Toward a More Perfect Union

For quite some time now, the labor union movement in America has been on a steady decline, in terms of its membership. Where once about a third of America’s workers belonged to a union, today the number is hovering around 10 percent. But the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — which has janitors, home healthcare aides, nurses, immigrant workers — has broken the mold and become the fastest-gowing union in the nation, with 1.8 million members. Much of that growth has been attributed to its president, Andy Stern, the 54-year-old dynamo who has begun to reshape not just the image of the union boss, but the reality.

Stern, who took over as president of SEIU in 1996, has begun to question whether union leadership in America shares some of the blame for the declining union movement. As Matt Bai pointed out in a Jan. 30 profile of Stern in The New York Times Magazine: “Last year, Andy Stern did something heretical: he started pointing the finger back at his fellow union leaders. Of course workers had been punished by forces outside their control, Stern said. But what had big labor done to adapt?”

Stern isn’t just concerned about the union movement, but about the larger progressive movement in America, and more specifically, about the Democratic Party and its inability to relate to working class Americans. Stern recently talked with AlterNet by phone.

AlterNet: So let's do some Monday morning quarterbacking regarding the elections. What would you definitely do now, given what you know now?

Andy Stern: I'd change the primary process. I don't think the primary process is geared towards finding candidates that contend to win in the states that are significantly contested — like Ohios, Wisconsins, or Colorados, Nevadas, or Floridas. I think our process is not geared toward the general election appropriately, so the candidates who can do terrific retail politics in Iowa or New Hampshire may not be candidates that can win in a campaign that isn't about retail politics. You know, that's much more about impressions and media, so a) I'd change the primary process, and b) I'd insure that in the next four years that all the work that was done on a temporary basis, in terms of voter registration and then talking to voters about issues was really institutionalized. Right now, the Democratic Party has been unable to maintain any kind of infrastructure or organization that could talk to voters regularly, so somehow there needs to be a permanent effort like the Republicans have — to register, talk to, get the voters aware of what the issues are, and not just 90 days before an election.

So you're saying it's all about retail politics — maybe we should define retail politics first.

I think it's very important that candidates can relate to individual people, but relating to people one-on-one is only one aspect. Relating to people on television, on a radio interview, at campaign events, where you don't get the time for people to really get to know you — there's a public identity and then there's a one-on-one identity in any relationship. So, I would say, obviously, John Kerry on a one-on-one basis — if he could've talked to every voter — might have been as successful as he was in Iowa, but I think in a presidential campaign, your impression comes across from campaign appearances, debates, interviews, and unfortunately what your opponent tries to characterize you as.

So in a sense, what we need is someone like Bill Clinton then, in terms of personality, with a strong charismatic personality that could override anything that is thrown at him?

I think you need people who either have tremendous political skills like Bill Clinton, who people learn to feel comfortable [about], or you need people very clear and decisive, even if they don't have great political skills, because you know who they are. I think when you look at the difference between the results at a federal level, and at a state and local level — for instance, George Bush won Colorado, yet there were huge gains in the State House and State Senate for Democrats — I think people make two very different judgments in their electoral life: One is what they send people to Washington for, and the other is what they expect people to do in their own state or community. In their state or community, they really want their problems solved, they want their roads paved, they want their schools improved, they want the money to be spent well. I think when people send people to Washington, particularly as their president, they really want to know who they are, they really want to know what's in their heart and in their soul, and I think Bill Clinton was skilled at least in giving people that impression, but people say it was phony and he was a shallow politician, but I think people felt like they knew Bill Clinton, that he was the son of working-class people, his family had a tough time, he was human and made mistakes, and you know, I think he genuinely gave people an impression at a different era in history, when people weren't looking as much for someone to be there commander in chief, someone to sort of recognize what average working people were facing, because the economy was bad at the end of the [first] Bush administration, so they were looking for someone who could feel their pain, who had a plan to help them. I think in this case people were looking for the commander in chief and I'm not sure Bill Clinton would have as easily passed the test in 2004.