Weird: Andy Stern to Resign from SEIU

by Publius

From Ben Smith at Politico:

andy_stern

Service Employees International Union President Andrew Stern, one of America’s most prominent labor leaders, is set to resign, according to a member of the union’s board and another SEIU official.

The President of an SEIU local based in Seattle, Diane Sosne, broke the news to her staffers at 11:35 this morning, local time.

“Last night I received confirmation that Andy Stern is resigning as President of SEIU. He has not yet made a public announcement; we will share the details as we become aware of them,” Sosne wrote in an email obtained by POLITICO.

Sosne offered no explanation for the move, but another SEIU official speculated that Stern had finally tired of the draining job.

“Health care getting done is a good culmination,” the official said.

Sosne isn’t seen as a Stern loyalist or a central union player, but she’s a respected former nurse who sits on the international’s board as president of SEIU Local 1199NW, which represents nurses. She and her assistant didn’t respond to questions about the email. Stern’s spokeswoman also didn’t immediately respond to a question about the email.

The SEIU has emerged as a central political player and has grown rapidly under Stern’s tenure, and some close to him had expected him to resign during the first term of the president he helped elect, and after the achievement he’d spent years focusing on, widening access to health care. But he’s also waged a series of bitter battles inside the labor movement, one of the nastiest of which turned in SEIU’s favor with a California court ruling last week. Stern also won a victory when Obama named his union’s lawyer, Craig Becker, to the National Labor Relations board over Republican objections in a recess appointment last month.

Read the whole article here.


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Posted Apr 12th 2010 at 8:12 pm in Big Labor | 57 Comments