to bringing McDonald’s to the bargaining table.
Under the rubric of the Fight for $15, the union used its considerable political clout in the states where it had a massive number of members (California and New York above all) to prod city councils, mayors, legislatures, and governors to raise the minimum wage for workers in the fast-food or other designated sectors, and, eventually, for workers across the board. Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles did just that; California, New York, and then other blue states followed suit. It became a priority for Democrats in Congress and the Democrat now in the White House, but lacking the 60 Senate votes required for such a move at the national level, it was only in the states that the Fight for $15 prevailed. (And not all of them were blue; several red states raised minimum wages, albeit by ballot measure.)
Henry both inherited and herself devised a work-around for how to grow the union and also produce significant gains for non-union workers.
Still, this meant that millions of workers enjoyed wage hikes, even as the share of American workers in unions continued to shrink. Real wages for the bottom tenth of workers have increased by 10 percent in the past five years, even as wages for the top tenth stagnated, and much of that is due to minimum-wage increases.
Henry even devised a way to get workers in the fast-food industry to the not-quite-bargaining table, though they didn’t have a union. Last year, SEIU (which has roughly 700,000 members in California, about one-third of its national membership) prevailed upon the state’s legislature and governor to raise the minimum hourly wage for fast-food workers to $20. The legislation also created a table where workers, union representatives, fast-food franchise owners, corporate representatives, and state government officials could meet to discuss issues of common concern, which could include some conditions of work, but not wages or benefits.
In most European nations, this kind of sectoral bargaining actually can include bargaining over wages, but there, the workers are union members who already have contracts with management. What California has is yet another example of American exceptionalism: sectoral semi-bargaining absent contractual relations. But that’s still a far cry from where things were before SEIU put muscle behind the push on fast-food wages.
SEIU’S MEMBERSHIP ROLLS HAVE NOT BEEN STAGNANT, but most of its new members have joined in large part due to the union’s political clout in Democratic-run states. This is a pattern that predates Henry’s tenure. In 1999, when Andy Stern was SEIU’s president, the union (along with fellow union AFSCME) persuaded the legislature, the governor (Democrat Gray Davis), and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to establish county councils of home care recipients, whose care was at least partly paid for by public dollars, that could set conditions and standards of work for their caregivers. The councils, once established, gave caregivers the right to vote on unionizing. In Los Angeles County, SEIU conducted that campaign, unopposed, as it soon did in other counties, also unopposed, while AFSCME did the same in still other counties, again unopposed. While covering labor for the LA Weekly, I was present at the vote tabulation for Los Angeles caregivers. When the count was completed, SEIU had a new local encompassing all 74,000 of the county’s publicly paid caregivers. During Henry’s tenure, a similar process has yielded the union tens of thousands of child care provider members, too.
In a sense, then, Henry both inherited and herself devised a work-around for how to grow the union and also produce significant gains for non-union workers, at a time when traditional bottom-up organizing of nonprofessional workers was nearly impossible. Within SEIU, there were critics of the Fight for $15 campaign, in which the union invested tens of millions of dollars without getting a single dues-paying fast-food union member in return. Some, like the late Hector Figueroa, who headed the massive East Coast building service local, 32BJ (janitors, doormen, and such), argued that more resources be put into traditional organizing. During nearly all of Henry’s 14 years at the helm, however, the threadbare state of labor law’s protection of workers seeking unionization made that the steepest of uphill climbs. Her plan B—securing raises for low-wage workers and helping push Democratic economic discourse leftward—was, within its limits, a winning strategy and will surely be her legacy.
But should that be the course for a post-Henry SEIU, and more generally, for American unions going forward? The present lay of the land for unions is not what it was when Henry assumed the presidency in 2010, nor what it was ten or five years ago, or even last year. Concern over economic inequality and the central role that union decline has played in creating it has spread from academic circles to a sizable share of the public. More than two-thirds of our divided nation now approves of unions, with particularly high levels of support among the young.
Under Henry’s leadership, SEIU has blazed circuitous paths to helping workers at a time when the traditional paths have been blocked.
How much support among the young? The NLRB has recently released the vote totals of all the unionization elections it held at private colleges and universities (public colleges and universities are outside the NLRB’s jurisdiction) for graduate student teaching and research assistants, postdoc employees, and undergraduate dining hall and resident hall workers during 2022 and 2023. At every one of the 37 colleges and universities where those elections were held, the students voted to form or join a union. Out of the 23,898 students who voted in those elections, 21,613—an amazing 90.5 percent—voted yes on unionizing. (In the new year of 2024, the grad student TA and RA and postdoc employees of Caltech have also voted overwhelmingly to unionize. The next generation of Richard Feynmans, it turns out, will belong to the UAW.)
As teaching and research assistants, or even undergraduate dining hall workers, all these employees fell under the category of workers who couldn’t readily be replaced, or, therefore, fired. That may well suggest that their fellow 20-somethings across the entire American workforce are inclined to form and join unions, too, if only it weren’t so risky. That the largely young baristas at more than 300 Starbucks outlets have taken that step also suggests there may be more of an opportunity for large-scale unionization than we’ve seen in a very long time.
As events would have it, the union with which those baristas have voted to affiliate is Workers United, which is a division of SEIU. In the face of Starbucks’s refusal to bargain with those baristas, and the inability of labor law to compel the company to bargain, SEIU has devised, characteristically, another line of attack. At Starbucks’s annual shareholder meeting next month, it has helped put together a slate of worker-friendly candidates (including Wilma Liebman, who chaired the NLRB during Barack Obama’s presidency) for three seats on Starbucks’s board, and gathered some institutional shareholder support for them.
Still, there’s more that labor can be doing to ride the current wave of pro-union sentiment. Two years ago, former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse and I jointly authored a piece for the Prospect arguing that no union was doing what John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman had done in the mid-1930s: investing nearly their entire union treasuries in organizing the nation’s then-unorganized autoworkers, steelworkers, electrical workers, and rubber workers. Millions of workers responded to those campaigns by joining and forming the unions that were to provide the basis for America’s mass prosperity in the decades following World War II.
Given the current pro-labor zeitgeist, today’s unions should be embarking on a 21st-century version of those campaigns. Coming off its historic victory in its strike against the Big Three automakers, the UAW has begun to do that at non-union auto factories in the South. SEIU has begun to do that with the (unreplaceable) interns and residents at some hospitals. But there are a lot more hospitals where such campaigns could succeed.
Winning contracts can require strikes, but as teachers in red states, bakery workers in the Midwest, actors and writers in California, and autoworkers in the industrial heartland have all shown, strikes these days tend to get substantial public (and now, presidential) support.
Under Henry’s leadership, SEIU has blazed circuitous paths to helping workers at a time when the traditional paths have been blocked. Now that a generation of new union leaders is coming into power at a time when pro-union sentiment is the highest it’s been in half a century, some of those traditional path blockages should be subjected to the kind of battering rams that Lewis and Hillman deployed. In the world’s most capitalist nation, nothing short of that level of union commitment can really build worker power and restore the broadly shared prosperity that was once America’s calling card to the world.
