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Andy Stern was elected President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in 1996. He recalls one of his first tasks: he had to call the CEO of Kaiser Permanente, the union’s largest healthcare employer. His message was simple. “We need to change our relationship.” It worked. (1)

It was the beginning of a huge, painful, but ultimately successful reform and reorientation process for the union, which is now the largest and the fastest growing in North America. The Justice for Janitors campaign followed, in which the union looked at the industry as if it were actually involved, rather than just being an angry spectator on the sidelines. These jobs belonged to the workers, as well as their employers. As Stern says, “Employees and employers need organizations that solve problems, not create them. In a fast-paced, competitive world... unions need to level the playing field for all employers, not by simply raising the cost of doing business for unionized ones alone.” Developing a strategic industrial campaign on this basis, the SEIU launched the most successful private sector organizing campaign of the 1990s.

From 1996 to 2000, through a determined focus on organizing above all other things, the union grew by 27%. Critics (and there were plenty) maintained that union mergers and inter-union “poaching” were a factor in this success, but as the SEIU developed its partnership strategy further, and integrated this in ingenious ways with the ever-present focus on organizing, the growth continued. By 2005 union membership had increased by 55%. Like the New Zealand PSA story (see previous page), the SEIU had found innovative ways to let organizing and partnership complement each other. The difference in the two country’s governments (ie George Bush and Helen Clarke), and the legislative contexts under which they operated, could hardly have been more extreme. One can only conclude that government need not be the determining factor that many people think it is.

"Campaigns for social justice have almost invariably tended to pursue justice one country at a time. Now, with the advent of globalization, it's no longer that simple. We have to achieve justice everywhere at once in order to achieve it anywhere at all." With these words, Stern illustrated the next step the SEIU was to take. Many of the employers they worked with were multinationals, and so the union began working with other unions in international “global alliance” campaigns. These have been based on the formation of project-driven networks, rather than setting up cumbersome new organisations. This keeps bureaucracy to a minimum, and also ensures that the focus is squarely on direct, tangible results. These global alliances, often involving Union Network International, seem to be paving the way for a new form of international solidarity for the union movement, where alliance partners “act nationally but think globally” in industries such as cleaning, telecommunications, transport, security and catering.

Like partnership in the UK, every unionist in the USA seems to have a strong and determined view with regards to the SEIU. But one thing they have proved is that organizing and partnership are not opposite ends of a single spectrum. (The experience of "transformational unionism" in South Africa shows the same thing, as we will be reporting soon). You can be an organizing union and a partnership union at the same time. And it can work very, very well.

On other fronts, it was the SEIU who convinced the Chinese to insist that Walmart workers had the right to organize. It was they who led the way out of the national union federation (the AFL-CIO), taking a number of major unions with them, and set up a new grouping called Change to Win. Those who haven't made up their minds yet (and perhaps even those who have?) would be well advised to read Stern's recent book: A Country that Works before bringing down their gavel.

One can never know where a story like this will end. The recent regime change in the USA, which sees Bush isolated and many crediting the result to the labour movement, suggests that this is going to be a long story. Watch this space!

(1) For further reference, a recent version of the Kaiser Permanente national agreement is available from our Online Library here.