Leader: Andrew L. Stern

Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, was born in 1950 in West Orange, New Jersey, a lawyer’s son. He graduated in 1972 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied business while learning activism in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements.

He began as a welfare case worker in a unionized government agency, quickly became a shop steward, and fought his way to the presidency of the Local in 1978. He once mused, "Everywhere I go there’s one big fight."

Andy Stern's relationships are mapped on Muckety.

In 1978, he married Jane Perkins, who went on to become head of the Friends of the Earth. In 1996, Andy Stern and his wife Jane Perkins created what they called the "Blue-Green Working Group" around their kitchen table, inviting friends from both movements (Blue collars and Green dollars) to start talking about green solutions, particularly for global warming, that keep workers in mind.

Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club, and other enviro leaders kept up the dialogue with key unions including the United Steelworkers of America, Andy Stern’s SEIU, Gerald McEntee’s American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).

Carl Pope's relationships are mapped on Muckety.

The Blues and Greens tried for years to converge—funded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation—but energy disputes and fate intervened. For a while they made progress toward accommodation if not agreement.

In 1984, John J. Sweeney, then-head of the SEIU, brought Stern to Washington to lead a national organizing campaign. Stern proved himself an outstanding organizer with his Janitors for Justice campaign.

As unions lost members, Stern saw that the labor movement’s salvation was to recruit the only labor pool that was growing: service workers and government employees. In time, he realized even that wasn’t enough.

When Sweeney left SEIU after being elected president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, Stern took his place. The Ivy League union boss soon saw a fatal weakness in the U.S. labor movement: it was fragmented, many small unions overlapped the same employers, ending up with no clout. The only solution was to merge the weak many into a few powerful mega-unions like Europe.