by David Bego
Along the way, true blessings continued to occur to our family and friends. As I watched from the coaching bench for the 8th grade Catholic city girls’ basketball championship, Kelly hit the game winning shot at the buzzer to beat a much bigger and more talented team. Our two boys played on the same baseball team that I coached, and not only did we win the league championship, we went on to the all-star team together. We rounded up and sponsored an AAU basketball team, and coaching the boys’ and girls’ baseball and basketball teams was a real treat. All of our kids attended Cathedral High School. There they learned good, solid, Christian values and competitive skills we embraced. Hours spent with other Cathedral parents and families made the experience even more rewarding. Friendships are the lifeblood of special times, and preceding our move north of Indianapolis to a town called Fishers, 12 people living in our New Palestine neighborhood started a monthly euchre game where we laughed and told stories, most of them true. EMS corporate headquarters was just a few miles away, and with a few exceptions every company experiences, we never had any problems with employees. In fact, during the late 1990s when we could afford it, we started offering healthcare benefits, vacation, and holiday pay to our people and tried to push the industry along and get our customers and potential customers to buy into doing so as well. Many did. All due to that one great business acumen—treat people right and they will treat you right.
Soon my dad remarried and we enjoyed getting to know his new wife. Barb’s parents also continued to do well, which was a blessing. The kids had grown up and Kelly went to Xavier University on a golf scholarship and Mark ran track at Butler; Brian ended up at my old haunt, Tri-State, to play baseball and become an engineer.
To make EMS even more of a family operation with emphasis on employee rights, Kelly joined us as marketing coordinator and within a year was promoted to human resources manager. Then Mark became interested in what we were doing and within a few months of joining the clan, he moved to Atlanta and became our business development manager. One day perhaps Brian, successful now in his own right, will show up at our office door and we will welcome him, although he is doing well in another industry close to our home. As I mentioned, even my father worked at EMS for a short time. I suspect he wanted to see if his oldest son really knew what he was doing.
Over time, the success EMS has enjoyed has touched the lives of many people. From the day when Barb threw her love and support behind me when we decided to take the journey that led to happiness and joy in so many ways as the year 2006 appeared on the horizon, we had fought together to establish a first-rate company with a reputation for excellence like few in its field. And then, like a vulture out of the sky, Stern and his SEIU cohorts swooped down and threatened us with destruction if we did not bow to their commands. Soon Stern and I would be at loggerheads as I faced the biggest challenge of my life.
Persuasion of
Power
“SEIU PRESIDENT ANDY STERN IS THE DRAMA QUEEN OF BIG LABOR.”
This rather unflattering depiction of Stern appeared in a July 2008 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article. It reported, “The Service Employees International Union is staging nationwide rallies this week to ‘Take Back the Economy’ from wealthy private equity firms. Based on the evidence of pension policies, however, SEIU members would do better to take back their own pensions from union chieftains.”
Before examining the WSJ’s allegations, it is important to understand who Stern is. And why he targeted EMS as a plum operation to be unionized at all cost.
According to his 2006 book, A Country That Works, Stern “was born to white-collar, professional parents in a community where unions were rarely mentioned.” Further, Stern said, “I went to an Ivy League college and never held a union job until I started working as a social worker in 1972.” He noted having expected to become an attorney, but instead, after college, sold newspapers on street corners in Massachusetts, administered tests to census workers, and became a substitute teacher at Benjamin Franklin High School in Philadelphia.
In his book, Stern wrote, “Reflecting on my life, I realize that the seeds of my commitment to dignity of work, and to organizations that give hope, voice, and strength to ordinary hardworking people, were planted in my upbringing.” This commitment, he added, was best understood in an “ethical will” he wrote during some religious training. There he imagined “a world of concentric and cross-influencing circles; at the core of the innermost circle was the individual, grounded by principled action and an ethical life.” Surrounding each individual, he decided, were the “concentric circles of family, community, and nation, each influencing the next.” His directive in the will was to urge “friends and family to ‘state what you believe in and reach for higher standards that you have already attained.’” These principles, he said, “guide my actions to this day, and more important, are the basis for a country that works.”
Stern believed that his mother, a college graduate with honors who had given up any sense of a career to raise him and his two brothers, and his father, a lawyer for family-owned businesses who had worked his way through college waiting tables after losing his father when he was only 13, were the illuminating forces in his life. Growing up on “The Hill” in West Orange, New Jersey, where neighbors were “mostly white-collar workers, some Jewish, some not,” Stern attended an elementary school where no religious, job status, or wealth separations among the students existed. Ironically, the future labor leader’s bar mitzvah in Newark was earmarked for November 22, 1963, the very day when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Stern wrote that his first exposure to “organized protest” occurred upon his arrival at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. First, he joined fellow students protesting the requirement to wear a tie at meals, and then participated in the attempt to prevent the university from building a parking lot in an area of open green space. Perhaps he should have spent more time in the classroom, Stern admitted, because when he graduated in 1971, he had gained the dubious distinction of “having attended the least number of classes in Penn’s undergraduate history.”
