Jump to content

Service Employees International Union

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 63.171.1.2 (talk) at 18:59, 25 July 2007 (→SEIU Locals). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Service Employees International Union
Founded1921
Members
1.8 million (2005)
AffiliationsChange to Win Federation, CLC
Websitehttp://www.seiu.org/, http://www.seiu.ca/

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is a labor union representing 1.8 million workers in about 100 occupations in the United States and Canada. The main divisions are health care (around 50% of the union's membership, including hospital, home care and nursing home workers), public services (government employees), and property services (including janitors and security officers). With over 300 local branches, SEIU is affiliated with the Change to Win Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress. It is based in Washington, D.C., and is structured into seven internal departments: Communications, Education, Human Rights, International Affairs, Organization, Political, and Research.

SEIU is sometimes referred to as the "purple army," easily recognized at political events thanks to the union's purple shirts. The union is also known for its Justice for Janitors campaigns.

History

The SEIU was founded in 1921 in Chicago; its first members were janitors, elevator operators, and window washers. Membership increased significantly with a strike in New York City's Garment District in 1934. Formerly known as the Building Service Employees' International Union, it absorbed the International Jewelry Workers Union in 1980 and later the Drug, Hospital, and Health Care Employees Union (Local 1199), Health & Human Services Workers.

In 1995, SEIU President John Sweeney was elected president of the AFL-CIO, the labor federation that serves as an umbrella organization for unions. After Sweeney's departure, former social worker Andrew Stern was elected president of SEIU. In the first ten years of Stern's administration, the union's membership grew rapidly, making SEIU the largest union in the AFL-CIO by 2000.[citation needed]

In 2003, SEIU was a founding member of the New Unity Partnership2, an organization of unions which pushed for reforms at the national level, and most importantly, a greater commitment to organizing unorganized workers into unions. In 2005, SEIU was a founding member of the Change to Win Coalition, which furthered the reformist agenda, criticizing the AFL-CIO for focusing its attention on election politics, instead of taking sufficient action to encourage organizing in the face of decreasing union membership.

In June of 2004, SEIU launched a non-union-member affiliate group called Purple Ocean to stand with workers in the fight for economic justice.

On the eve of the 2005 AFL-CIO convention, SEIU, along with its Change to Win partners, the Teamsters union, and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, announced that it was disaffiliating from the AFL-CIO after the 50-year-old labor federation declined to pass the Coalition's suggested reforms. The Change to Win Federation held its founding convention in September 2005, where SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger was announced as the organizations' Chair. As with other Change to Win unions, most individual SEIU locals remain affiliated to regional AFL-CIO bodies through "solidarity charters."

Recently, the union has made a concerted effort to expand outside of its traditional base on the coasts. Since 2004, the union has seen success organizing workers in Texas, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona in particular.[citation needed] Over 5000 janitors organized with SEIU in Houston, Texas in 2005, which was especially significant due to the size of the campaign and its location in an area with low union density. [1] In Florida, a high-profile strike at the University of Miami which lasted nine weeks and included a hunger strike, ended with the union winning representation of 425 janitors on campus. [2] This victory was shortly followed by another 600 workers at North Shore Medical Center, also in Miami, voting to join the SEIU in early 2006.[3].

There is also a joint local of SEIU and the New York-based union UNITE HERE called Service Workers United.

In 2006 and 2007, Oregon's SEIU Local 503, OPEU (Oregon Public Employees Union) decided to build on its earlier successes in organizing state-paid "long-term care providers", including Homecare workers (in-home care providers) and family child care providers, by organizing adult foster home providers who received state funding. By forming a union, providers would for the first time be able to collectively bargain a contract with the state over service fees, benefits, regulations, and respect. In the spring of 2007 the state Employment Relations Board verified that a significant majority of providers across Oregon had signed authorization cards supporting forming a union, and Governor Ted Kulongoski signed an executive order recognizing adult foster care providers as a union, and opening the path to contract bargaining [4]. Following the governor's executive order, the Oregon legislature passed a bill, on June 28, 2007, codifying the executive order and making the adult foster care providers state employees solely "for the purpose of collective bargaining." [5]; [6] This is the first time adult foster care providers were able to form a union in the United States.

Trivia

  • SEIU's Los Angeles Justice for Janitors campaign was portrayed in the motion picture Bread and Roses.

Presidents

SEIU Locals

See also

Template:Organized labour portal

References

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Service_Employees_International_Union&oldid=147050306"