Andy Stern, President, Service Employees International Union
Monday, August 27, 2007SUSIE GHARIB: He is considered one of the most powerful men in health care in the United States, but he doesn't run a health care company. Andy Stern is president of the Service Employees International Union and represents close to two million workers. Stern is a risk taker, willing to work with and fight with everyone from Wal-Mart to the private equity titans of Wall Street. With Labor Day approaching, Darren Gersh sat down with Stern and asked him why the union movement has so much trouble attracting new members.
ANDY STERN, PRESIDENT, SERVICE EMPLOYEES INTERNATIONAL UNION: We still represent the same 13 million people which is a huge number of people, but it's been basically flat for several decades now. The issue is, we have 1935 labor laws in a 21st century economy. We have employees who have never really wanted to have union have an incredible amount of opportunity to frustrate and actually work actively against unions and so what we have which his really interesting is the greatest positive feelings about unions in any time in history and yet the growth is not happening because workers don't get to make a free choice.
DARREN GERSH, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: Why do you say the greatest positive feeling towards unions?
STERN: (INAUDIBLE) keeps showing and I think you can see with the Democratic candidates that people are looking for a solution to the problem of growing inequality in our country. We have corporate profits are up, growth is up, CEO salaries are way up and yet for five years in a row now according to the Census Bureau, workers haven't gotten a raise. People are looking for solutions and unions are part of that answer.
GERSH: So what is the change that you're trying to make here? You've been out separated from the AFL-CIO now for a while. What changes are you making? What's working? What's not working to try to address the situation?
STERN: We're trying to make people appreciate there's a context here and the context is is our country's living through the most profound significant transformative economic revolution in world history. This is not our father's and grandfather's economy. In the global economy, America needs to be a team. We really need new partnerships and new ideas and new thinking and we need to be not anti-business or anti-government, but we need to be pro-America and that's what we're trying to build.
GERSH: It looked for a while like you were going to try to work as a team a little bit with some of these private equity players who have been so large in the business community right now, but recently you came out and attacked them. What's your relationship to the private equity folks? You've met with them before.
STERN: We put out a report in April and we asked the question, is the growing private equity, private ownership good for America and we spent three months, really four months talking to many of the private equity people and unfortunately we now would say the answer so far is no. 10,000 people have lost their jobs so far in America as a result of takeovers of private equity firms. We can't find a worker who has gotten a raise or a worker whose gotten an increase in their health insurance by the purchase of private equity, so we're really disappointed and we said we don't necessarily believe in government intervention. We believe that people should act independently but so far all we've seen is nothing good for American workers.
GERSH: The amazing thing to me is that union pension funds invest with some of these private equity folks. Why would you say you're getting a bad deal from them if some union are investing in them?
STERN: First of all, only 18 percent of Americans have any defined benefit pension plan, so at best only one out of five Americans are benefiting and we're not against private equity per se. What we are against is this growing concentration of private ownership that's not doing things that help the American economy. It was once a very small part of pension funds and the economy. Now companies like TPG that no one's ever heard of have more employees than Home Depot or McDonald's or GM or Ford or Chrysler or Toyota or General Electric. This is a growing new part of the economy and we need new ways including using our pension funds to try to get these people to help America.
GERSH: There's another company that you were trying to work with which is Wal-Mart and you took a lot of flack for appearing at the same news conference with them to talk about health care and health insurance. I haven't heard very much about that if anything in the last whatever six months since since you did that announcement. What's come of that?
STERN: Hopefully in September we're going to start to see this coalition we put together, better health care together, which has Wal-Mart and AT&T and Intel and 30 other corporations actually begin the public education process that we think is important with the candidates, with politicians and with consumers and we think we're at a moment of history where America is ready for health care change and having the business community say this is not just a moral problem, but now this is an economic and a competitive problem for American as well, we think it's a huge step forward and think we'll see in the fall those efforts taken up a step.
GERSH: Andy Stern, thanks for your time.
STERN: Thank you.
