W Post: Union leader Stern leaves with questions over spending

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/14/AR2010051402142.html?wprss=rss_nation

By Alec MacGillis
Saturday, May 15, 2010

In celebrating her election last weekend to head the Service Employees International Union -- the nation's fastest-growing and most politically active labor organization -- Mary Kay Henry vowed to "build on the success" of Andrew L. Stern, the charismatic, ambitious labor leader who is taking his influence to new arenas, such as President Obama's deficit commission.


Departing SEIU leader Andrew L. Stern said he was forced to spend money in order to protect the integrity of the 1.8 million- member union. (Andrew Councill/bloomberg News)


But the state of the union Stern is leaving behind is more mixed than Henry let on. Even as Stern turns to the nation's spending problem, his own union's spending -- notably the multimillion-dollar tab from internal battles he has waged -- is drawing sharp criticism from within the labor movement. Stern has expanded his union, but his decisions have left it and the labor movement as a whole financially strapped, according to disclosure reports.

Stern has played an active role in Washington, visiting the Obama White House more than three dozen times and overseeing his union's prominent role in the health-care overhaul. The 1.8 million-member union has also grown in a time of labor decline, making Stern the most consequential labor leader of his era.

Spending by his union, however, increasingly has been driven not by the usual priorities -- organizing workers and helping elect political allies -- but by internal strife, records show.

In 2008 and 2009, SEIU sent hundreds of its officials to California for a turf war with a big breakaway chapter, spending $2.5 million each year on hotels in the state, a fivefold increase from 2007. In Fresno alone, the union spent $300,000 on lodging before narrowly winning an election over dissident leaders.

The battle in California helped drive up SEIU's legal costs last year by 64 percent, to $11 million. That amount also reflected a showdown with the hotel and restaurant workers union and the fallout from corruption allegations involving several Stern loyalists.

FULL story at link.