After 14 years at the helm of the Service Employees International Union, Mary Kay Henry is formally stepping down today from her role as president.
Henry was the first woman to lead the 103-year-old union, has about two million members—including healthcare workers, janitors, food service workers, and law enforcement—and is one of the most powerful forces in the labor movement.
But Henry believes the time has come to hand over the reins, in what is expected to be another first for the union: This week, during its quadrennial convention, the SEIU will reportedly elect its first Black president, April Verrett, who is currently secretary-treasurer of the union.
“I think it’s really important for the next generation of multiracial leadership to take the helm and move our fight to win sectoral organizing to the next level,” Henry told Fast Company. “I really have full faith and confidence in the candidates that our members are considering for election at our convention.”
During her time as president, Henry oversaw one of the SEIU’s most significant initiatives over the last decade: the Fight for $15 campaign, which organized fast food workers across the country and helped catalyze minimum wage increases across many states. The campaign was also a major force behind a historic new law in California, which went into effect earlier this year and raised the minimum hourly wage for fast food workers to $20. Under Henry’s watch, the SEIU has sought to reach workers in nursing homes and across the care sector, advocating for a new approach to collective bargaining in which workers negotiate as a whole with employers across their industry.
In an interview with Fast Company, Henry looked back on her four-decade-plus career at SEIU, the union’s biggest wins during her tenure, and the future of the labor movement. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You’ve spent nearly your entire career at SEIU. What kept you there? Did you have any idea this would be your path when you joined back in 1980?
I was drawn to this work as a high school student and then a college student because I was doing community-based organizing on the east side of Detroit. When we were orienting people to public assistance, food stamps, housing, Medicaid, and whatnot, [at] every door I knocked on people said, “I don’t want a government handout. I want a good job that I can support my family on.”
This was at the height of the recession, [when] auto companies were closing plants in Detroit and around Michigan and moving to the south in the late ’70s, early ’80s. It made a huge impression on me—that what I really needed to commit my life to was people’s dignity at work. And I met UAW women when I was organizing on reproductive justice in the state legislature when I was in college, and they were really impressive to me.
So for me, it’s been more of a mission. It’s not really a job. I’ve stayed for 43 years because I’ve had the opportunity to witness and walk beside workers who have the courage to form unions even when they get fired—even when the employer harasses them [or] changes their schedule or reduces their hours or creates an economic consequence for them. It’s been incredibly moving for me. I’ve probably done 20 different jobs in those 43 years, and it’s been the honor of my life to serve as president for the past 14.
The Fight for $15 movement was a defining part of your tenure as president, and the campaign has helped usher in minimum wage increases across the country. Fourteen states have now passed a $15 minimum wage, along with many cities and localities. Did you expect that you’d see this kind of progress?
Not on this scale. When we first backed the fast food workers in New York who were making that demand—the fight for $15 and a union—we faced skepticism inside and outside the union. But it has transformed the national conversation around wages. I’m incredibly proud that it is one of the signature David versus Goliath stories of our generation, and that it’s had the impact for minimum wage workers on the scale that you said. Twenty-seven million workers have $150 billion more in their pocket as a result.
But there’s still so much more to do because we’re trying to realize the union part—and that’s why the $15 and a union demand is being shifted to a fight for unions for all. I feel really hopeful about the initial breakthroughs we’ve made in California on the Fast Food Sector Council, and in Minnesota on the nursing home workers. I’m really excited to see how the workers and leaders of our union bring those to life as the next form of worker power and permanent membership organization, and that it spreads beyond California and Minnesota into other sectors and to other states.
The progress you’ve made with fast food workers in California seems like an example of a new model for organizing. Bringing more workers into the labor movement—especially those who lack protections under labor law—has been a through line of your tenure. How has SEIU done that under your leadership?
That’s exactly how we see it, as a new model, and it’s why sectoral organizing is one of the key tools we believe we need to win the future. We think it’s absolutely necessary to organize on this scale—550,000 fast food workers in California [and] 25,000 nursing home workers in Minnesota—because we want to build an economy from the ground up.
[We want to give] workers a seat at the table across 30,000 fast food franchises in California, and then thousands of different nursing home employers in Minnesota, with the government who does 90% of the financing of those nursing homes, the workers who labor on the front lines of those nursing homes, and then their advocates, who are able to build an organization that allows those workers to speak with one powerful voice.
I think those two experiments will be replicated across the country and in other sectors. We’re trying to do it in home care. We’re trying to do it in airports. We’re trying to do it with childcare workers. We’re experimenting in the South with the union of southern service workers, which is a multistate, multi-industry union taking on the legacy of Jim Crow and union busting.
You see sectoral bargaining as a key part of organizing those types of workers. Can you elaborate on why you feel strongly about that approach?
We think it makes sense because the rules are broken for workers to join together in unions. Anti-union campaigning by employers, shop by shop, kind of ties down both the union worker leaders in individual stores or facilities and doesn’t allow us to unleash the power of workers on the scale that we need where the economic decisions are made by employers. For fast food, you have to get out of the one store at a time [model] and get to a level of power where we can actually influence not just the franchise owners, but really the multinational corporations that set the economic terms for those owners.
