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* President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the largest union in the AFL-CIO
* Was instructed in the techniques of radical union organizing by the Midwest Academy, which was formed by Paul and Heather Booth to train community organizers and infiltrate the labor movement
* Member of the Executive Committee of the Democratic Party auxiliary America Coming Together (ACT), which is funded by George Soros
The Los Angeles Times reports that Service Employees International Union (SEIU) leader Andrew Stern wields “formidable clout” in influencing the policy decisions of Barack Obama. Says the Times:
“When the president met privately with the health industry leaders [recently], Stern and a second [SEIU] official were the only labor representatives in the room.
“In a fractious labor movement fraught with rivalries and mutual suspicion, Stern's close association with Obama has given him cachet that may prove important in the fierce competition to lure new members….
“The Obama-Stern relationship has emerged as one of the most curious within the young administration.
“The SEIU spent $60 million to help elect Obama, according to the union. Stern said the group deployed 100,000 volunteers during the campaign, including 3,000 who worked on the election full time.
“Now in the White House, Obama has continued to derive political benefits from the union. It was the SEIU's health chief, Dennis Rivera, who helped bring industry to the table to start talks on a healthcare overhaul.
“With nearly 2 million members, the SEIU says it has people in 13 states whose senators are considered important targets in the lobbying effort behind the emerging Democratic healthcare bill. The union wants to coax those senators into voting for the bill.
“Stern can boast that union officials are scattered throughout the Obama administration. White House political director Patrick Gaspard is a former executive at an SEIU local based in New York. No other union has placed anyone at such a high level in the White House.
“Anna Burger, SEIU secretary-treasurer, was appointed to Obama's economic recovery board. And union associate counsel John Sullivan was named to the six-member Federal Election Commission.
“Moreover, Stern has enjoyed considerable entree to the new administration -- starting on Inauguration Day, when he joined Obama and the new president's family on the reviewing stand outside the White House to watch the inaugural parade.
Stern estimates he visits the White House once a week. SEIU officials talk to senior Obama advisor Nancy-Ann DeParle about healthcare -- a top priority for Stern -- and to Obama aide Cecilia Munoz about immigration, Stern said.
“‘We get heard,’ Stern said.”
Former New Leftist Andrew Stern is the current President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the second largest labor union in North America. The economic model championed by Stern and SEIU includes universal health care, increased taxation, an expansion of social welfare programs, and further opportunities for workers to unionize. According to Ryan Lizza, Associate Editor of The New Republic, SEIU leaders such as Stern "tend to be radical, even socialist."
Stern was born November 22, 1950 in West Orange, New Jersey. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a B.A. in Education and Urban Planning in 1971.
Stern was trained in the tactics of radical activism at the Midwest Academy, which was formed by former Students for a Democratic Society members Paul and Heather Booth. This Academy was created to teach leftist community organizers how to promote social change and infiltrate the labor movement.
Stern first joined SEIU as a member in 1973 and quickly rose through its ranks. In 1980 he was named to SEIU's Executive Board, and four years later John Sweeney, then-President of the union, placed Stern in charge of SEIU's organizing efforts.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Stern was a key organizer of SEIU's “Justice for Janitors” campaign demanding added benefits on behalf of cleaning and maintenance workers in Los Angeles. Using (with Sweeney’s approval) New Left tactics from the 1960s, Stern and his cohorts led strikers -- who wore red shirts and carried signs depicting brooms held in clenched fists -- in blocking access to a number of city streets.
In 1996 Stern succeeded Sweeney as SEIU President.
During his years at SEIU's helm, Stern has been instrumental in gaining more than a million new members for the union; membership now exceeds 2 million people.
Stern also has steered his union toward partisan politics. “We’re going to build the strongest grassroots political voice in North America,” he told more than 3,000 SEIU delegates in his June 2004 national convention address in San Francisco.
At that same convention, Stern and SEIU pledged to spend $40 million for more than 2,000 organizers to work full time against President George W. Bush’s re-election bid in 17 key battleground states. That figure was later augmented by an additional $25 million which SEIU spent on voter-registration, voter-education, and get-out-the-vote initiatives. At Stern's behest, the union also supplied some 50,000 “volunteers” from its member rolls to aid the aforementioned organizers during the days and weeks just prior to Election Day.
