The Dance of Sweeney and Stern: Sweeney’s Understudy Becomes a Rival

The Dance of Sweeney and Stern: The SEIU Takes the Lead and Divides the House of Labor (full series)
“Big” Labor in1990 | Justice for Janitors | Sweeney Ascends
Sweeney’s Understudy Becomes a Rival | Stern Pushes the Button

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Sweeney’s Understudy Becomes a Rival

When Sweeney took over the AFL-CIO, he created a vacancy in the leadership of the SEIU. Richard Cordtz, Sweeney’s number two, initially took over ad interim, but Sweeney’s former campaign manager and SEIU organizing director Andy Stern challenged him, unseating Cordtz in 1996. From essentially the moment he took over SEIU and continued Sweeney’s aggressive corporate-campaign organizing and social-movement unionism, observers suggested that Stern could one day succeed Sweeney at the AFL-CIO as well.

On organizing and politics, Stern followed in Sweeney’s footsteps. He continued the corporate campaign organizing model from Justice for Janitors, expanding it to the Eastern cities. Politically, Stern aligned with Democrats and the progressive left, just like Sweeney had done at SEIU and continued to do at the AFL-CIO.

Where Stern broke from his old boss was union internal management. Sweeney had tolerated the old fiefdoms left over from SEIU’s mobbed-up days, protecting local union autonomy. Stern, who had the backing of health-care local unions established in the Sweeney years, had no tolerance for alternative power centers that could threaten his top-down management and strategy for the union. Old bossmen like Local 32B’s Gus Bevona and Eddie Sullivan, leader of Boston’s Local 254 were pensioned off or shoved out and replaced by Stern’s handpicked operatives.

Membership, which Stern prided himself on growing, was also subject to top-down management. While demonstrative and disruptive corporate campaigns modeled on Justice for Janitors won headlines, backroom political deals brought in many of the members and their dues money. SEIU promoted the home health care “dues skim,” the practice of having liberal politicians backed by SEIU campaign donations deem welfare recipients’ in-home family caregivers to be “government employees” subject to unionization and (under court precedents prevailing at the time) forced dues. Jeremy Lott and Vincent Vernuccio described how the “dues skim” functions:

Federal money is sent to the states in question to pass on as subsidy checks to homecare providers who are mostly friends and family members taking care of sick relatives or daycare providers taking care of low-income children, many of which are also relatives. But union-friendly lawmakers and governors claim that since the subsidies emanate from the state, these providers can be considered public employees. And as public employees, they can be unionized which means the state can automatically deduct dues which will then be sent directly to the union. The union has an election (of which many of the providers are not aware) and dues money starts bleeding from their subsidy checks.

Stern was not satisfied merely leading the SEIU. He had dreams of restoring Big Labor to its mid-20th-century heights of power and influence, and many speculated his goals included taking John Sweeney’s job for himself.

In 2003, Stern began laying groundwork for his power play. With support from the Hotel Employees-Restaurant Employees (HERE) union; the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE); the Laborers International Union (LiUNA); and the Carpenters Union, Stern announced the New Unity Partnership. It was not officially a rival to Sweeney’s AFL-CIO, but rather a coalition of unions led by the SEIU that would campaign for changes to internal AFL-CIO procedures to enable large-scale organizing campaigns.

Since the AFL-CIO’s formation in the 1950s, it has operated on the principle of “jurisdiction” among its member unions. The federation grants each member union a set of workforces and territories for which it was responsible, and this “jurisdiction” is exclusive of all other AFL-CIO members. “Raiding,” the practice of unions seeking to gain membership by organizing in other unions’ jurisdictions or by competing with existing unions for members, is prohibited as a condition of membership in the AFL-CIO.

Stern expressed dissatisfaction with SEIU’s jurisdictional allotment and recommended consolidating smaller AFL-CIO member unions. Contemporary reporting indicated that SEIU leadership considered explicitly violating assigned jurisdictional limits. A confrontation with Sweeney was inevitable.

Defeat and Division

Stern argued that the AFL-CIO needed major changes, but only after the defeat of then-incumbent President George W. Bush. While he criticized the Democratic Party of then-Senator and presidential nominee John Kerry for insufficient support of labor organizing, earning a rebuke from the AFL-CIO’s Sweeney, Stern’s SEIU spent an estimated $65 million in union funds and other in-kind efforts supporting Kerry and other Democrats for the 2004 election.

Both the AFL-CIO and SEIU were key members of the America Coming Together (ACT) liberal political action coalition. Steve Rosenthal, who headed political operations at the AFL-CIO after Sweeney’s election, was named ACT CEO. SEIU spent $26 million on the ACT effort, which was also funded by the parent union federation. Other funders of ACT included major liberal donors including finance billionaire George Soros, the late Progressive Insurance CEO Peter Lewis, and liberal interest groups such as America Votes (then headed by pro-abortion activist Cecile Richards, an alumna of SEIU Justice for Janitors organizing).

But the country re-elected President Bush and the Republican federal trifecta, despite Big Labor and the Everything Leftist machine’s investments in their defeat. Stern saw his moment. The New York Times reported that Stern issued a letter to his fellow union bosses one week after their $150 million political efforts against Bush and the Republicans calling for fundamental changes to the AFL-CIO, led by a $25 million campaign to organize workers at Walmart.

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In the next installment, the SEIU, Teamsters and other unions quit the AFL-CIO and their own union federation.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-dance-of-sweeney-and-stern-part-4/