History
The SEIU was founded in 1921 in Chicago as the Building Services Employees Union (BSEU); its first members were janitors, elevator operators, and window washers. Membership increased significantly with a 1934 strike in New York City's Garment District. Growth from organizing new members, and affiliating with other unions, it includes more than 225,000 janitors in at least 29 cities in the United States and at least four cities in Canada, and mergers with other unions resulted in a membership working in industries well beyond BSEIU's initial boundaries. In 1968 it renamed itself Service Employees International Union. In 1980 it absorbed the International Jewelry Workers Union, later the Drug, Hospital, and Health Care Employees Union (Local 1199), and the Health & Human Services Workers.
In 1995, SEIU President John Sweeney was elected president of the AFL-CIO, the confederation of labor unions in the United States and Canada. After Sweeney's departure, former social worker Andrew Stern was elected president of SEIU. In the first ten years of Stern's administration, the union's membership grew rapidly, making SEIU the largest union in the AFL-CIO by 2000.
In 2003, SEIU was a founding member of the New Unity Partnership, an organization of unions that pushed for reforms at the national level, and a greater commitment to organizing unorganized workers into unions. In 2005, SEIU was a founding member of the Change to Win Coalition, which furthered the reformist agenda, criticizing the AFL-CIO for focusing its attention on electoral politics, instead of taking sufficient action to encourage organizing in the face of decreasing union membership.
In June 2004, SEIU launched a non-union-member affiliate group called Purple Ocean to stand with workers in the fight for economic justice.
On the eve of the 2005 AFL-CIO convention, SEIU, along with its Change to Win partners, the Teamsters union, and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, announced that it was disaffiliating from the AFL-CIO after the 50-year-old labor federation declined to pass the Coalition's suggested reforms. The Change to Win Federation held its founding convention in September 2005, where SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger was announced as the organizations' Chair. As with other Change to Win unions, many individual SEIU locals remain affiliated to regional AFL-CIO bodies through "solidarity charters."
Read more about this topic: Service Employees International Union
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