Leader Has New View for Unions
    By Barbara Rose
    The Chicago Tribune

    Sunday 15 October 2006

Andy Stern wants to end employer-based health care and increase worker ownership.

    Andy Stern is a union leader who talks like a management strategist.

    Some labor stalwarts call him a sell-out. A recent profile in Fortune labeled him "the new face of labor."

    Always provocative, Stern, president of the 1.8 million-member Service Employees International Union, lately sounds like he's on the stump.

    "We're at a moment when the character of America is at risk," he said, echoing Alan Greenspan's warning that the growing gap between rich and poor threatens democratic capitalism. "We need to get America back on track."

    That's the theme of his new book, "A Country That Works: Getting America Back on Track" (Free Press), a stinging populist critique blended with personal history and his road map for reform.

    He answered questions last week during a visit to Chicago. This is an edited transcript:

    Q. How do you respond to critics who say you're selling out by calling for a new non-adversarial union model?

    A. Our members go to work every day wanting to solve problems, be successful, get the tools and the training to do their job. They don't go to work to create problems for their employer.

    They don't want someone to come in and turn things upside down. But they do want to be able to be heard and share in the company's success.

    Q. What institutions have done a good job of reinventing themselves?

    A. We've seen megachurches change traditional religious institutions to [places] where there's a lot more focus on people's personal needs, a lot more involvement of their children, a lot more service to the community. There's a changed institution meeting a need, particularly in exurban and suburban America.

    We've seen with the Internet an incredible explosion of new ways for people to be connected and form communities. [At SEIU] we hired a design firm, IDEO, to help us think more thoughtfully about how we engage our members. We're going to begin some experiments here in Chicago.

    One we've already begun is how to provide more services to our members through service centers, which are mostly done on the phone, where we're available far more often to talk to members and where they can get their answers immediately.

    We've tried to centralize a lot of our back office operations, take them off locals [to free them up to] really focus on talking way more to members about issues that are important to their lives. We look at talking to them in their communities, not just in their work, because our members have a much fuller life than the union movement has necessarily focused on in the past.

    Q. Many workers see no benefit to joining a union. How can you win them over?

    A. You win them over by being successful and smart. I think what people worry about is that unions aren't really smart sometimes and we make their employer less competitive and they say, well, are unions going to mean I lose my job?

    We have to understand our employers live in an incredibly complicated world. Our job is to increase their ability to succeed, to take certain responsibilities off of them, to assist them in some areas like [passing] legislation, trying to reduce workplace injuries and worker compensation costs.

    And we just can't organize one nursing home or one hospital or one factory and expect we're going to raise the wages significantly higher than what everyone else who's competing pays and be successful. The union has to level the playing field, not raise the cost of just union employers.

    Q. You've said you want labor costs to resemble electricity.

    A. Generally speaking people pay the same amount for electricity, so the competition is who can install energy-saving devices, who can run their building more efficiently, not who can pay people the least. Competing to see who can pay people the least is just a road to disaster for American workers because the bottom is now $5.15 an hour and it's not a family supporting wage. We need a race to the top in America.

    We're moving from employer-managed work lives to employee-managed work lives.

    My son who's 20 will have nine to 12 jobs by the time he's 35. Only one-third of employers that exist today will be economically viable in 25 years, and 25 percent of the workforce is [temporary help, on-call and contract workers].

    This is just a different moment. We're as far today from the New Deal as the New Deal was from the Civil War. I'm sure Franklin Roosevelt admired Abraham Lincoln, but he built an economy for the industrial era. We need to build an economy for this 21st Century global era.

    Q. What can unions bring to the table?

    A. Health care and pensions have become an enormous problem for employers. We need to end the employer-based health-care system [and replace it], whether it's a system like the building trades, where the unions receive a defined contribution but provide the benefit, or whether it's like TIAA-CREF, where professors all pay into a pension plan regardless of where they teach and at the end of their careers get an annuity, a lifetime guarantee.

    Unions can provide the training for all employers so that each employer isn't trying to create something new - particularly some of the upgrading, like how do I get [a licensed practical nurse] to be a registered nurse, how do I solve the shortage of technical employees in hospitals?

    There's a whole emerging question about how we give workers equity ownership. We only have a third of Americans who have more than $5,000 worth of stock. And yet people owning firms as they go private and public are making huge amounts of money, and the workers usually only own things when the companies are distressed.

    Q. What are some ways of promoting ownership?

    A. We are working with some investment bankers on the history of ESOPs in America and how we tailor them in ways that give people some ownership and at the same time provide tax breaks for businesses.

    We've looked at forming staffing companies, in some ways like the building trades, companies that sell services to employers, manage the health care, the pension, potentially taking a percentage of the gross. And as the company grows our staffing firm would grow. Workers would have a bigger stake in it.

    I think we're just at the earliest stages. We need new models for the 21st Century. The American labor movement and work is just so diverse that we're not going to have a one-size-fits-all solution, but we certainly need new ideas.