We think this is required because of the way the economy has shifted over the past 40 years and because the workers that we’re trying to organize were written out in the 1930s. These new sectoral approaches are a way to write in primarily Black, brown, and immigrant workers who were never included in the original law and are doing jobs that didn’t exist a hundred years ago—like franchise jobs, contract jobs, gig jobs. The way the [National Labor Relations Act] currently works doesn’t allow for workers to build the economic power they need to really transform poverty wage work into good living wage jobs that people can raise their families on.
It seems like that approach makes sense for industries like childcare, which is largely comprised of smaller businesses.
Here’s the thing about that sector: [There’s] a direct government subsidy to low income families through family childcare. It took us 17 years to create the childcare workers union in California, but we finally got the rules written so those women could bargain together at a statewide table, and they’ve made incredible progress.
But there are also corporations entering this space, and I think we’re going to see more as we win a big federal investment in this sector. For-profits didn’t exist in nursing homes 50 years ago, but as Medicaid reimbursement increased, for-profit ownership in nursing homes has increased. I think we’ll see the same development in the childcare space, and I think it’s why we need a workforce primarily dominated by Black, brown, and immigrant women to have the ability to join together and bargain, both at the state level and ultimately at the federal level, where the money is moving.
Your time as president has coincided with a particularly tumultuous period, between the pandemic and Trump presidency and other challenges to organized labor. Looking back, what would you say were some of the biggest hurdles you faced?
When I took office in May 2010, we experienced a big political shift in that midterm. President Obama called it a shellacking. We were still trying to recover from the Great Recession in 2008. Obama had to do all this footwork to infuse the economy and there was a big debate. Did he move enough federal money into the economy to deal with a recession? And we never tackled economic inequality. Then we had the rise of the Tea Party right after we passed the Affordable Care Act. I would say that was the first challenge. We were dealing with an insurgent right wing attack on universal healthcare. So we launched the Fight for a Fair Economy [campaign] to try and change the economic discussion. That birthed the fight for $15 and a union in 2012.
I would say the next wave of challenges were the nine states that went right-to-work. There were the private sector attacks on right-to-work. We lost home care units in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio in that 2010 to 2014 period. And then we had the two terrible Supreme Court decisions that attacked public employees and then attacked home care and childcare workers and said we couldn’t build union power in our collective bargaining agreements. Those are the challenges in addition to Trump and COVID that you’ve named, but I saw incredible opportunity in each of those challenges. You can take the crisis and help interpret [it] for working people—why is Scott Walker so committed to dismantling unions in Wisconsin?—and connect that to the corporate power that was influencing him to do that. There were big banks behind that move. There was big pharma behind the Michigan governor. [You can] tell the story to working people. It helped create the conditions for the uprising that we saw going into the pandemic and then coming out of the pandemic, and the number of strikes where workers made huge gains. It inspired more workers to join together in unions.
We’ve seen a surge in worker organizing and strikes in recent years. At the same time, we’re also seeing corporations push back, even attempting to undermine the National Labor Relations Board’s authority. What do you make of these attempts to undermine the NLRB and organizing efforts? Do you worry they could derail the labor movement’s momentum?
For me, it’s a sign that workers [are] standing up and fighting back, both in collective bargaining and for workers that want to become a part of the union. The backlash you just described is, from my perspective, a testament to the fearlessness and courage of workers who have basically said: Enough is enough. We brought you through the pandemic, and we aren’t going to make a choice between our livelihood and our lives. We’re going to insist on jobs that we can raise our families on, that also have paid sick time and paid vacation, for God’s sake, and have decent wages.
The backlash is something that as organizers, we always contend with. Even in the worst of times, when I first started in the labor movement and we were declining, the sort of struggle for power that would happen inside a 100-person nursing home is similar to the struggle for power on the scale of fighting the NLRB in every decision it makes for the tens of thousands of workers that are trying to join a union, or airlines fighting the inclusion of workers in the FAA reauthorization.
So I think it’s a really good sign, and I believe that we’re going to prevail. I have such confidence in the next generation of leaders to read the dynamic and help workers win in the numbers needed to actually shift the balance of power, so that corporate power and structural racism don’t continue to block us moving from 10% of the workforce having a union back to the 35% of the workforce that had a union in the 1970s. That [made] wages go up for everyone. This time, when workers win, we’re going to tackle both racial inequality and economic inequality.
As you step down, what do you think the future holds for SEIU and the broader labor movement?
I’ve never been more confident about SEIU’s future and the labor movement’s future and the broader progressive movement. That’s because our union champions workers who have been written out and written off, and who I think have been demonstrating since the pandemic a willingness to take risks that I’ve never seen before. I am incredibly inspired by the next generation of multiracial leaders inside of SEIU but frankly, across the labor movement and progressive movement. So I think we will see SEIU win worker power on a scale that I could only dream about. That’s what makes me so excited.
And what’s next for you?
I want to take a rest and support the next president of SEIU, and then figure out what I’m called to do next. It could be that I’m in a choral group or take up street theater. It could be movement work. I want to keep myself open. I played a musical instrument when I was a really young person. I haven’t done that since I became an organizer, and I’m kind of curious—will I be drawn back to music of some kind? I have found that very inspirational. The fast food workers brought music and poetry into the early days of that campaign, and I feel like it’s balm for the soul in the tough times. So I’m going to stay very open.