SEIU looks to megachurch
Stern’s Union Looks to a Church for Inspiration (Update1) By Kim Chipman
June 16 (Bloomberg) — In its quest for ideas to revive the power of
organized labor, the Service Employees International Union is going
to church.
Earlier this year, about 20 union leaders descended upon Radiant
Church in Surprise, Arizona, near Phoenix. Their goal: learn how a
small fellowship founded by a Microsoft Corp. engineer eight years
ago grew to attract 6,000 visitors a week.
The SEIU, which has doubled in size in the last decade, has been one
of the few glimmers of success for the U.S. labor movement during a
period of precipitous decline. Organized labor has lost its base
within the manufacturing industry as jobs move overseas. Last year,
just 7.8 percent of non-government workers belonged to unions, the
lowest in 70 years.
The SEIU, which represents 1.8 million janitors, security guards, and
health-care and public-service employees in North America, is adding
members — 200,000 last year — in part by trying to redefine what it
means to be a union member. “We need to restructure the union to
have a different relationship with workers,” SEIU President Andrew
Stern, 55, told reporters last month.
That goal led them to unconventional models such as Radiant. “We are
looking at what lessons we can learn from them,” said SEIU Treasurer
Anna Burger, 55.
Lee McFarland, Radiant’s founder, says the secret is not scaring away
people by acting too church-like.
Starbucks in the Lobby
At this church, crosses are nowhere to be found. The music has a rock
‘n’ roll beat, visitors dress casually and worshipers are welcome to
listen to the service while hanging out at the Starbucks in the
lobby. If they prefer coffee without the sermon, there’s also a
Seattle’s Best drive-through window –anything to make the non-
believer comfortable with organized religion.
“It’s something we really have to remember,” Burger said in an
interview. “Sometimes we are out there trying to get someone to go
on strike before they’ve ever connected to the union. Radiant’s
approach is much more about building a relationship and understanding
that people have different abilities to commit.”
The SEIU’s soul-searching began about two years ago when it formed a
committee of local officials to find ways to tap into a pool of 50
million non-unionized services employees. The parallel between
churches and unions may have been staring them in the face all along.
Essentially Voluntary
“Both are essentially voluntary membership organizations, so they
have to figure out how to reach people and persuade them that it’s
worth joining,” said Richard Hurd, a labor studies professor at
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “With the current low levels
of union membership and steady decline that’s been going on for the
last 25 years, labor leaders have to start thinking about what they
can do to reach and attract people.”
SEIU officials say they are trying to erase the negative images of
unions as being too militant, rigid and corrupt, and instead present
an organization that fits the times.
Ideas so far include following the lead of its Chicago office and
setting up call centers for members to ask questions or air
grievances, freeing up union representatives to do more organizing in
the field. The union has also met with scholars at Harvard University
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to mull new organizational models.
Some of the ideas “might not pan out, and some have a `back to the
future’ quality, but I think in tough times they are looking for new
ways to approach organizing and servicing their members,” said
Harley Shaiken, a labor analyst at the University of California at
Berkeley.
Common Points
Radiant Senior Pastor McFarland, 47, who left his job as an
electrical engineer at Microsoft to start the church in 1997, said
Stern approached him about Radiant because “it seemed like he was
looking for common points between what we are doing and what he wants
to do.”
“The church needs to reinvent itself every so often because the
culture changes so much,” McFarland said in an interview. “My
impression is that the same thing has happened in organized labor.”
Radiant is modeled after the California church of Rick Warren, whose
“Purpose Driven” series of books and seminars calls for reaching
out to the “unchurched” and giving them a friendly, low-pressure
environment to learn about Christ.
“They have this incredible approach to moving people from an
interest in community to a commitment to their church,” Burger said
of Radiant. She said SEIU officials were most impressed with how
comfortable Radiant sought to make visitors.
The number of Protestant mega-churches — congregations with weekly
attendance of more than 2,000 people — has doubled in the U.S. to
more than 1,200 in the past five years, mostly by creating a more
open atmosphere, according to a report from the Hartford Institute
for Religion Research in Hartford, Connecticut.
Successful Model
“The mega-church model is a success story,” said Cynthia Woolever,
a professor of sociology of religious organizations at Hartford
Seminary, which runs the institute. “They have found ways to use
small groups to make people feel attached and give them a sense of
belonging, even though they are part of this mammoth group.”
Stern says the SEIU has already started to streamline its roughly 300
local operations; 20 SEIU locals currently have over 25,000 members,
and three exceed 100,000. Stern and Burger say they want to
reorganize the membership in a way that allows a better focus on
their respective industries.
Burger said she also learned from the visit to Radiant that the SEIU
must do a better job at approaching workers when they first get to
the workplace, rather than waiting to recruit them for battle when
problems arise.
Building a Discussion
“We are also trying to figure out how people get to know each other
in today’s workplace, because those connections are important,” she
said. “How do we build a discussion when so many workplaces are
dispersed?”
How the union talks to members is also key, Burger says. “Sometimes
it’s the language we use that turns people off because they don’t
know what it means,” she said.
Not everyone is sure the softer approach will work.
“It can’t all be about harmonization,” said Bob Bruno, a history
professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “The labor
movement was built on conflict. You couldn’t build the coal, steel
and auto unions without the strong language of exploitation and
empowerment and I can’t imagine Stern can do what he wants without
that language, either.”
Still, said Hurd, it’s hard to argue with the union’s success so far.
“They’ve done a great job transitioning from the old-time local
union model of fiefdoms and cigar-chomping union bosses to a more
centralized and coherent organization.”