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.
But workers in different parts of the world don't seem to have much in common.
I think we live with that every day. We have workers who work in hospitals in Tenet [Healthcare Corp.]. Within that group we have every classification, from nurses to cafeteria workers. We have workers in urban areas like L.A. and workers in rural areas. What the union has been able to do is come up with a process to have people democratically make decisions about their own life.
We just need to conceive of the fact that it shouldn't have to end at a national border. Employers get that. They don't see borders as obstacles to their future. They don't stop at the shoreline and say, "We're an American employer." They appreciate that their future is served by joining the global economy. Workers need to appreciate that we are not going to be successful being regional or national when our employers are international.
About 40 percent of SEIU workers are government employees. How are their interests being served by this movement?
They are seeing their jobs being transferred many times to private multinational employers. They appreciate that their salaries get paid by American companies' tax dollars. They have an interest in keeping good jobs in that state. We are trying to find ways to make sure that we don't demolish our tax base here.
Why are you now getting involved with private-equity groups?
Have you heard of a company called TPG? That company [indirectly] employs 500,000 workers. It's one of the 10 largest American employers, and it's a private-equity company.
Now we have some of the largest employers in our country, and no one knows their name. But they do own these companies–they don't rent them, they aren't shareholders. They are the owners, and the way they own them is that they raise capital from pension funds and governments and rich individuals and they buy all the shares up in the marketplace and take the companies private, in which case very few people know what goes on because they have no governmental requirements for transparency or corporate governance.
What piqued your interest?
We spent time with private-equity groups because they happened to buy the two largest employers that SEIU has, which are HCA, the hospital system, and Equity Office Properties. HCA was the largest deal in history of private equity. That kind of shocked us. If you read the business pages, which I now do a lot more every day, someone else is being bought. So we have our economies being reshaped by a new form of capitalism that very few people know much about.
What's the strategy?
You need to get their attention. Much of their money comes from public pension funds, so we ask those pension funds to set up meetings for us. If they want our members' money, we believe they should have some semblance of responsibility to workers. We raised issues that we're concerned about. I think this is the next bust in the economy. What it takes for me to buy a condo–the paperwork and responsibility–is far greater than what the banks require for private-equity companies to borrow $1 billion. People are just throwing money like they once did for high tech. I'm not sure whether it is good for America in the long run.
Aren't private-equity groups helping the economy by rescuing failing companies?
These companies are not in trouble. Now private equity is taking companies that are perfectly healthy and they're loading them up with debt. Under our tax laws, all this debt is tax-deductible. Private equity could adopt an attitude about work, employees, and profit sharing that is actually healthy and helpful. Or they could be another bust in the economy, which requires, like we saw in Enron, workers losing pension fund money and the government being forced to step in and bail them out.
So how do can unions change that?
We want workers to share in success. It happens by having unions. That's what we're seeing in the Chrysler deal. Workers have a seat at the table. We're trying to get into the discussion to have some of the benefits of these purchases go to the benefit of workers and the community.