Stern contends that the AFL-CIO’s “loose trade association of 65 disparate unions” is too weak to carry the labor movement successfully into the future. To revitalize labor, he proposes consolidating these 65 into no more than 15, and perhaps as few as 5, giant unions -- all subsumed under the purple and gold logo of national SEIU and its supreme boss, Andrew Stern. As Stern foresees it, these unions will have enough money, power, and political clout to intimidate many companies, industries, and politicians.
Under Stern's leadership, SEIU commonly bullies and pressures companies into signing agreements to make SEIU the representative of their employees. If a company resists joining the union, Stern and his political, media and activist allies conspire to launch “corporate campaigns” aimed at breaking down that resistance through what they term the “death of a thousand cuts.” In such campaigns, the cabal of attackers harasses and disrupts company activities, sends vicious emails and letters to stockholders, intimidates customers, stalks and frightens employees, files baseless lawsuits, and plants false stories with media allies to smear the company’s reputation.
These pressure tactics are often successful in bringing companies into SEIU's fold. When this occurs, all of their employees are required to join the union. SEIU prefers this arrangement (which Stern calls “Union Democracy”) because, in times past, a large percentage of workers who were given a choice voted against joining the union.
In 2005 there was infighting among a number of SEIU's member unions, as well as between SEIU and John Sweeney’s AFL-CIO. At the heart of the tension was Sweeney’s July 2005 announcement that he planned to divert more than $37 million in AFL-CIO funds away from support for the Democratic Party, and into efforts to recruit and organize more union members.
In response, Stern and four other union leaders formed a group called the New Unity Partnership, which opposed Sweeney’s reelection. When it became apparent, however, that Sweney's reelection was inevitable, Stern announced that SEIU would be withdrawing from the AFL-CIO union federation.
In 2005 the New Unity Partnership was dissolved and re-formed as the Stern-founded Change To Win (CTW) federation, which seeks to raise the minimum wage and/or enact living wage ordinances; eliminate free trade agreements; and pass “a sensible immigration policy” recognizing that “undocumented workers contribute much to America” and “should be ... provided with a path to citizenship.” CTW consists of seven unions whose combined membership exceeds 6 million. These include the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Laborers' International Union of North America, SEIU, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, the United Farm Workers of America, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, and UNITE HERE.
Stern is a leading figure in the so-called Shadow Party, a nationwide network of more than five-dozen unions, non-profit activist groups, and think tanks whose agendas are ideologically leftist, and who are engaged in campaigning for the Democrat Party. In July 2003, Stern -- along with fellow Shadow Party leaders Harold Ickes, Steve Rosenthal, Ellen Malcolm, and Jim Jordan -- formed America Votes, a national coalition of grassroots, get-out-the-vote organizations.
Stern also sits on the Executive Committee of yet another Shadow Party constituent group, America Coming Together.
In 2005 Stern was featured in the AlterNet-published book Start Making Sense: Turning the Lessons of Election 2004 into Winning Progressive Politics. This book also included an interview with MoveOn.org co-founder Wes Boyd, as well as articles penned by blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama.
In 2006 Stern published his own book, A Country That Works, wherein he identifies globalization and the widening economic gap between rich and poor as the primary problems facing the world. Calling for unions to be the dominant vehicles for the promotion of comprehensive social reforms, Stern lays out his proposals for increased taxation on high earners and the implementation of universal health care.
In 2007 Stern helped organize Working For Us (WFU), a political action committee that seeks to "elect lawmakers who support a progressive political agenda." Aiming to move the Democratic Party ever further to the political left, Stern and WFU work to prevent conservative and moderate Democrats from gaining too much influence in government. The Executive Director of WFU is Steve Rosenthal, co-founder of America Coming Together.
In September 2008 Stern was a signatory to a statement demanding that a portion of the $700 billion “bailout bill,” enacted by the federal government to preserve the solvency of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, be used instead to fund various social and economic “justice” provisions. Said this document:
“Major public investment in new energy and conservation, rebuilding schools and infrastructure, extending unemployment and food stamps, helping states avoid crippling cuts in police and health services -- is vital to get the real economy moving and put people back to work. No bailout should proceed without being linked to support for a major public investment plan to get the economy going.”
Fellow signers of the foregoing statement included Maude Hurd, Robert Borosage, John Sweeney, Nan Aron, John Podesta, Brent Blackwelder, John Cavanagh, Kevin Zeese, and Wade Henderson.
Stern has been writing blogs for the Huffington Post since 2005.
In 2008 Stern supported Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy.
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