SEIU's Andy Stern: Going Global
These days Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, pays a lot more attention to the business pages of the newspaper. Between American companies setting up shop on foreign soil and international companies plopping down in the United States, his workers are increasingly affected by the pressures of globalization. In addition, private-equity groups are buying up some of the union's biggest employers.
Instead of fighting the changes, Stern hopes he can work with company executives to broaden the reach of his union–which has 1.8 million members including janitors, healthcare workers, and government employees–in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Sounding more like an executive than a union boss, Stern wants to find a way to make unions help companies stay competitive.
In May you visited China. Since your union members are service workers who aren't threatened by outsourcing, why bother?
Because our employers are all in China. So, the largest security and food service companies in the world are moving to China. Wal-Mart is in China. They are not directly our union's employers, but obviously we have a lot of interest there, and we're very helpful on working with the Chinese on organizing. We go there because our employers have gone there, and what we learned in the U.S. is that as employers get larger, we're less able to affect their behavior. As they grow globally, we begin to think more globally as well. China is the mother lode for American corporations.
What came out of the trip?
This is my sixth trip to China. I first went in 2002. This is sort of a continuation of trying to understand China. I met with our employers in China and their unions. The last time we were there, we did a seminar on organizing. We had some exchanges. They come here and we go there. So we've learned a lot from how [Chinese unions] do their work, and they've learned a lot about how to do grass-roots work.
Historically, when they were representing people in state-owned companies, they had a lot more interaction with the government. Now that they have private employers, they are not familiar with organizing from the bottom up instead of with the employer and party.
Why should your members pay dues to improve the condition of Chinese workers?
Workers who work for the same employers, whether they are in our country or around the world, are much stronger when they work together. The largest employer in Africa is a security company who owns Wackenhut in the U.S. We have been unable to get Wackenhut to respect workers' rights because they are a very small part of a very big company. So now we joined together with other unions to deal with Group 4 Securicor, which owns Wackenhut, to try to put pressure on them to respect workers in the U.S. but also respect workers' rights in Africa, Poland, and Asia, and other places around the world.
Despite the fact there are geographical borders, our employers are global and we don't have the strength when we are just in our country. When we represent a small number of employees in a large corporation, we can't influence [its] behavior. We're on the verge of having global unions. Capital and trade and companies have gone global–how come unions shouldn't be global? It doesn't make sense for the workers.
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