One of the largest and most powerful U.S. unions is rejoining the AFL-CIO, giving the country’s leading labor federation a boost as it prepares for another Donald Trump presidency.
The 2 million-member Service Employees International Union announced Wednesday that it had decided to re-affiliate with the federation after a nearly 20-year absence. The SEIU will immediately become the biggest union within the AFL-CIO.
Liz Shuler, the federation’s president, called it “a BFD.”
“You know that we always say ‘stronger together,’ right?” Shuler told HuffPost. “This is an incredible time for us to be amassing our power, uniting and building our muscle together and really showing the power of solidarity. Because we want to make sure that workers continue to have their voices heard as we are about to enter into this new administration.”
The reunion comes at a critical moment for the U.S. labor movement.
Union membership has been declining for decades and now hovers near a historic low of just 6% in the private sector. And that trend is unlikely to improve: The incoming Trump administration will probably seek to reverse the labor-friendly reforms under President Joe Biden, while a Republican-controlled Congress won’t make it any easier for workers to form unions.
“This is an incredible time for us to be amassing our power.”
– AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler
SEIU President April Verrett said discussions to rejoin the federation long preceded Trump’s November victory, but that the election outcome helped reaffirm the rationale behind the move.
“It’s that much more important to come together, to organize workers, to build real power, because that’s our best offense in this moment,” Verrett said.
The AFL-CIO is not a union itself — it is an alliance of 61 unions representing roughly 15 million workers. It lends support to member unions’ campaigns and advocates for organized labor in Washington as a major Democratic ally. It is funded by per-capita taxes that unions pay based on their membership numbers.
The SEIU could be highly influential within the federation due to its size. It has grown into the second-largest union in the U.S. after decades of organizing workers in health care, child care, custodial work and other service fields. It’s known for its innovative labor campaigns — like the Fight for $15 movement in fast food, which helped spur minimum-wage raises in cities and states around the country — as well as its progressive politics.
The reaffiliation means the AFL-CIO can more directly pitch in on SEIU campaigns, including a high-profile one at Starbucks. That effort is led by Workers United, an SEIU affiliate, and has led to more than 500 unionized stores nationwide at the coffee chain, making it one of the most closely watched organizing pushes in decades.
The reunion could also help mend old rifts within the labor movement.
The SEIU was part of an ugly split from the AFL-CIO in 2005, when it joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers and others in forming a rival federation.
The breakaway faction said the AFL-CIO was focusing too much on politics and not doing enough to organize new workers. The AFL-CIO’s then-president, John Sweeney, himself a former SEIU leader, called the defection a “grievous insult” to the concept of solidarity.
Those unions that left the AFL-CIO have since come back into the fold, with the exception of the Teamsters, which remain unaffiliated.
The SEIU’s return was years in the making, according to Shuler and Verrett.
Shuler said she wanted to “form a new relationship” with the union after she took the helm at the federation in 2021, replacing the late Richard Trumka. Verrett said she and her predecessor at SEIU, Mary Kay Henry, received a green light from their board to enter formal talks about rejoining the AFL-CIO in 2023.
“It was a natural evolution out of many years of conversations,” Shuler said. “We think this is going to be a big game-changer for our movement and for working people broadly.”