Service Employees International Union
Service Employees International Union is a labor union representing 2 million workers in over 100 occupations in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. SEIU is focused on organizing workers in three sectors: healthcare, including hospital, home care and nursing home workers; public services ; and property services.
SEIU has over 150 local branches. It is affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the Strategic Organizing Center, and the Canadian Labour Congress. SEIU's international headquarters is located in Washington, D.C., and it is one of the largest unions in the country.
The union is known for its strong support for Democratic candidates. It spent $28 million supporting Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. In 2012, SEIU was the top outside spender on Democratic campaigns, reporting almost $70 million of campaign donations, television ads and get-out-the-vote efforts in support of President Obama and other Democrats. SEIU is a major supporter of the Affordable Care Act and of increased minimum wage laws, including wage increases for fast food workers. The union is the primary backer of the Fight for $15.
History
The SEIU was founded on April 23, 1921 in Chicago as the Building Service Employees International Union ; its first members were janitors, elevator operators, and window washers. The union's membership increased significantly with a 1934 strike in New York City's Garment District. In order to reflect its increasingly diversified membership, in 1968 the union renamed itself Service Employees International Union. In 1980 through 1984, most of the SEIU's growth came from mergers with four other unions, including the International Jewelry Workers' Union and the Drug, Hospital, and Health Care Employees Union.In 1995, SEIU President John Sweeney was elected president of the AFL–CIO, the main confederation of labor unions in the United States. After Sweeney's departure, former social worker Andrew Stern was elected president of SEIU. In the first ten years of Stern's administration, the union's membership grew rapidly and the SEIU became the largest union in the AFL–CIO.
In 2003, SEIU was a founding member of the New Unity Partnership, an organization of unions that pushed for a greater commitment to organizing unorganized workers into unions. In 2005, SEIU was a founding member of the Change to Win Coalition, which furthered the reformist agenda. Their differences with AFL-CIO boiled over on the eve of the 2005 AFL–CIO convention, as the SEIU and Teamsters announced that they were disaffiliating from the AFL–CIO, and boycotting the convention. The Change to Win Federation held its founding convention in September 2005, where SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger was announced as the organization's chair.
In the following decade, several Change to Win members disaffiliated and re-joined the AFL–CIO, leaving SEIU, the Teamsters, and the United Farm Workers as the remaining members. The SEIU's decision to break away from the AFL–CIO is considered controversial by some labor experts. After the disaffiliation, the SEIU continued to experience significant growth in membership. Stern stepped down as president of SEIU in 2010, and was replaced by Mary Kay Henry, a long-time organizer and staff member at the union, and its first female president.
April Verrett was elected the union's first Black president in May 2024.
On January 8, 2025, the SEIU announced that they had rejoined the AFL-CIO after a 20-year absence, bringing the total membership of the AFL-CIO to nearly 15 million members, a move which the Associated Press said would help increase the union's political power.
Leadership
Presidents
- William Quesse
- Oscar Nelson
- Jerry Horan
- George Scalise
- William McFetridge
- David Sullivan
- George Hardy
- John Sweeney
- Richard Cordtz
- Andy Stern
- Mary Kay Henry
- April Verrett
Secretary-Treasurers
Organizing and political activities
Under the Stern and Henry presidencies, SEIU has organized workers in a number of industries. In some cases, these organizing drives have been built around nationwide campaigns, like the earlier Justice for Janitors campaign. SEIU has organized large numbers of home care attendants in Oregon, Missouri, and Wisconsin,among other states, in some cases working together with other unions.
Since 2004, the union has seen success organizing workers in Texas, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona in particular. Over 5,000 janitors organized with SEIU in Houston, Texas in 2005, which was especially significant due to the size of the campaign and its location in an area with low union density. In Florida, a high-profile strike at the University of Miami which lasted nine weeks and included a hunger strike, ended with the union winning representation of 425 janitors on campus. This victory was shortly followed by another 600 workers at North Shore Medical Center, also in Miami, voting to join the SEIU in early 2006.
One of the major potential areas of union growth in the United States is organizing workers usually hitherto considered "unorganizable," especially low-wage service sector workers, in what is often called "social movement organizing." SEIU has played a major role in the fast food worker strikes from 2012–2014 and has contributed more than $15 million to workers' centers and community organizations to organize them. The motto for the campaign is "$15 and a union," reflecting the call to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour and the unionization of fast food workers. SEIU has recently begun supporting lawsuits filed by fast food workers to the National Labor Relations Board, calling for McDonald's to be named a joint employer of the restaurants run by its franchisees, a move which would make it substantially easier to unionize McDonald's employees. Adjunct faculty at colleges and universities have been part of a similar campaign.
In June 2004, SEIU launched a non-union-member affiliate group called Purple Ocean as a mechanism to mobilize non-SEIU members in support of the union's agenda. Purple Ocean members do not have voting rights within the SEIU.
In November 2009, the SEIU and the National Union of Healthcare Workers competed for the right to represent 10,000 home health-care workers in Fresno, California. After the SEIU won the right to represent the workers, the NUHW charged the SEIU with changing ballots and threatening to report a worker to immigration officials. The NUHW asked that the election be invalidated and a new one ordered due to what it said was evidence of intimidation.
In 2012, SEIU, the American Federation of Teachers and AFSCME agreed on a politics-only alliance for the 2012 national election campaign. In 2016, AFSCME and SEIU announced an extension of that agreement, leading to speculation about a possible future merger.
In January 2015, the SEIU endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party's nominee for the US Presidency, despite her opposition to the union's flagship "Fight for $15" campaign.
In July 2020, three SEIU members, Felix Thomson, Julia Wallace, and Mark Ostapiak, published an article in the media and organizing forum Labor Notes describing their participation in a campaign to disaffiliate police unions from the SEIU.
The Service Employees International Union challenged California's Proposition 22. The proposition was initially overturned in the lower courts before the decision was reversed in the Court of Appeal.
On November 15, 2023, President Joe Biden nominated Nicole Berner, the general counsel of the SEIU, to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Sodexo
In 2009, the union launched a nationwide campaign against Sodexo, criticizing the company's labor standards. The union's strategy, which was ultimately unsuccessful, involved organizing student groups to pressure administrators at universities to kick Sodexo out of school cafeterias unless the company permitted unionization. Sodexo USA filed a civil lawsuit against SEIU under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act on March 17, 2011. In the complaint, Sodexo alleged that SEIU engaged in blackmail, vandalism, trespassing, harassment, and lobbying law violations, referring to the "Clean Up Sodexo" campaign as "old-fashioned, strongarm tactics" and SEIU behavior as "egregious" and "illegal."During the trial, it was revealed that in 1988, the SEIU had co-written a manual detailing how "outside pressure can involve jeopardizing relationships between the employer and lenders, investors, stockholders, customers, clients, patients, tenants, politicians, or others on whom the employer depends for funds." Tactics recommended include references to blackmail and extortion, accusations of racism and sexism, targeting the homes and neighborhoods of business leaders for demonstrations, and also explicitly stated that at times it is necessary to "disobey the law." Following the court discovery of this document, a settlement was reached where Sodexo withdrew the lawsuit and SEIU terminated its public campaign focused on Sodexo.