Purple Power: The History and Global Impact of SEIU

With nearly two million members—more than the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers combined—the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is now the second-largest union in the United States. Its influence on the American labor movement over the last thirty years dwarfs probably even the size of its membership. From its role in the 2005 Change to Win (CtW) split with the AFL-CIO to its long history of raiding other unions to its leadership of campaigns like Fight for 15, the SEIU has been at the forefront of many of the battles—internal and external—in twenty-first-century American labor politics. Luís L. M. Aguiar and Joseph A. McCartin's collection Purple Power: The History and Global Impact of SEIU is a welcome attempt to bring scholarly analysis to the growth, successes, and controversies of “Big Purple. ” While perhaps somewhat disingenuously claiming the collection as the “the first book-length academic treatment of SEIU (227) ”—Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg's 1989 Upheaval in the Quiet Zone and Steve Lopez's 2004 Reorganizing the Rust Belt stand out as previous scholarly monographs—the editors nevertheless bring together nine scholarly essays on SEIU. Accompanying these essays are an interview with Justice for Janitors (J4J) leader Stephen Lerner, an introduction, and a conclusion that collectively help open up a range of questions about both SEIU and the last half century of American labor. Aguiar and McCartin's introduction lays out a solid primer on the union's influence in its sector (and perhaps those it has arguably usurped), on the broader labor movement, and within American social movement politics over the last forty years. They briefly detail a variety of topics within SEIU and adjacent history that could use further critical historical explication, including the union's early adoption of management consultancy practices; the individual roles of John Sweeney and Andy Stern within both SEIU and the broader labor movement; the J4J campaigns; the CtW split; its brutal battles with UNITE HERE and what would become the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) ; its heavily top-down structure; and its role in Democratic Party politics. No doubt Aguiar and McCartin are correct that “scholarship on the union lags far behind its influence, ” though the kind of large-scale, institutional history the editors seem to be advocating has generally not been the modus operandi of American labor historical scholarship—for better or for worse—for multiple generations (6). To be sure, though, as historians increasingly turn to the last forty years of American life, the kind of institutional scaffolding that Aguiar and McCartin suggest is missing for SEIU—and virtually every other union during that time period—is sorely needed if we're going to begin to build a labor historiography meaningfully engaged with recent transformations in work, the labor movement, and political economy. Chapters in the book variously cover topics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives such as SEIU's model of centralized control; internal changes during Stern's presidency; the relationship between SEIU membership and civic engagement; challenges for fast food organizing; the Sweet 16 campaign in Ottawa; the replicability of J4J outside the United States; and the partnership between the Brazilian union Siemaco-SP and SEIU. While salutary as a whole, much of the work in these chapters is directed toward discussions within social science scholarship and, in general, includes little information that will be new for scholars embedded in the contemporary labor movement and its debates. For labor historians in particular, a few chapters in the book stand out as especially useful. Benjamin L. Peterson's “From Flats to the White House: A Brief History of SEIU, 1910–2010, ” provides an important introduction to the longer history of SEIU; in this volume it is also unique in its evenhandedness, for most other contributors tend to emphasize SEIU's successes and downplay the meat of internal labor movement criticisms of the union. Loosely summarizing his 2016 UIC dissertation on SEIU, janitors, and Chicago politics (a study that is required reading for those seeking to understand the context of the union's early growth), Peterson traces the rise to prominence of SEIU progenitor Flat Janitors’ Union (FJU) in Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s. Spread out across apartment buildings in every neighborhood of Chicago, the FJU included an impressive racial and ethnic diversity in its membership. It also grew at an astonishing rate and was integral to the broader Chicago labor movement via providing the building trades with dispersed informants on the use of nonunion labor by apartment building owners. That same dispersal of membership mapped well onto Chicago's precinct structure and made FJU's six thousand members important foot soldiers in the city's machine politics. The FJU's success in Chicago convinced the AFL to grant an international charter, and in 1921 the Building Service Employees Union was founded. Peterson continues to convincingly demonstrate how this early progress “through the use of questionable alliances” dovetailed with many of the strategies that later led to the union's impressive growth as well as its current controversies (30). “Persistence, Militancy, and Power: The Evolution of Justice for Janitors from Atlanta to Washington, D. C. , 1987–1998, ” by Alyssa May Kuchinski and McCartin and based on Kuchinski's undergraduate thesis, is also a particularly welcome contribution. Kuchinski and McCartin trace the early origins of J4J's key strategy of targeting building owners rather than the direct employers of cleaning staff. The chapter then contrasts the failure of J4J in Atlanta with its successes in Washington, DC, a discussion that suggests a variety of avenues for future research surrounding the relationship between urban labor organizing more generally and the role of the language of civil rights, real estate development, court jurisdictions, and what Adolph Reed once labeled the “Black urban regime. ” This chapter in particular would make an excellent reading in a variety of courses on labor, urban, and civil rights history. As a whole, Purple Power provides a useful introduction to SEIU and helps open up a range of historical questions regarding not just that union but also the victories, defeat, and self-inflicted wounds of the broader labor movement of the last four decades. As labor historians increasingly turn to this recent past, the story of SEIU will certainly be integral to many of the questions we ask and narratives we offer.