Path to Power
“One part of me wanted to be a psychiatrist, one part of me wanted to be a lawyer, and one part wanted to be an organizer,” Stern said in and interview with WhorunsGov.com. “The union allowed me to fulfill all three.”
Stern grew up in a West Orange, N.J., household where his parents discussed everything from the burgeoning civil-rights movement to the riots in northern New Jersey, but “no one discussed unions,” he said.
Although Stern didn’t learn about unions at home, what he did glean from his parents was “a basic sense about fairness and justice,” he said. “My father was one of these people who loved other people and became friendly with them whether they were the guy at the gas station or the CEO at a company,” he said.
Stern graduated high school in 1968, and moved to Philadelphia to attend college at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. He didn’t last long in the business program, he said, choosing instead to focus on other things, like political activism.
Early Political Activism
The first protest Stern organized at UPenn was “to end students having to wear ties to dinner,” he said. Later, Stern irked the administration with a “little sit-in over a parking lot.”The university wanted to turn an area that had become a de-facto community park into a parking lot. Stern’s “little sit-in” succeeded in halting the project, at least until his graduation.
“I would say they were not unhappy I was leaving the school,” he said of UPenn’s higher-ups. He was out the door in 1971 with a teaching degree he called “urban education,” which Stern said the school created especially for him.
He went to work for the state of Pennsylvania as a social-service worker, but his evenings were dedicated to a group called the Welfare Rights Organization, which was trying to empower people to get off of welfare through community-worker alliances.
In 1973 he found himself attending a union meeting for that organization (“because there was pizza,” he said). He happened to be the last person in attendance when the board voted for a new leadership position. By acclamation, Stern found himself the assistant shop steward for the Vine District Welfare Office. A few mergers and name-changes later, that office is now known as SEIU local 668.
In 1974, members of his chapter asked him to be their representative to the state organization, and the boy from the suburbs began working full-time at the Pennsylvania Social Service Union. Stern also began attending classes at Temple law school in the evenings. In 1977, Stern won the presidency of the union in his area.
In 1983, John Sweeney, who was then president of the SEIU, asked Stern to help organize workers in California. Stern went to California, and stayed on at the SEIU’s national organization after the job was done. In 1984, he became assistant to SEIU president Sweeney for organizing work. He moved to SEIU headquarters in Washington, D.C.
SEIU Presidency
Stern assisted Sweeney until 1996, when Sweeney left to head the AFL-CIO. At the time, SEIU was a member of the federation of unions, which had held sway over labor politics since its creation in 1955.
Sweeney had hand-picked successor, who was then serving as interim president. When Stern announced he would challenge him in the SEIU presidential election, he found himself fired—and kept out of his office with police tape—on what he called trumped-up charges of insubordination.
But Stern, already a dynamic figure, was not without supporters. When he was fired, Stern vowed not to return until he could claim the presidency of the SEIU. Stern managed to return four months later without breaking that promise.
Leaving the AFL-CIO
While Stern’s SEIU was the largest and fastest-growing union, the larger labor movement had come to something of a crisis point in the late 1990s. Stern led the charge for change.
Ever the upstart, Stern proposed a new direction for the AFL-CIO, which he saw as on a downswing because of its unwillingness to adapt to the 21st century economy. “Unions, unfortunately, forgot to change when the world changed,” he told a Philadelphia crowd in 2006. “Now we’re trying to catch up with what we need to do.”
Stern demanded a corporate-style consolidation of the AFL-CIO’s 58 unions into 20 unions, in order to give each streamlined organization more power. He also called for massive and well-funded organizing drives to combat waning membership.
This didn’t win him many fans in the labor movement. ''He's trying to implement dictatorial rule,” Tom Buffenbarger, president of the union that represents machinists and aerospace workers, told the New York Times in 2005. ''He's trying to corporatize the labor movement.”
Stern had a different view: “American workers weren't getting raises, were losing their health care and their retirement, we didn't believe the AFL-CIO really had a plan or an ability to change that.”
On the opening day of the 2005 AFL-CIO conference, The International Brotherhood of Teamsters and Stern’s SEIU broke from the AFL-CIO and created their own federation, called Change to Win. Today, Change to Win is a federation of seven unions with six millions workers.
At the time, AFL-CIO president Sweeney called the break, “a grievous insult.” But time has healed some of those wounds, Stern said. “We’re now back to working on issues together,” Stern said of his former boss.
Stern said Change to Win hopes to work with the AFL-CIO and the National Education Association during the Obama administration, and could even form an alliance with those groups in the future.
