New SEIU Chief, Mary Kay Henry, Charts Her Path for Union

[Earth Bound Misfit]

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5952/new_seiu_chief_mary_kay_henry_charts_her_path_for_union/

Mary Kay Henry, elected Saturday as successor to Service Employees union (SEIU) president Andy Stern by the union’s executive board, pledged to expand the union’s organizing and political work while reaching out to other unions to unite on strategy.

“We can’t go it alone,” she said, referring both to the need for workers to organize and for SEIU to work more collaboratively with other unions. SEIU, she said, wants “to be full partners inside American labor because we can’t turn around this country as SEIU alone.”

Henry indicated she hoped to negotiate a settlement of SEIU’s fight with UNITE HERE, which originated with Stern’s attempt to take advantage of UNITE HERE internal tensions to gain control over the entire union. (One faction of UNITE HERE did split and join SEIU.)

But she has “no plans whatsoever to engage the leadership of a rival organization,” the National Union of Healthcare Workers, a group of former union members, staff, and officers who broke away from SEIU's 150,000-member California healthcare local after Stern put it in trusteeship. The two unions are now battling for loyalties of the local’s members.

She expressed interest in closer work with unions in both the AFL-CIO and Change To Win, the new union group that Stern led out of the older union federation in 2005. Henry said she will soon “begin a listen and learn series of conversations with heads of all affiliates of both the AFL-CIO and Change To Win. We think the crisis for working people is so profound we need a unified voice.”

But Henry made it clear she was thinking more about unifying strategically than about rejoining the AFL-CIO. “We don’t think it’s about how the labor movement is structured but about what unions decide to do,” she said. “That’s the way we restore unity–by winning for workers.”

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[Omaha Steve]

1. K&R!