From Penn, it was on to Europe before “wandering aimlessly around New England,” and working at various jobs in Philadelphia. He then accepted a civil-service position at the Vine District Welfare Office, which, he admitted, “led to the start of my union career.” Here occurred a milestone with Stern writing, “The story of my official entry into the union is rather anticlimactic. Despite its accidental nature, it marked the moment when my lifelong passion for the labor movement was born.” This caused him to realize, he said, that “the union heritage of fighting for social and economic justice and being on the side of the powerless touched within me a deep-seated belief in equity and community that has never faded.”
The defining moment occurred, Stern contended, when he attended a Vine Street lunchtime meeting of the Pennsylvania Social Service Union (PSSU), a chartered affiliate of SEIU. It represented more than 10,000 white-collar workers employed in the state’s welfare and social service agencies.
At the luncheon, after seizing on the opportunity to eat as much free pizza as possible, the 23-year-old listened with interest as various union matters were discussed. When it was time to elect an assistant shop steward, a staff representative, according to Stern’s version of the story, walked over to him, and even though he didn’t know him, asked his name. Seconds later, with the smell of pepperoni pizza in the air, the shop steward called out Stern’s name as a nominee, and presto, he was unanimously elected.
Soon, Stern admitted in his book, he “fell in love with union life” while attending meetings around Pennsylvania as he pursued a law degree at Temple University’s night school. Soon he was standing on the picket lines protesting a worthy cause, with an early impression of his suspicions that the “structure of the union provided the staff with disproportionate authority for decision making, as opposed to the more democratic empowerment of the members that I thought was in the
true spirit of the labor movement.” Disproportionate authority seemed to conveniently escape Stern as he rose to power in the SEIU! Ready to assume a more prominent role, he became a full-time field representative for the union’s Philadelphia chapter. This led to his running for President of the local union. Not only did he win, but married his “election partner,” Jane, as the year turned to 1983. Flush with ideas for change, Stern then transformed the local SEIU affiliate into “a more modern, innovative, and aggressive organization.”
During his days in Pennsylvania, Stern said he learned two fundamental lessons: 1) “unions allow the powerless to unite their strength and become more powerful,” and 2) “the ways in which unions were structured and doing business had to change.” This was because there was no doubt, Stern wrote, “the failure of American labor laws to adequately protect workers’ rights is a stain on our democracy.” This, he said, was due to the establishment of “statutory amendments” weakening the true intention, the guts, of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Among other provisions, the NLRA had initially provided for union cards signed by employees to be used in deciding whether a union could organize at a particular employer. This procedure had been washed away through the years, Stern said, and the NLRA election procedure, one utilizing the secret-ballot method, had become, in his view, a “frustrating process for workers and a litigation nightmare.” He believed management and its lawyers were the culprits because their delaying tactics could prevent elections for more than a year during which time “indirect threats could be made to employees, as well as blatant intimidation,” with some leading to dismissal of union-oriented employees. Because employers were not subject to any punitive damages for such actions, the fired employees had “no real-world remedies.” This caused the SEIU, even thought it was the seventh largest union in the country, to lack, in Stern’s opinion, “a public profile,” and to be “disparagingly referred to as “SEIU who?”
According to Stern, for the next 12 years, he led the charge for reform with the support of SEIU’s President, John Sweeney. Using new tactics, including recruiting organizers from rival unions, the union flourished and within eight years, SEIU doubled the membership numbers. Key to the increases was the Justice for Janitors Campaign, the Dignity, Rights, and Respect Campaign relating to nursing home workers, and the We’re Worth It! Campaign for public-sector employees. Stern believed the soul of the union was the janitorial workers and noted that in nearly all of the janitors’ unions, membership had severely declined. One reason, he decided, was because “cleaning was no longer provided by the building owners but was contracted out to cleaning companies, which were becoming larger and more sophisticated.” These companies, Stern suggested in his book, “were gaining market share, yet they had no allegiance to long-standing local union relationships,” an indication Stern had companies like ours in his sights even before he became SEIU’s national President.
What was the remedy, according to Stern? After listening to union employers cry about being unable to compete with non-union companies because they had to pay union wages and benefits while non-union employers didn’t providing an unfair competitive advantage to the nonunion employers, he realized a simple strategy was necessary: “Our priority should not be to make unionized employers noncompetitive by raising the wages and benefits they offered their employees over the non-union company’s wages in the market. Instead, our priority should be to contribute to our employers’ success by organizing all their competitors.”
If this was accomplished, apparently whether the particular company provided better wages and benefits than the union norm or not, Stern believed, “Only then would we be able to bargain contracts that set the same minimum standards for all the competing employers and thus take wage differentials off the table.” Patting himself on the back, Stern wrote, “We thought the theory brilliant, a win-win situation.”
