Don’t miss FrontPage’s other Union Gangsters profiles featuring Craig Becker, Richard Trumka,Stephen Lerner and Daniel De Leon.
Andy Stern is one of the most outspoken, cocksure neo-communists of the American labor movement.
“We like to say: We use the power of persuasion first,” Stern said, channeling Rules for Radicalsauthor Saul Alinsky. “If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.”
Stern quotes Karl Marx in television appearances. In 2007 the wannabe Bolshevik told Bill Moyers that his Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was expanding to Australia, Switzerland, England, South America, and Africa.
We’ve been working with unions around the world. And what we’re working towards is building a global organization. Because “workers of the world unite,” it’s not just a slogan anymore. It’s the way we’re going to have to do our work.
Stern loves government slush funds that advantage the Left. He enthusiastically supports President Obama’s so-called jobs bill that would provide $15 billion for ACORN and its 20-odd new front groups, other radical left-wing groups, and state and local governments.
He also seems blissfully, willfully ignorant of the many misguided government policies and programs that helped to cause the current financial crisis. To him everything is the fault of investors.
“People burnt this economy to the ground with irresponsible speculative behavior,” Stern said in January 2010 at a labor forum sponsored by the left-wing Center for American Progress Action Fund. “And I would just say for the record that if American justice is really equal for everyone there are a lot of people that deserve to be called into account for what’s taken place up to now.”
As punishment, he supports enacting a stock market-killing tax on financial transactions that backers say could net $1.7 trillion over 10 years. The tax is being aggressively promoted by fellow neo-communist Heather Booth, the founder of the Alinskyite training school called the Midwest Academy. (Booth recently led Marxists in a stirring recitation of “Solidarity Forever” at a conference in Washington, D.C.)
Stern is also well-practiced in the dark art of Alinskyite vilification. At the 2010 forum he excoriated lawmakers for not passing the then-stalled Obamacare bill. Stern called senators who refused to approve the legislation “terrorists.”
“We should send the national security people over and explain to them why we don’t negotiate with terrorists,” he said. “There are a lot of terrorists in the Senate who think we’re supposed to negotiate with them when they have their particular needs that they want met.”
Under Stern’s leadership, SEIU became the fastest-growing union in America. His brutal, in-your-face tactics apparently helped to add a million dues-paying members to the rolls, bringing its total membership to 2.2 million.
Stern’s radicalism and love of thuggery permeates virtually every aspect of SEIU, which he led as president from 1996 to 2010 before leaving under an ethical cloud two years before his term of office was to expire.
With Stern at the helm, SEIU harassed and harangued companies into signing agreements to make the union the representative of their employees. Companies that dared to resist were subjected to “corporate campaigns” that included picket lines, boycotts, and actions calculated to generate negative publicity for employers.
The racketeers of SEIU use an intimidation manual to guide their vicious attacks against targeted companies. As labor watchdog F. Vincent Vernuccioreported,
The new union tactic is to use pressure on corporate boardrooms as a means of organizing entire companies nationwide rather than recruiting workers on a site-by-site basis; in short, to organize employers rather than employees. To create this pressure, unions attempt to push businesses to the edge of bankruptcy, with little regard for the welfare of employer and employee. They attempt to strong-arm businesses into agreeing to take away the secret ballot for employees in union-organizing elections via card check. They also try to force employers to restrict their own speech on union issues so that workers will not get both sides of the story on unionization. Among the SEIU’s demands is that employers agree to bargain only with it, to the exclusion of all other unions, regardless of what workers want.
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