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Andrew L. Stern (born November 22, 1950) is the former
president President most commonly refers to: *President (corporate title) * President (education), a leader of a college or university * President (government title) President may also refer to: Automobiles * Nissan President, a 1966–2010 Japanese ...
of the
Service Employees International Union Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is a labor union representing almost 1.9 million workers in over 100 occupations in the United States and Canada. SEIU is focused on organizing workers in three sectors: healthcare (over half of members ...
, and now serves as its President Emeritus. Stern has been a senior fellow at Georgetown University,
Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
, and is now a Senior Fellow at the Economic Security Project. Under his leadership SEIU became both the fastest growing union in the world, growing to 1,200,000 members, and the largest political action committee (PAC) in the United States. As SEIU President, Stern was a constant figure in the news. He was on the covers o
The New York Times Magazine


and Business Week, featured on CBS 60 Minutes, on Fox as the Power Player of the Week, CNN, and the Washington Post. He talks about his career and philosophy on the podcast The Great Battlefiel

He is the author of two books, ''A Country That Works'' (2006), and ''Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream'' (2016). Stern was a key organizer and leader in two of the most significant changes in social policy in the 21st century: healthcare reform and a guaranteed income. According to ''
Modern Healthcare ''Modern Healthcare'' is a twice monthly business publication targeting executives in the healthcare industry. It is an independent American publisher of national and regional healthcare news. The publication is also known for providing statistic ...
'' magazine Stern was one of "the chief architects of healthcare reform." SEIU participated in over 12 coalitions with business leaders, labor and advocates, hosted the first Presidential primary in 2008 on healthcare, and after President Obama's election created a war room with over 100 staff in the states advocating until the successful completion of the legislative process. Stern’s book, ''Raising the Floor'', discussed his exploration into the future of work and jobs leading to his leadership on providing cash, and a guaranteed income for all American. Stern's book and conversations helped spark Andrew Yang’s candidacy for President promoting his platform of creating a universal basic income. With other organizers Stern assisted in the founding of the Economic Security Project, and serves on the board of the Income Movement. Stern was an early organizer for cash benefits and a guaranteed income which led to the passage of the Child Tax Credit as well as setting the stage for an increasing number of local experiments, as well as the American Recovery Act’s cash stimulus payments.


Early life and career

Andy Stern grew up in
West Orange, New Jersey West Orange is a suburban township in Essex County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. As of the 2020 United States Census, its population was 48,843, an increase of 2,636 (+5.7%) from the 46,207 counted in the 2010 Census.
, where his father was a lawyer and his mother worked both at home and in healthcare. Stern graduated from West Orange High School in 1968. He began college as a business major at the
University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
's
Wharton School of Business The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ( ; also known as Wharton Business School, the Wharton School, Penn Wharton, and Wharton) is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a private Ivy League research university in ...
, but ultimately graduated in 1971 with a BA in
education Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty ...
and
urban planning Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, ...
.http://www.tnr.com/story.html?id=61f4ea0d-90bb-4a38-9650-c507fa73efbe Stern began his career as a
welfare Welfare, or commonly social welfare, is a type of government support intended to ensure that members of a society can meet basic human needs such as food and shelter. Social security may either be synonymous with welfare, or refer specifical ...
caseworker and member of the SEIU Local 668 in 1973, eventually being elected president in 1977 of his
Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
local. In 1980, he was elected to SEIU’s International Executive Board, as the youngest member in its history, and in 1984 the union's then-president John Sweeney put him in charge of SEIU’s organizing efforts.


SEIU President

In 1996, Stern was elected to the presidency of the union in a hotly contested election. He led a major restructuring of the union to “grow stronger not smaller” spending nearly 50% of its resources on organizin

In 1999 SEIU won the largest union election since 1935 for 74,000 LA home care worker
IN BIGGEST DRIVE SINCE 1937, UNION GAINS A VICTORY
By 2000 SEIU had become the largest union in the AF
CIO
and the fastest growing union in the world. It launched major North American campaigns “Justice for Janitors
Historic Justice for Janitors campaign inspires a new generation
“Stand for Security,” “There’s No Place Like Home” (home care workers), as well as child care, Southern, hospital and nursing home workers, and set up offices around the world to lead transnational global accountability efforts for Sodexo, Securitas, and IS

As a result of these efforts, SEIU grew 1,200,000 members under his leadership. Stern was both a progressive and practical labor leader as Al Hunt profiled in his WSJ column, "He (Stern) is a powerhouse in the labor movement and American politics, and one of a new breed of labor leaders determined to energize the movement." The Washington Business Journal profile was headlined "Militant but pragmatic labor leader wants a vibrant D.C." After launching a national debate aimed at uniting the nine out of ten American workers who have no organization at work, SEIU, along with the
Teamsters The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), also known as the Teamsters Union, is a labor union in the United States and Canada. Formed in 1903 by the merger of The Team Drivers International Union and The Teamsters National Union, the ...
, announced on July 25, 2005 that they were disaffiliating from the AFL-CIO. Stern led SEIU out of the AFL-CIO and founded
Change to Win The Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), formerly known as the Change to Win Federation (CtW) is a coalition of North American labor unions originally formed in 2005 as an alternative to the AFL–CIO. The coalition is associated with strong advocac ...
, a six-million-member federation of seven major unions "dedicated to giving workers a voice at their jobs."


