Love, Labor, Loss

He's telling of a woman named Flora Aguilar. She's a janitor in Houston, among the janitors that Stern's SEIU has just recently organized. She works four hours a day for one of the largest cleaning firms in the country, he says, cleaning "30 offices, two hallways, 29 toilets. And she goes home with 20 bucks. That's Flora Aguilar's life."

And yet workers like Aguilar -- increasingly the backbone of the service economy -- have been overlooked, deemed too hard to organize by a labor movement whose mentality is stuck in an industrial, manufacturing past that has been exported and globalized.

That's why he calls the labor movement "male, pale and stale."

"We thought we could go into the future by looking into the rear-view mirror, but it just doesn't work," Stern is saying, using one of his oft-repeated images of labor stuck in the past.

The largely white male crowd applauds politely.

An hour later, Stern is down in South Philly peeling off his suit jacket and tie, pulling on a purple SEIU windbreaker and marching across a rain-swept parking lot to join a sea of purple-clad protesters converging on a local Wal-Mart.

He loves this, loves the fray. He used to take Cassie and Matt to protests once in a while, as well as labor conventions, when Cassie was well enough to go.

Here, he is with a family of a different kind. He is chairman of the Wal-Mart Watch advocacy group, and these protesters -- white, black and brown home-care workers and janitors -- are from SEIU Local 668, where Stern got his start. Now he's plunging into the crowd to show his solidarity, chanting "Hey-hey! Ho-ho! Wal-Mart has got to go!"

From Success, Criticism

Stern wanted to overhaul the AFL-CIO and its more than 60 affiliated unions. And as the leader of the largest and fastest growing union in the group, his voice was heard.

He wanted the federation to merge some of its small unions with larger ones. He wanted it to recruit more aggressively and across entire sectors (all janitors, home-care workers, security guards, etc.), not just at individual workplaces. And he wanted to bring businesses on board by dispelling their fears, in labor negotiations, of being undercut by competing workplaces.

It could be done, he believed, for his own union has done it. In the SEIU, membership has tripled since the 1980s to 1.8 million. The union represents health care workers, janitors, security guards and other service workers often deemed difficult to organize because many are part-time or contract workers.

By gathering the support of local political and religious leaders, the SEIU recently unionized 5,000 janitors in Houston across several workplaces. It also won a recent battle to organize 49,000 child-care workers in Illinois.