Andy Stern
President of the 1.9 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Andy Stern is leading a resurgence of organized labor after decades of decline. With Stern at the helm, the SEIU has unionized some of the lowest-paid, least visible workers in the economy like janitors, security guards, home health care workers, winning them pay increases, health insurance and benefits they had never known before. In the process, he is re-creating the labor movement for a global economy. When Andy Stern joined SEIU in 1973, he was a 21-year-old social worker, fresh out of the University of Pennsylvania. He soon became head of his local, and by age 29, he was the youngest member of the SEIU Executive Board. Unlike other union officers, he spent most of his career in the field, organizing workers. In 1996, he won the International Presidency of SEIU in a hotly contested struggle. Over the last 50 years, organized labor in the United States devoted much of its resources to lobbying and elec