The Union Leader Who Changed How We Think About Work

SEIU’s Mary Kay Henry looks back on the Fight for $15 and a Union, organizing fast-food workers, and more.

By the time Mary Kay Henry stepped down from the presidency of the Service Employees International Union, she and the union had helped change how we think about work. In 2012, SEIU backed striking fast-food workers in the city who were advocating for what was then a bold demand: a $15-per-hour minimum wage and a union. A decade later, the efforts of Fight for $15 and a Union led to an estimated 26 million workers winning $150 billion in higher pay. (The campaign is now known as the Fight for a Union.) Three years ago, Starbucks baristas in Buffalo, New York, launched what would become a high-profile unionization campaign with Workers United, a SEIU affiliate; now, over 400 other stores have voted to unionize. Workers led the charge. Henry lent them critical support. Now, it’s more widely accepted that the federal minimum wage is too low, that unions are beneficial, and that the way we work in America should transform.

She faced significant challenges, too. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that public workers like many of SEIU’s members did not have to pay dues to cover the costs of collective bargaining. Later, COVID presented a unique threat to frontline workers, who make up much of SEIU’s membership.

I spoke to Henry shortly before she stepped down on Monday about her trailblazing path as the first woman and openly queer person to lead the 2 million member service- and care-workers union. She looked back on her decision to back Fight for a Union, the skepticism she faced when she did, and what’s changed for women in organized labor. April Verrett takes up the presidency after running unopposed for the position. She is the first Black woman to lead the union, which is now majority people of color.

Whenever I talk to people in the labor movement, I’m always interested in what drew them to labor in the first place. So I’ll put that question to you: Why did you choose to work in organized labor?
I was a community organizer on the east side of Detroit, and I was door-knocking one summer between my first and second year of college in 1976. And everybody that I door-knocked said to me, “We don’t really want a handout from the government. We want a hand up to a good job where we have a union.” And this is because a lot of the people in the neighborhood I was assigned to were former UAW members who had been laid off by plant closures.

And so I have to tell you: That’s when the seed really got planted in my head that if I wanted to revitalize downtown Detroit, I thought, maybe I should try and see if I could go work for the labor movement instead of doing social-service work. And that’s what drew me to the labor movement. I saw it as a way to make permanent change in people’s individual lives but also the larger community that I lived in.

How has the situation changed for women in the labor movement over time?
When I went to the UAW to apply for a job, I was told I needed a Ph.D. in economics to work in their research department, or I should go work on an assembly line and work my way up. This woman saw me leaving the building and asked what I was doing there, and it was Olga Madar, one of the founders of the Coalition of Labor Union Women. I told her my little story really fast and she connected me with Joyce Miller, and I got a Greyhound bus ticket to New York. Joyce tried to hire me on a project, but because I hadn’t been a textile worker, they didn’t want me to stay there. And so she sent me to SEIU, and they were all interested in pulling women who were interested in working. They sent me to a research position in San Francisco and then L.A., and there were three women on our entire executive board of 60 people at the time I was hired. It’s now half women today. And one of the three women called me and said, “I want you to promise me you will not quit this job without calling me, because I had to threaten to sue the president on an EEOC case if he kept hiring men on international staff.”

And so we were four women. Two women quit within the first three months, and two of us stayed and are still in the labor movement, but it’s because of a network of women being committed to pull other women up and into the labor movement. And so I would say there’s been a sea change in the number of women leading. Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO. Becky Pringle and Randi Weingarten lead education unions. And they’ve had more of a history of women leaders than SEIU, because I’m the first woman leader at this level for our union. So there’s been a sea change, and I would say we still have a long way to go.

Obviously, Fight for a Union had a huge impact since 2012. Can you explain why you at SEIU decided to back its campaign?
I would say our union’s history has always been to make big bets and make hard decisions and allocate resources to workers who nobody thought were organizable. So we backed the Justice for Janitors movement in the ’80s, and they were immigrant part-time workers who nobody thought could get organized, and they did. And then we backed in the ’90s Black, brown, and immigrant home-care workers in California, Illinois, Washington. Everybody thought, Oh, these are just independent contractors. But we figured out how to create employment that had living wages, health care. Some places we’ve won pensions, which we’re really proud of, and education and training.

Was there any skepticism about that decision at the time? And if there was, how did you address it?
Yes, there was skepticism inside our union. There was skepticism by partner organizations and electeds in New York and around the country. There was not skepticism by the employer. I would say the employers started to get locked and loaded to fight us. So the way we overcame it was by winning. It was ’14 when we won a ballot initiative in the city of SeaTac, which is where the Seattle airport sits. There was a $4 million anti-campaign on this ballot initiative. We won by signing up and registering Eritrean voters, who were the newest community in SeaTac, and we prevailed and then they marched from SeaTac to Seattle. And the mayor’s race became a referendum on whether Seattle was going to be the first to go to $15 an hour.

And then, in 2015, New York and California competed to see who could sign the $15 bill first. And I think that level of victory made people think, Okay, the first part of our demand, we are on a roll to win. We got blocked in southern states and in midwestern states, which we are trying to innovate a way around. And that overcame the skepticism because as wages started to go up, it totally changed the bargaining of our own members inside of SEIU. So our existing members experienced a benefit from the movement demand for $15, and it wasn’t just minimum-wage workers in our union that experienced it; all the workers earning $17, $20, $21, their wages got pushed up when the lowest wage got to $15.

