The Service Employees International Union is growing at a time when most other unions are not. It now has 1.9 million dues-paying members, a near doubling from early 1996 when current President Andrew Stern took over the helm. Things, in other words, have worked out according to plan. Stern’s grow-or-die gospel is central to the way his union organizes and negotiates. It’s also the main reason for the eventual split that occurred between him and his predecessor, John Sweeney, who ascended to the AFL-CIO leadership. That split became formalized in the summer of 2005, when the SEIU and a half-dozen other AFL-CIO affiliates formed their own federation, Change to Win. But Stern has opponents within his own union, too, most of all in the form of Sal Rosselli, head of a 140,000-member, Oakland, Calif.-based affiliate, United Healthcare Workers-West. Union Corruption Update reported last year that Rosselli was highly dissatisfied with the way SEIU leaders from Washington, D.C. headquarters apparently strong-armed into being a substandard contract between UHW-West and California nursing home operators. Relations since have deteriorated further.
In placing 
Barack Obama, like any Democratic president, has serious IOUs to labor unions. And AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, more than any other labor leader, is one ally he can't afford to alienate. About the last thing Obama wants, especially as his party faces heavy losses in congressional elections this November, is the subject of Trumka's lengthy track record of aggression and corruption to come up. Major media, for the most part, have obliged him in the wake of the round of speeches yesterday at the Milwaukee Area Labor Council Laborfest, making little or mention of inconvenient facts. It isn't as if Obama or top members of his administration are complaining.
It may have been a formality, but the executive board of the Service Employees International Union this past Saturday overwhelmingly named SEIU Executive Vice President Mary Kay Henry to succeed Andrew Stern as the labor organization's next president. The 73-member governing body met in Washington, D.C. to select Ms. Henry, who ran unopposed after Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger dropped out of the race a little over a week earlier. Henry, like Burger, is a Stern loyalist.
Almost everyone connected to organized labor by now has heard the news: Andrew Stern soon will resign as president of the Service Employees International Union. His departure in all likelihood will be permanent. And, if somewhat muted, so will the edgy aggression of the union he redefined. 
No organization likes bad publicity. And when allied organizations create it, disavowing ties to them becomes attractive. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has exercised that option - at least on the surface. 
In Barack Obama, organized labor knows it has its man in the White House. Arguably more than any U.S. president in history, President Obama supports the union domestic agenda, ever and always anchored in aggressive government intervention in the economy. And union officials support him, having provided indispensable financial and logistical support for his campaign last year. To show his appreciation, 
Almost nobody doubts that come September, 
