No doubt that the politically influential union head was embattled — the SEIU was facing pushbacks from unions that had rejected it’s heavy-handed tactics. Further, the much ballyhooed “Change to Win” coalition that the was supposed to completely remake all of America’s unions in the SEIU’s image seems to have completely fizzled. In a thorough and illuminating post, Michelle Malkin highlights this Washintonian profile of Stern that may have some answers about what’s going on:
Change to Win’s agenda was essentially to elevate the SEIU model of organizing—recruiting members and pressuring employers via corporate-accountability campaigns that targeted the public image of management—to serve as the industry standard for labor organizing. A no-less-prominent goal of Change to Win was Stern’s vision of a reorganized national leadership for labor—a federation that would streamline smaller, traditional craft-affiliated union locals into bigger operations able to organize across an economic sector. The textbook model of the corporate campaign was SEIU’s Justice for Janitors initiative in the 1990s, which proved influential in shoring up the International union’s power base.
