Love, Labor, Loss

The SEIU's successes have not gone unnoticed.

"Houston's tough turf," says Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University. "Houston sends a very good message -- that you can win in the South and you can win big."

And that is the rub.

Ruth Milkman, a professor and director of the UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations, says the SEIU's success has made it the target of resentment by some in the labor movement.

"They're so much better than everybody else that the hubris that might go with that is dangerous," Milkman says.

Indeed, there's a soaring self-assuredness that infuses Stern's work. Get him talking and he launches into a rapid-fire stream of consciousness, very high-concept, and it all makes sense, you think, but then he's turning a sharp intellectual corner, racing up a hill, rounding a bend in the logic and challenging the listener to keep up.

Stern's leadership is "both exciting, wonderful and sometimes a little terrifying," says Stephen Lerner, a SEIU division director and leader of the Justice for Janitors campaign begun in the 1980s. "You can be working with Andy Stern hand in hand with a great idea and there'll be a series of discussions and he'll have a brand-new idea and gears will change incredibly quickly," says Lerner. "So part of what happens is there's very little orthodox. It's an environment that is constantly challenging you and saying you can't sit on your laurels."

In a broad brush, Stern likens himself to John L. Lewis, the mine workers leader who broke with the AFL back in the 1930s when he founded the CIO to represent industrial and manufacturing workers.

"He had the guts to take the money of the mine workers and invest it in building a new organization based on a fundamentally different principle," Stern says. "This guy really created the modern industrial labor movement." Minus Lewis's infamous megalomania, Stern sees himself as leading a similar sea change in big labor.

His detractors -- surprise -- don't see it that way at all.

When he put forward a set of comprehensive proposals to the AFL-CIO in December 2004, John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO president and Stern's onetime mentor, and other labor leaders rejected most of them.

But even some of Stern's main allies didn't share his far-reaching vision.