Political Influence

During the years of Stern's leadership, the SEIU became the largest political action committee in the United States, and funneled vast amounts of financing to the Democratic Party and its candidates, far outnumbering the contributions of other unions during his last two election cycles. SEIU contributed $65 million to the 2004 presidential campaign of
John Kerry John Forbes Kerry (born December 11, 1943) is an American attorney, politician and diplomat who currently serves as the first United States special presidential envoy for climate. A member of the Forbes family and the Democratic Party, he ...
. In 2008 SEIU sponsored with the Center for American Progress (CAP), the first Presidential election forum, on health care, and required all candidates seeking the union's endorsement to “Walk A Day In My Shoes” including Senator Barack Obama as a home care worker Hillary Clinton as a nurse, and Joe Biden as a school maintenance worker, and have a plan for universal healthcare. The union spent another $85 million on Democratic candidates in 2008; $60 million going toward the election of President
Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...
, with a significant chunk of that money funding door-to-door canvassing and other GOTV efforts, as well as voter registration. Stern along with Harold Ickes, Ellen Malcolm, Steve Rosenthal, and George Soros, and other activists founded and funded America Coming Together (ACT) the largest independent expenditure in history at that time for grassroots organizing in an effort to defeat the re-election of President George Bush. Stern has been the most frequent visitor to the White House since Obama's election. Between Inauguration Day and February 23, 2011, Stern visited the White House 53 times. And SEIU's political organizing and advocacy changed the lives of workers in state after state. As Harold Meyerson wrote in the LA Times, "Andy Stern has arguably been the most influential non-Californian in the affairs of California in the past 15 years...Stern has shaped the state’s politics and much of its economy."


Healthcare

Stern is referred to as one of "the chief architects of healthcare reform" in ''
Modern Healthcare ''Modern Healthcare'' is a twice monthly business publication targeting executives in the healthcare industry. It is an independent American publisher of national and regional healthcare news. The publication is also known for providing statistic ...
'' magazine, ranking in the top 10 of the 100 Most Powerful People in Healthcare. Stern has been named to Modern Healthcare's annual "movers and shakers in healthcare" list for five years in a row. SEIU poured millions into a group called
Health Care for America NOW! Health Care for America Now (HCAN) is a political advocacy group of more than 1,000 organizations that joined together in 2008 in a successful effort to promote legislation to reform the United States health care system and extend medical benefit ...
, which, at times, fought strongly for universal healthcare including single payer. Stern was an ardent supporter of the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) (), nicknamed the Recovery Act, was a stimulus package enacted by the 111th U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama in February 2009. Developed in response to the Gr ...
.


Media and Internet

Andy Stern, as SEIU President, was a constant figure in the news. He was on the covers of The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, and Business Week, featured on CBS 60 Minutes, on Fox as the Power Player of the Week, CNN, and the Washington Post Stern embraced political organizing via the
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
in the wake of the
Howard Dean Howard Brush Dean III (born November 17, 1948) is an American physician, author, lobbyist, and retired politician who served as the 79th governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003 and chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from 2005 to 2009 ...
campaign, which his union endorsed. Through Stern's initiative, a New Media team was formed at SEIU in the late summer of 2008, the first major union to enter the digital age. The union's website was completely redesigned and relaunched shortly thereafter, and Stern began to blog on the Huffington Post
Andy Stern , HuffPost
In fall of 2005, he launched an online contest called Since Sliced Bread that awarded $100,000 for the best new economic ideas in America. Since 2005, Stern had been a contributing
blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...
ger at ''
The Huffington Post ''HuffPost'' (formerly ''The Huffington Post'' until 2017 and sometimes abbreviated ''HuffPo'') is an American progressive news website, with localized and international editions. The site offers news, satire, blogs, and original content, and ...
''. Stern has been a key figure in financing the online grassroots "netroots" community, along with Dean,
George Soros George Soros ( name written in eastern order), (born György Schwartz, August 12, 1930) is a Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist. , he had a net worth of US$8.6 billion, Note that this site is updated daily. having donated mo ...
, Simon Rosenberg, and Andrew S. Rappaport, to funnel a progressive agenda to liberal bloggers.