Despite the brilliance, Stern recognized two challenges: 1) building relationships with employers where value [more productivity] was a plus for them despite padding employee paychecks, and 2) means by which workers could “make free and fair choices about union representation without shedding blood at their workplaces.” The key: “The former required the power of persuasion and the latter the persuasion of power.” The agenda: “Although we preferred to lead with the power of persuasion, with many resistant employers we were often left no choice but to use the persuasion of power.” Apparently, based on what was about to occur, EMS and I fit into the latter category.
To implement his strategy on a personal basis, Stern needed a bully pulpit. This became possible after he had worked under Sweeney at the national SEIU headquarters as organizing director. When Sweeney resigned to become President of the AFL–CIO, SEIU Secretary-Treasure Dick Cordtz was the anointed successor. Disappointed with Cordtz’s intent to follow old-line policies, Stern decided to challenge him. Upset with the absence of loyalty, Cordtz fired Stern but then lost to him in a 1996 election. Stern now headed the SEIU, a long journey from the day when he had been surprised to become an assistant shop steward to the local SEIU chapter. In his book, Stern noted, “It’s my job to watch out for the threats that confront our members—and all American workers—and to find solutions to improve their lives.”
Stern’s first move in that direction caused him to concentrate on “organizing strategically for growth.” Over the next 10 years, he would do just that and by 2005, more than two million members belonged to SEIU. Hard work, and dedication to improving the plight of the common man and woman, had paid off. At least that is what Stern, my future adversary, preached.
Others had a differing view. In January 2005, The New York Times Magazine profiled Stern under the subtitle, “The New Boss.” Reporter Matt Bai began the article by writing, “Purple is the color of Andrew Stern’s life. He wears, almost exclusively, purple shirts, purple jackets, and purple caps. He carries a purple duffel bag and drinks bottled water with a purple label, emblazoned with the purple logo of the Service Employees International Union, of which Stern is President.” Later, Bai added a vivid description of the-then 54-year-old Stern: “He is a lean, compact man with thinning white hair, and when he reclines in the purple chair in his Washington office and crosses one leg over the other, he could easily pass for a psychiatrist or a math professor.”
When Stern had attempted to disconnect his nearly two million workers and what amounted to a 6.5 billion dollar enterprise from the AFL–CIO, the tactic did not endear him to other union leaders. In the article, Tom Buffenbarger, President of the union that represented machines and aerospace workers, told Bai, “What Andy’s doing now with his compadres is what Vladimir Putin is trying to do to the Communist bloc countries. He’s trying to implement dictatorial rule.” Later in the article, Buffenbarger called Stern “an arrogant usurper” and compared him to “a rather small peacock.” He then said Stern was “enamored of all the glitz and hype of Wall Street types. He must be a fan of Donald Trump. I think he wants his own TV show.” Reading Buffenbarger, it would lead you to believe that Stern is a legend in his own mind.
Former boss John Sweeney was tough on Stern as well based on accusations that Stern’s grand ideas for revolutionizing the union movement “incited fury within a lot of smaller unions, whose members don’t seem to think the movement needs a self-appointed savior.” “Andy is impatient,” Sweeney said, “I think he needs to stand still for a minute and listen to what other people think.” In a telling point to this and other characterizations based on the financial fiascos during the 2008/2009 economic downturn, Stern suggested that unions merge into global unions even though the smaller ones resented it, “What was good for GM ended up being good for the country.” Later, when GM was on the verge of bankruptcy, he would change this tune as a guest on the Charlie Rose television program.
In an update to Stern’s plans, The New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse chronicled some bumps in the road in early 2008. In an article titled, “Union Grows, but Leader Faces
Criticism,” the reporter displayed the comments of Sal Rosselli, President of one of SEIU’s largest locals with representation of more than 140,000 California health care workers. His view: “. . . an overly zealous focus on growth—growth at any cost, apparently—has eclipsed SEIU’s commitment to its members.” Later, in April, the Times reported “Poor Andy Stern,” before documenting his failed attempt to organize private equity firms that “even his fellow labor leaders seem to think is a bad idea.” Such an agenda caused the Times to suggest his real goal “was expanding his own political clout,” but Stern denied any aspirations for a personal role in politics with carefully chosen words that left the door open to seeking office in the future.
Such depictions did not add to the superior image Stern wished to portray, and an incident in Oakland, California during this time pointed fingers at how rough and tough Stern, and the SEIU organizers, had become. This was clear based on a district court issuing a restraining order against Stern and the SEIU over allegations “that SEIU members stalked, harassed, and physically assaulted members of the California Nurses Association.”
These incidents, and others, had caused the Wall Street Journal in July 2008 to refer to Stern as the “the drama queen of Big Labor,” one who “wants to pound [equity] firms with bad publicity and political retribution until they break.” While we did not own an equity firm, we would learn how true the allegations against Stern and SEIU were. He was about to attack with his Corporate Campaign against EMS as well as any one else who stood in his way, and with a viciousness that I could have never predicted in my wildest dreams.