Mary Kay Henry had one big success and one big disappointment in her 14 years as president of the Service Employees International Union, which is one of the biggest and most politically powerful in the United States.
Henry, who chose not to run for re-election and stepped down on Monday, spearheaded the successful campaign to raise wages to $15 an hour or more for many of America’s lowest-paid workers, particularly in fast food and home care. “Since 2012, more than 26 million workers have won higher pay to the tune of $150 billion,” nearly half of them workers of color, the National Employment Law Project said in a tribute to Henry after she announced she would not seek re-election.
The disappointment is that Henry didn’t manage to increase membership in her own union. In fact, S.E.I.U.’s membership fell to under 1.9 million now from about 2.1 million when she took office. Those workers at McDonald’s, Burger King and other chains who are enjoying higher pay aren’t paying dues to any conventional union. (More on this below.)
The decline in membership is not something S.E.I.U. dwells on. It continues to claim “about” two million members. But in a filing with the Department of Labor in March, the union stated that it had 1,845,500 members, of which 30,015 were retired.
To be sure, Henry doesn’t deserve all of the credit for higher wages, nor does she deserve all — or even most — of the blame for the membership erosion. But it’s clear that the “Fight for $15 and a Union” campaign, which she told me last week was a highlight of her time in office, was only half successful.
In November 2012, about 200 fast-food workers in New York City walked off the job in what Steven Greenhouse described in The Times as “the biggest wave of job actions in the history of America’s fast-food industry.” The job action was the spearhead of a unionization drive sponsored by S.E.I.U. along with several community and civil rights groups. The campaign had deployed 40 organizers to rally fast-food workers behind unionization and a raise in wages to $15 an hour. At the time, $8 or $9 an hour was typical for fast-food restaurants in the city.
Henry told me that a committee of workers came up with the $15 demand “based on doing their own math,” figuring in rent, groceries, subway fares, clothing for kids and other essentials. “At the time Obama was saying $9 and Harkin” — Senator Thomas Harkin, Democrat of Iowa — “was saying $10.10. Fifteen dollars just sounded out of this world. It spread to 10, 30, then 300 cities.”
The restaurant chains could easily afford to pay more, Henry said at the time. “People who work for the richest corporations in America should be able to afford at least the basic necessities to support their families,” she said.
Now seven states have wage floors of $15 or more for non-tipped workers, and several more are on track to reach that level soon. According to my calculation based on the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, earnings have grown one-third faster since 2020 for people at the 10th percentile of wages than for people at the 90th percentile.
I asked Henry whether she thought some of those wage increases would have happened without “Fight for $15 and a Union,” since wages are being pushed up anyway by low unemployment and, until recently, high inflation. That may be the case now, she allowed, but it wasn’t in the early days of the campaign. “Those were not macroeconomic forces,” she said. “Those were dog fights. The industry fought us tooth and nail, every step of the way.”
Henry faced some pushback from inside the union that rallying fast-food workers was a distraction. The union didn’t have any members in that sector. Its membership is mainly in government, hospitals, long-term care and janitorial and other building services. But Henry saw it as complementary to union organizing. “We created a new form of organizing, which is movement-based organizing,” she told me.
Henry said she’s also proud that S.E.I.U. “linked the fight for worker justice with racial justice.” The union website contends that “race is weaponized to keep working people divided while greedy corporate bosses remain at the top.”
The 14 years in which Henry ran S.E.I.U. were difficult ones for all of organized labor, not just her union. The share of workers who belong to labor unions is stuck at around 10 percent, half what it was in 1983, when the government first collected comparable statistics. The share is far lower in the private sector (6 percent) than in the public sector (32.5 percent). Also, unions that have formed at employers such as Starbucks and Trader Joe’s haven’t managed to obtain contracts yet, potentially leaving workers disillusioned.
Henry ticked off several reasons for the slump in unionization, including the Covid pandemic, several states’ adoption of right-to-work laws that hamper unions and adverse decisions by the Supreme Court. In 2018, the court ruled 5-4 that government workers who choose not to join unions may not be required to help pay for collective bargaining. During her time in office the union has lost mandatory fees from more than 200,000 nonmembers, putting a hole in its budget.
Having trouble organizing fast-food workers the usual way, S.E.I.U. formed this year a California Fast Food Workers Union, an unconventional union that didn’t require winning elections at thousands of restaurants. It didn’t form through a federally certified election, so it can’t do collective bargaining, but it will advocate better pay and working conditions across the industry.
Organizing in the traditionally anti-union South has been a top priority for S.E.I.U., as well as other unions. A new unit of S.E.I.U., the Union of Southern Service Workers, is trying to organize service, care and retail workers in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. “We have big plans for this summer,” she told me.
As Henry steps down, she can take satisfaction that a lot of things are going right for organized labor. Writers and actors won improved contracts after striking last year. President Biden walked the picket line with striking autoworkers, who won substantial concessions from General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis. Public support for labor unions is the highest it has been since the 1960s.
The news isn’t all good, though. While union membership is rising in some sectors — graduate students in universities, for example — it isn’t rising overall because membership continues to erode in other sectors. While the United Automobile Workers won its first factory-wide foothold at a major foreign automaker in the South last month, at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., the U.A.W. lost on Friday its organizing attempt at two Mercedes plants near Tuscaloosa, Ala.
Henry told me she can’t predict where the next president of S.E.I.U. will take the union, but she’s optimistic. “I think that we will grow” in membership, she said. “This is a key inflection point for the whole labor movement.” That’s right: Increasing membership is essential because the only way labor unions can countervail the power of employers is through strength in numbers.
Elsewhere: Jobless in the Golden State
California continued to have the nation’s highest unemployment rate in April, at 5.3 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday. Employment in the state grew by just 5,200 jobs from March, an increase of 0.03 percent. Employment declined in manufacturing, construction, financial activities, and professional and business services. North Dakota and South Dakota shared the nation’s lowest jobless rate, at 2.0 percent.
Quote of the Day
“Philosophy, as I’ve said, is a gentle discipline. It approaches people with respect for their full humanity, and is in that sense a form of love.”
— Martha Nussbaum, “The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis” (2018)