As one of the nation’s largest labor unions, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been at the forefront of several political battles for economic justice in recent years. The union and its various locals and state councils have organized workers in fast food, healthcare and government sectors while championing worker-focused policies at the state and national level, despite continued drop offs in union membership and a continued rightwing onslaught against organized labor.
Here are six keys to understanding the SEIU.
1. Two million strong, and counting
According to its own figures, the SEIU is currently made up of over 150 local union affiliates, or locals, consisting of some 2 million individual members. The locals are governed by both their own members and the SEIU international board, headquartered in Washington, D.C. The locals are also members of the union’s state councils, which work to organize the various groups to flex their muscles at a state level. The locals, state councils and the international organization all collect dues from their members, which are used to fund their operations, campaigns and political expenditures. SEIU members largely work in healthcare, property service and government.
2. SEIU leaders are divided between highly paid staff and elected board members
The SEIU’s current international president is Mary Kay Henry, the union’s first female president. Henry has worked for the SEIU since 1979, virtually all of her adult life, and was elected international president in 2010. In 2018, the SEIU paid Henry just over $380,000.
Along with Henry, key SEIU leaders include Gary Hudson, the union’s secretary-treasurer. Hudson and Henry are joined by six full-time executive vice presidents, including Valarie Long, Rocio Saenz, Neal Bisno, Luisa Blue, Heather Conroy and Leslie Frane.
The SEIU is governed at the highest level by its international executive board, which is elected by the membership and is made up of the president, secretary-treasurer, the executive vice presidents, 25 other vice presidents and 40 board members.
3. Major SEIU locals have tens if not hundreds of thousands of members
The largest individual SEIU chapter is local 1199 United Healthcare Workers East, the largest healthcare workers union in the United States. The union represents some 450,000 members in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Florida and Washington, D.C.
On the other side of the country are SEIU United Healthcare Workers West and SEIU 2015. Based in Oakland, SEIU-UHW is a labor powerhouse, representing nearly 100,000 workers in California, and a major political actor on the West Coast. The local has played a key role in ballot measures to raise wages in the state, while also providing startup funding for ballot measure advocacy group the Fairness Project. SEIU 2015 was created by splitting UHW in 2015 and claims some 385,000 members in California.
Another highly influential local is New York City-based 32BJ, which represents 175,000 members. 32BJ is the country’s largest property service workers union. While headquartered in New York and mostly representing members on the East Coast, 32BJ covers workers throughout much of the U.S.
4. Fighting for higher wages and more members
The SEIU has almost doubled in size since 2000, from 1 million members to close to 2 million. This has come in large part thanks to aggressive organizing and deal making within major hospital systems.
The SEIU has also grown its political power. Working with the economic justice group New York Communities for Change, the SEIU launched the first Fight for $15 campaign in November 2012, using its vast network of organizers to make a $15 per hour minimum wage into a national issue. With the SEIU’s help, dozens of states and major cities have raised workers’ wages, while a $15 per hour national minimum wage is now a Democratic litmus test.
The SEIU has also used its money and resources to spawn political advocacy groups like BlackPAC, a super PAC focused on Black voter turnout, and the Fairness Project, which has helped to start and win ballot initiatives across the country to expand Medicaid, raise wages and establish guaranteed paid family leave.
5. Recent Controversy
In the last decade, SEIU has seen massive changes in both its leadership and locals. Starting in 2009, the union began an aggressive campaign to take over and reform several locals using a method called “trusteeship.” The international union essentially declares a local to be financially or otherwise mismanaged and takes control of the union, restructuring and purging leadership as it sees fit. Notable chapters taken over by SEIU International include SEIU United Healthcare Workers West and SEIU Healthcare Michigan. In UHW, former 1199 President Dave Regan and others, including Mary Kay Henry, were tasked with taking over the union. Regan fired numerous union leaders and dissident members, some of whom went on to form the National Union of Healthcare Workers, a successful independent union.
Regan has also been a controversial SEIU official for other reasons: In early 2020, the SEIU settled a major sexual harassment suit that accused Regan of inappropriate behavior, including sexual advances on female co-workers, public drunkenness at SEIU events, and retaliation. A few years earlier, in October 2017, then-SEIU Vice President Scott Courtney resigned amidst accusations of sexual misconduct.
Many of the accusations against Regan were outlined in an extensive report by the labor journalist Mike Elk at his site Payday Report, where Elk also included evidence that Henry knew of allegations earlier but chose not to act. Regan and the SEIU deny the claims of sexual harassment.
6. Future
The SEIU is one of the nation’s few growing unions and hopes to keep it that way. While its political advocacy work has been highly advantageous to members, victories can also translate to more members and more political influence.
Although most people wouldn’t know it, the official Fight for $15 project was launched with the explicit goal of unionizing fast-food workers. More members and higher wages mean a lot more organizing and spending power for one of the nation’s most influential unions. However, the SEIU has seen essentially no movement on organizing fast-food workers; as the American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson points out, the structure of the fast-food workforce makes it particularly challenging to unionize, while federal labor laws have become essentially useless.
“In a campaign on which SEIU was spending many millions of dollars every year,” Meyerson wrote in 2019, “the Fight for 15 had failed to unionize a single worker.”
The recent controversies impacting the highest levels of the union’s leadership could spell doom for a blossoming economic justice movement—or at least for some of those involved in it. Unions will also remain under siege by a conservative federal court system and several states continuing to wage war on organized labor. At least for now, though, the SEIU will remain a center of power in the liberal world.
