Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Workers Worldwide Union, one of many nation’s largest and most politically highly effective labor unions, introduced Tuesday that she would step down after 14 years in her place.
Ms. Henry was the primary girl elected to guide the union, which represents practically two million employees like janitors and residential well being aides in each the private and non-private sectors.
Beneath her management, it launched a serious initiative referred to as the Battle for $15, which sought to arrange fast-food employees and push for a $15 minimal wage. Successful over skeptics within the ranks, Ms. Henry argued that the union may make features by way of a broad-based marketing campaign that focused the trade as an entire reasonably than particular person employers.
Labor consultants and trade officers cite the marketing campaign as a serious power behind important minimum-wage will increase in states together with California and New York and cities like Seattle and Chicago. It additionally pushed a recent California law making a council to set a minimal wage within the fast-food trade, which can grow to be $20 an hour in April, and to suggest new well being and security requirements.
Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor on the Graduate Middle of the Metropolis College of New York, stated the union beneath Ms. Henry had been “prepared to take possibilities on fairly daring initiatives” and referred to as the Battle for $15 an “extraordinary achievement.”
However the marketing campaign has not unionized employees on a big scale and enabled them to barter collective bargaining agreements with their employers.
Ms. Henry’s tenure has coincided with a sequence of legislative and authorized challenges to organized labor, together with state legal guidelines rolling again collective bargaining rights and permitting employees to decide out of once-mandatory union charges, in addition to a landmark Supreme Court docket ruling permitting authorities staff to do the identical.
The union’s membership has stayed practically flat on Ms. Henry’s watch, whereas the general share of People represented by unions has declined roughly 15 p.c. However the union misplaced obligatory charges from greater than 200,000 nonmembers, inflicting a big lack of income.
The union will choose Ms. Henry’s successor by way of a vote of delegates at its quadrennial conference in Could.
“I’m able to go the baton,” Ms. Henry, 66, stated in an interview. “S.E.I.U. is full of highly effective, dynamic, multiracial leaders of the subsequent era who’re able to seize this second of employee rebellion.”
The union’s second-ranking official, Secretary-Treasurer April Verrett, stated in an interview that she meant to be a candidate for the highest job.
A longtime organizer, Ms. Henry was an government vp when the union’s board selected her to fill out the presidential time period of Andy Stern, who resigned in 2010. She gained the primary of three full four-year phrases in 2012.
Ms. Henry’s strategy has invited criticism that the union is simply too top-down in its efforts.
The organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey has criticized the Battle for $15 for being too centered on what she calls “mobilizing” — that’s, relying closely on knowledgeable employees, consultants and activists to generate consideration and form public opinion — reasonably than constructing an in depth, worker-led group.
As S.E.I.U. bought extra concerned in a union marketing campaign that an affiliate, Employees United, launched at Starbucks in 2021, some Starbucks employees stated decision-making and communications had grow to be extra centralized.
Within the interview, Ms. Henry rejected the competition that the union’s campaigns didn’t prominently contain employees, however stated it was vital to pair ground-level organizing with different methods that pressured employers.
The union has additionally been a power in politics and in coverage debates. Ms. Henry took the highest job shortly after President Barack Obama signed the Reasonably priced Care Act, which the union had mobilized to assist go. She threw the union into defending the well being care laws in opposition to Republican makes an attempt to repeal it.
The union’s political bets beneath Ms. Henry haven’t at all times labored out, like its endorsement of Hillary Clinton early within the 2016 presidential marketing campaign cycle. Many members later turned obsessed with her Democratic main rival, Bernie Sanders.
In 2020, the union took a distinct tack, laying out a coverage agenda that it urged candidates to embrace, which included making it simpler for employees to cut price on an industrywide foundation and making giant investments in house care and baby care, together with elevated pay for care employees. Joseph R. Biden Jr. included most of the union’s concepts into his home coverage platform en path to the presidency.
“It’s an instance of how we take inventory and consider management choices, and draw classes and take into consideration what we wish to do in a different way subsequent time,” Ms. Henry stated of the change in strategy.
Nonetheless, main house care and baby care measures proposed by Mr. Biden died within the Senate.
Ms. Henry stated the union was spending closely on this 12 months’s political elections — a sum more likely to exceed $100 million, in line with a union official.
“We wish to end the job,” she stated. “We’ve Senate targets, Home targets, governors, state legislators, metropolis councils — to make all the main features we will make.”