I know you’ve been a champion of sectoral organizing for a long time. Could you explain for readers what it is and how it could grow worker power?
Well, it takes individual employers in a geography or across an industry and unites the bargaining of all those workers into one table. And so instead of organizing one fast-food store at a time through the NLRB — where the franchisee closes the franchisor store or they never reach an agreement on a contract — we understood that we were going to have to help workers bargain at the power where the decisions are made. And so that’s what I think is the best way to think of sectoral: Think about how the employers are making decisions on wages and benefits and then organize the power of the workers to have an equal say with those employers. So now we have half a million workers talking to franchise owners in California, and my dream is that we could replicate that in many states and then finally force a national sectoral agreement, which is what McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King have done in seven other countries around the globe. And there’s no reason they can’t make it happen here in the United States of America.

I think Fight for $15 and a Union has done an incredible job changing the conversation around the minimum wage. It seems like the unionization part has been more difficult. And so I was wondering if you could lay out what challenges exist when we’re talking about organizing people in these industries.
I think one challenge is anti-union animus by corporations in the U.S. Starbucks is a classic example of penalizing workers economically when they decided to vote for the union. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King did the same thing. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is doing that as we speak. There’s the penalizing of gig workers, who are standing up, and Uber and Lyft are canceling their participation on the platform by deactivating their rides. So that’s one obstacle. A second obstacle is that the laws are written in a way that limits workers’ power. The law is fundamentally about one employer, one bargaining contract, and not about sectoral. And so the rules are rigged against workers.

That’s how we talk about it, but it’s the laws, essentially. And then the third thing I would say is that the labor movement is a challenge because I think we have to adapt from the industrial economy that formed in the ’30s to the new service and care economy, which is now 80 percent of the workforce. And with only 10 percent of workers having the ability to collectively bargain, I think this moment calls for the labor movement to think in new and different ways about how to work together to create sectoral breakthroughs, because we need organizing wins to reach our goal, from 10 percent to 35 percent of the economy being able to collectively bargain. And so I would say those are the three biggest challenges. There’s other challenges, but they’re easier to adapt to. I have found in my 43 years those to be three key obstacles.

Thinking about COVID now, the virus presented an enormous challenge for organized labor, and, of course, many SEIU members worked on the front lines of the pandemic. What do you think the pandemic maybe revealed about existing inequalities in the American workplace in particular?
Everything.

My first thought when you said that is all the people whose lives were lost unnecessarily because of the corruption of Trump’s administration response. And I have to tell you: I remain furious to this day that so many nursing-home workers and residents unnecessarily lost their lives because he wasn’t willing to give the notice that he got from the Chinese government. People didn’t have the personal protective equipment and respirators they needed in that first quarter of the pandemic.

And I think it laid bare that white middle-class, white-collar workers who could remain home stayed safer than the majority-minimum-wage workforce that continued to report to work. Whether it was bus drivers or airport workers or health-care workers or janitors and security officers. And that’s why, for me, the structural inequality in who does what jobs in this nation was laid bare and then housing, health-care access, all of that, we know that Black and brown communities died and got sick at a disproportionate rate to their numbers because of the part of the workforce they occupy, which is a legacy of slavery and exclusion in this country.

In 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, a Starbucks location in Buffalo, New York, unionized with Workers United, which is an affiliate of SEIU, and now we’re at over 400 Starbucks stores unionized across the country. Why do you think this campaign has been so successful? I think it really captured the anger that people felt about the decisions corporations like Starbucks made in the height of COVID. That’s what I’ve heard directly from baristas, which is, again: They were asked to go into stores and figure out the mobile-order system to protect the customers, but inside the stores, they didn’t often have the protocols needed to protect them. And I think it laid bare a company that had some progressive benefits, but their actual intention was to maintain and increase their bottom line — many corporations earned record profits because of how they adapted during the pandemic. So that’s one reason. A second reason is I think that Starbucks workers represent the 80 percent of folks under 30 in this nation that support collective action.

And I think their willingness to organize through technology and connect each other and have it spread so quickly off of the Buffalo election victory was a signal to the future of labor organizing that I’m incredibly excited about and want to cheer on even as I exit the stage. That’s the other thing that I thought was incredible. And then the third thing is, I think, the Starbucks workers’ embrace of diversity in their leadership, from LGBTQ leaders in the organizing, to the leaders of color, to white women and men who operate in intersectional ways on issues. It also infused the movement aspect of the Starbucks effort.

Thinking about this year in particular, it feels like an especially challenging time on a number of fronts, not just for organized labor but for the country. Thinking along those lines, many of us are struggling to react to what’s going on in Israel, Gaza, right now. In January, you released a statement calling for a cease-fire and the release of hostages, and I just wanted to know why you felt it was important to come out and say that.
Because I listened to the lived experience of SEIU members all across the country. It’s mostly been driven by our members: Sarah, like the Israeli, Jewish RN who has a son in Tel Aviv, and who has the opportunity at this nurses conference to listen to the agony of a Lebanese nurse from Minnesota, whose mom and dad were being bombed by Israel, simultaneously. And so we reach for each other’s humanity. And we understand that working-class people, whether in Gaza or in Israel or in the U.S., are always on the front lines of paying the price by serving in the military and by our tax dollars being used for this destruction.

You’ve been the president of SEIU for 14 years now. Why did it feel like this was the right time to step down?
I think everything we’ve talked about, where the Fight for $15 and a Union is in this next phase of moving the union demand and I feel really proud of the step forward we made in California fast food and Minnesota nursing homes — it is time for the next generation to take the union to the next era of worker power. And I am aware that as a 66-year-old woman, I am further and further away from that next generation of Starbucks workers that I think is charting the future for the union.

And so I thought it was really important to pass a baton to the next generation. And I’m more confident than I’ve ever been about our union’s future, because our union champions workers who’ve been written out and written off — and we always will. And I know that the next generation of multiracial union leaders in our union is going to take the fight to the next level, to places that I haven’t been able to imagine. And I still have a lot of energy left in me, but I think it’s a really key moment for the next leadership group to take charge.

This interview has been shortened for length and clarity.