Early Life and Career
He grew up Jewish and middle class in West Orange, N.J., where his father was a lawyer. Stern was a student leftist in the 1960s. He began college as a business major at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business but ultimately graduated in 1971 with a B.A. in education and urban planning. Stern began his career as a welfare case officer and member of the SEIU in 1973, eventually being elected president of his Pennsylvania local. In 1980, he was elected to the union's executive board, and in 1984 the union's then-president John Sweeney put him in charge of its organizing efforts. Stern is a backer of the Employee Free Choice Act.
In 1996, Stern was elected to the presidency of the union. After launching a national debate aimed at uniting the 9 out of 10 American workers who have no organization at work, SEIU, along with the Teamsters, announced on July 25, 2005 that they were disaffiliating from the AFL-CIO. Stern led SEIU out of the AFL-CIO and founded Change to Win, a six-million member federation of seven major unions "dedicated to giving workers a voice at their jobs".
Stern is now a Senior Fellow at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute.
Read more about this topic: Andy Stern
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus’s time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“I’ve been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had their career.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)