Service Employees International Union - Recent Organizing

Recent Organizing

In Missouri, 12,000 home care attendants in the Consumer Directed Services program voted to unite in the Missouri Home Care Union, a joint local of AFSCME and SEIU. In Wisconsin, 5,500 home care providers voted 'yes' to unite in SEIU. In a landslide vote, part-time adjunct faculty members in the Maine Community College System formed a union with the Maine State Employees Association, Local 1989 of SEIU. And in New York, 30,000 SEIU Local 32BJ apartment building workers—doormen, security guards, bellhops, and others—averted a strike and won a new contract.

Over the course of the past several years, the union has made a concerted effort to expand outside of its traditional base on the coasts.

Notable health care organizing successes in 2009 include more than 800 healthcare workers at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center, the largest medical center in Boston's Caritas Christi Health Care chain, voting to unite together with thousands of health care workers in 1199SEIU. And in July 2009, 13,000 home care attendants in the state's consumer directed home care program voted to join the Missouri Home Care Union, a statewide union of home care attendants.

In 2009, the union launched a nationwide campaign against Sodexo to improve wage and job standards. Clean Up Sodexo serves as the online voice of the workers at Sodexo, many of whom make near poverty-level wages working as food service workers at universities around the country.

Since 2004, the union has seen success organizing workers in Texas, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona in particular. Over 5,000 janitors organized with SEIU in Houston, Texas in 2005, which was especially significant due to the size of the campaign and its location in an area with low union density. In Florida, a high-profile strike at the University of Miami which lasted nine weeks and included a hunger strike, ended with the union winning representation of 425 janitors on campus. This victory was shortly followed by another 600 workers at North Shore Medical Center, also in Miami, voting to join the SEIU in early 2006.

One of the major potential areas of union growth in the United States is organizing workers usually hitherto considered "unorganizable," especially low-wage service sector workers, in what is often called "social movement organizing." Many of these service sector workers are minorities, immigrants, and women.

As an example of this, in 2006 and 2007 Oregon's SEIU Local 503, OPEU (Oregon Public Employees Union) built on its earlier successes in organizing state-paid "long-term care providers", including homecare workers (in-home care providers) and family-child-care providers, by organizing "commercial" adult foster home providers who receive state funding. Commercial providers are licensed to operate foster homes with up to five senior or disabled residents. By forming a union, providers would for the first time be able to collectively bargain a contract with the state over service fees, benefits, regulations, and respect.

In the spring of 2007 the state Employment Relations Board (ERB) verified that a significant majority of the commercial providers across Oregon had signed authorization cards supporting forming a union, and Governor Ted Kulongoski signed an executive order recognizing commercial adult foster care providers as a union, and opening the path to contract bargaining. Following the governor's executive order, the Oregon legislature passed a bill, on June 28, 2007, codifying the executive order and making the adult foster care providers state employees solely for the purpose of collective bargaining. After successfully organizing commercial providers, SEIU 503 continued the campaign and organized "relative" adult foster home providers, who are licensed and paid by the state to provide care for senior or disabled family members.

In November 2007 the Oregon ERB verified that a significant majority of relative providers had signed authorization cards and Governor Kulongoski signed Executive Order No. 07-20 recognizing them as part of the union. With the success of the two stages of this organizing campaign, adult foster care providers were able to form a union for the first time in the United States. In August 2008, the new adult foster care providers in SEIU Local 503 and the State of Oregon completed negotiations on the first adult foster care provider union contract in the US.

In 2012, news sources reported that SEIU was paying local and non-local workers to campaign against Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for $11 an hour.