Love, Labor, Loss

James P. Hoffa, president of the 1.4-million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters and son of the late and legendary Jimmy Hoffa, said his union does not support mergers and strict sectorial organizing. But Hoffa shares Stern's frustration with the AFL-CIO's failure to arrest labor's decline, as well as annoyance at its administrative size.

"You go to meetings there, it's like going to a U.N. meeting," Hoffa said. The Teamsters made some radical organizing proposals of their own. But Sweeney's team was not receptive. (Sweeney declined to be interviewed for this article.)

In June, the SEIU, the Teamsters and other disaffected unions formed the Change to Win Coalition. The next month, while the AFL-CIO was holding its 50th anniversary convention in Chicago, the SEIU and Teamsters announced they were leaving. Soon thereafter, they were joined by the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Laborers International Union, the United Farm Workers of America, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, and the apparel and hospitality workers of the Unite Here union.

They left behind an AFL-CIO embittered by the breakup.

The AFL-CIO executive committee had tried to satisfy Stern by proposing that a commission be established to recommend union mergers. Stern voted against it. He saw it as a feint, an AFL-CIO tactic to "fake change rather than make change."

"Nobody ever understood exactly what they wanted," says Denise Mitchell, spokeswoman for the AFL-CIO. "It was maddening."

Some observers suggested that it was all a power play by Stern.

"For all the talk about fundamentally different principles, different strategic approaches, differing organizing principles, that's all really [expletive]," says a labor official familiar with the SEIU who spoke anonymously because he works with both labor federations.

"He'd decided he had outgrown the federation," the source says. "His union was growing. Too many other unions weren't."

Stern dismisses such criticism as "insulting," saying it merely attempts to "diminish" the reformist agenda. Yes, he does want power, he says -- "but for workers."

Aiding the Underdog

Almost all the men in Stern's family are lawyers. His late father was. His brothers are. A grandfather was. (The other grandfather was a butcher.)

Ken Stern, 53, Andrew's brother, says they were raised in the Judaic tradition of tikkun olam , "sort of a duty and responsibility to heal the world, make the world a better place."

"He's always cared about people," Ken Stern says of his big brother. "He always liked to help the underdog."

As a teen in West Orange, N.J., Andrew Stern raised money for poor children around the world by throwing backyard carnivals, complete with a baton-twirling neighbor and songs lip-synched by Tom Stern, his youngest brother, who was terrified but did it because Andy was persuasive that way.

In high school, Stern managed a political campaign for a class-president candidate. That role, in the background, was typical of his high school career, except when he played on the tennis team. He was never the high achiever of parental expectations.

"My mom wanted me to be the most likely to succeed or win an academic prize," Stern says, "so in ninth grade, me and my girlfriend were class couple." He laughs. "And then in 12th grade, I was best personality or runner-up in best personality. My mom was hoping for the best biology award."

At the University of Pennsylvania, he enrolled in the Wharton School for a year. But it was a mistake. He didn't plan on going into business.

"You had to wear a tie and jacket to get into the dining hall, and you were served by students in uniforms wearing white gloves," he says, laughing at the spectacle.

He switched to urban studies. He threw himself into campus activism. He helped organize and manage a food co-op. He protested a university plan to turn Penn's version of a "people's park" into a parking lot.

After graduating, he went into welfare, becoming a caseworker for the state. That led him to join the SEIU, which hired him as a union organizer in 1973.

He rose steadily through its ranks -- as a local president, then a state president, all the while challenging the status quo, making allies and enemies with whom he would contend for years to come.

Transcending the Grief

Cassie had surgery to correct scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, in May 2002. She also was chronically weak from hypotonia, abnormally low muscle tone that plagued her from birth. Later that month, father and daughter visited his stepmother in Ocean City, N.J. Stern slept in the same room as Cassie to make sure she was all right through the night.

He heard the silence when she stopped breathing.

He tried to resuscitate her. His stepmother called 911. A chopper medevaced Cassie to the hospital. But she slipped into a coma. Several days later, it was over.

His memories became a form of torture -- their trip to Venice and the Vatican, their safari in Botswana, the way she bossed her cats, Patrick and Olivia, and did her pottery and had her dad and everyone else lovingly wrapped around her finger.

There was grief counseling. He had a hard time coping. So did Matt, who found it troubling that his father would lose it and start crying in public. And Stern's marriage to Cassie's mom, A. Jane Perkins, did not survive the trauma.

One day, Stern just walked out of a union meeting and wandered the streets.

"I wasn't sure I could continue doing my job after she died," he says.

This year, for the first time, he watched a video montage that a friend had made for him of Cassie's life. It was hard. He watched it in segments over three weeks.

And slowly, it happened. The balance began to take shape. There was and will always be the horror of the loss, he says, but bursting through the pain was also the joy of remembrance.

He had discovered and claimed Cassie's gift.