OPINION:
The international executive board of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) met this weekend to formalize what already was considered a done deal. It chose Mary Kay Henry as president of SEIU to fill out the term of departing leader Andy Stern.
The choice of Ms. Henry to head the union has confounded many expectations. Mr. Stern had hoped his secretary-treasurer, Anna Burger, would replace him. He had reason to expect that would happen. During his presidency, the executive board backed Mr. Stern even when he was doing extremely controversial things, including taking over large union locals and feuding with prominent union leaders. On the Association for Union Democracy’s website, Herman Benson last year charged that the executive board “has allowed itself to become a housebroken appendage to Stern’s will.”
So why did the executive board refuse to roll over and play dead when it came time to choose Mr. Stern’s successor? Call it the revenge of the vice presidents. Four of SEIU’s executive vice presidents sent a letter to the executive board that played up the need “to return to organizing as our top priority” as well as the need “to restore our relationships with the rest of the union movement and our progressive allies.” The members found that pitch persuasive and signaled well in advance of the vote that Ms. Henry would be their choice.
Their vote could be viewed as a mixed decision about Mr. Stern’s legacy. There are certain things that he did well that they hope Ms. Henry will continue. He built the SEIU into a powerhouse union by aggressively organizing many workers whom other unions did not want to woo. But some of that organizing energy has been siphoned off by Mr. Stern’s interests in score-settling and left-leaning politics. Privately, few union leaders have anything good to say about the man, and his frequent trips to the White House have been controversial. The Alliance for Worker Freedom (AWF) had called for a formal inquiry into why, exactly, Mr. Stern wasn’t subject to the normal lobbying disclosure rules when he clearly was lobbying. The AWF wanted to know the same about Ms. Burger.
Some observers have argued that Ms. Henry’s election was the revenge of the locals. Mr. Stern was hard on local union bosses and pushed to consolidate several locals into fewer regional superunions. He wasn’t always successful, and several of the officers he used to consolidate the locals were felled by scandal, creating much resentment. Ms. Henry might have a lighter touch than Mr. Stern and push less hard for consolidation, but Steve Early, on the liberal labor blog Labor Notes, poured cold water all over the idea that she was the “grass roots” candidate.
Ms. Henry’s campaign for president, Mr. Early wrote, “is about as far from the grassroots as sky-boxes are from the astro-turf in a big league stadium.” She is instead “a quintessential product of the SEIU managerial class recruited and installed by Stern or his predecessor, John Sweeney, over the last 30 years. … Henry has never been a working member of SEIU. She joined the union staff as a researcher in 1979. She managed to get on the [executive board], as a Stern appointee, 17 years later without ever having been elected to any local union position - not shop steward, negotiator, e-board member, or president. She has never even run a local union as a Stern-appointed trustee.” The third of 10 children who grew up outside of Detroit, Ms. Henry earned a degree from Michigan State in urban studies and labor relations and then went into union organizing for the SEIU. She made her mark organizing health care workers, co-founded the SEIU’s gay and lesbian Lavender Caucus, and rose to the position of executive vice president.
Ms. Henry is, at this point, a bit of a blank slate that people project onto, but her selection does give us a few clues about the future of SEIU. First, it’s likely to be slightly less political, at least in the near future. Mr. Stern left its finances a mess, so it will be difficult for the union to pour as much money into the midterm elections as it has into the past several election cycles. Ms. Henry will likely be preoccupied with the internal politics of the union rather than racking up a record number of visits to the White House.
Second, SEIU wants to organize more aggressively, and that is likely to be concentrated in the sector of the economy Ms. Henry knows best: health care. The government is set to become much more involved in medicine, and the only part of the union movement that isn’t shrinking these days is public employee unions. Ms. Henry can’t reverse that trend. However, unless the efforts to repeal health care reform succeed, the union she now leads just might profit from it.
Terrence Scanlon is president of Capital Research Center. He served as chairman of the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission during President Reagan’s second term.
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