Resignation

Stern announced on April 13, 2010, that he would be stepping down as president of the SEIU. “There is a time to learn, a time to lead, and then there's a time to leave. And shortly it will be my time to retire...and end my SEIU journey,” Stern wrote on April 14, 2010. Health care employers, often at odds with SEIU, begrudgingly wrote, "Regardless of how you feel about Andy Stern, president of the 2.2 million-member Service Employees International Union, there is no denying that he is the most important labor leader of his generation." In response to question of why Stern has left at the height of his success Marick F. Masters, director of the Fraser Center for Workplace Issues and Labor at Wayne State University in Detroit, said... "He had the presence of mind to leave when he is at the top rather than to stay longer,"


Post SEIU Affiliations and Activities

SEIU honored Stern with the title of President Emeritus in 2010. In March 2010, Stern was the Alice B. Grant Labor Leader in Residence at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Stern was a senior fellow at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute from 2010 to 2011. From 2011 to 2016, he served as a Senior Fellow at the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business Law and Public Policy at Columbia University. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Economic Security Project
Economic Security Project
Stern has served on many non-profit Boards including the Open Society Foundations, the Hillman Foundation, and Broad Foundation, and works with many non-profits and unions on worker organizing.


Written works

''A Country That Works'' (Free Press), Stern calls for unions to be the dominant vehicles for the promotion of social reforms, including espousing the benefits of increased taxation on the wealthy and universal health care. On October 3, 2006, he appeared on ''
The Colbert Report ''The Colbert Report'' ( ) is an American late-night talk and news satire television program hosted by Stephen Colbert that aired four days a week on Comedy Central from October 17, 2005, to December 18, 2014, for 1,447 episodes. The show fo ...
'' to promote his new book '' A Country That Works''. On October 4, he appeared on ''
Democracy Now! ''Democracy Now!'' is an hour-long American TV, radio, and Internet news program hosted by journalists Amy Goodman (who also acts as the show's executive producer), Juan González, and Nermeen Shaikh. The show, which airs live each weekday at ...
'' to promote the book. In 2016, Stern authored a book with Lee Kravitz entitled ''Raising the Floor'', in which he makes the case for a
universal basic income Universal basic income (UBI) is a social welfare proposal in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive an unconditional transfer payment, that is, without a means test or need to work. It would be received independently of a ...
. The book was a catalyst to a renewed debate about and experimentation with universal basic income, the founding of the Economic Securit
Project
and Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaig
Andrew Yang on Facebook Watch
Andrew Yang credited Stern with his decision to run for President in 2020 on a platform of universal basic income, calling his UBI proposal-the “Freedom Dividend.”


Personal life

Stern is divorced from Jane Perkins, a former head of the environmental network Friends of the Earth. They had two children, Matt and Cassie. Cassie died in 2002. In 2017, Stern married Jennifer Johnson, a former Communications Director for the Center for Food Action in northern NJ, and the mother of Claire, Alex, and Isabel Beckenstein.


Controversy

"He's arguably the most important labor leader we've had in a long time: aggressive and controversial," says Philip Dine, an authority on labor issues and author of the recent book ''State of the Unions.'' On January 27, 2009, SEIU placed UHW West under trusteeship and dismissed 70 of the local's executives, including president Sal Rosselli. Rosselli and other ousted leaders reformed under the
National Union of Healthcare Workers National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) is an independent, democratic labor union based in Oakland, California, that represents 15,000 healthcare workers in California. It was formed in 2009 after a split with the SEIU United Healthcare Work ...
and pushed for UHW West members at 60 facilities to vote to decertify SEIU. SEIU filed a lawsuit in mid-2009 alleging that UHW West and NUHW officials embezzled millions of dollars. In 2009 Former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall issued a report, "Acting as hearing officer, Mr. Marshall found that the local's president, Sal Rosselli, and other union officials had improperly transferred union money to a nonprofit group to use in a feud with the parent union. Mr. Marshall also concluded that the local had wrongly hidden $500,000 from the parent union by placing the money into a lawyer's trust account." On March 26, 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the District Court ruling that a jury awarded, "... individual judgments ranged from $31,400 to $77,850, and NUHW was assessed damages of $724,000".


References


External links

*
Raising the Floor Website and Articles
*
Biography page & online media kit of Andy Stern
from SEIU website

30 January 2005 * ttps://huffingtonpost.com/andy-stern/ Stern's Blogat the Huffington Post
60 Minutes Interview
(May 14, 2006)

on Bill Moyers Journal (June 2007) * Rik Kirkland

'' Fortune'', October 10, 2006
Video (and audio) of conversation with Andy Stern
and
Robert Reich Robert Bernard Reich (; born June 24, 1946) is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in ...
on
Bloggingheads.tv Bloggingheads.tv (sometimes abbreviated "bhtv") is a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast on ...
*
Vox Interview
{{DEFAULTSORT:Stern, Andy 1950 births American bloggers Trade unionists from New Jersey Change to Win Federation Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations faculty Living people People from West Orange, New Jersey West Orange High School (New Jersey) alumni Presidents of the Service Employees International Union Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania alumni Universal basic income writers 20th-century American Jews 21st-century American Jews