Leading Voice on Working People’s Issues
SEIU is now the largest advocacy organization in America.
Political strength.In 2007 SEIU launched our largest effort ever to elect a president who will stand up for workers.
- For the first time in a presidential election, six of the leading Democratic presidential candidates took almost an entire day from their campaigning last year to spend it with one worker each as part of SEIU’s “Walk A Day in My Shoes” program.
- Nearly every Democrat running last year attended an SEIU-sponsored Presidential Forum on Health Care in Las Vegas and responded to our members’ challenge to release detailed healthcare plans. An October 30, 2007 New York Times article reported that “after the union said it would not consider endorsing anyone who did not put forward a plan for universal health coverage, all the leading Democratic candidates produced one.”
Quality, affordable healthcare for all. Over the past several years, SEIU has reached out to business leaders, healthcare providers, workers, community organizations, voters, and elected officials to work toward fixing our broken healthcare system.
- Over 350,000 "Health Care Voters" in targeted states have pledged to make health care their top priority as part of SEIU’s Americans for Health Care campaign.
- In 2007, SEIU helped form two new coalitions to work toward healthcare reform – the Divided We Fail coalition with AARP and the Business Roundtable and the Better Healthcare Together Coalition that brings together progressive organizations and Fortune 500 companies.
- Through rallies, vigils, and meetings with members of Congress, SEIU members became a leading voice in the fight last year to protect children’s healthcare through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
- SEIU's Nurse Alliance successfully fought to introduce the first federal safe staffing legislation that would protect patients and improve care by establishing minimum nurse-to-patient ratios, and another bill that would limit mandatory overtime in our nation's hospitals.
Comprehensive immigration reform. SEIU represents more immigrants than any other union. Together with community, religious, labor, and other allies, SEIU members have continued to help lead the movement to fix America’s broken immigration system and establish fair and practical ways to for taxpaying undocumented workers to obtain legal status.
- SEIU helped pave the way for organized labor to support legalization for hard-working, tax-paying immigrants, and the union's civic participation program encourages immigrants to actively participate in our communities and our democracy.
- We spoke out in recent years against raids by federal immigration officials that targeted immigrant workers and worked in support of the federal DREAM Act, a bill to provide immigrant children who grew up in the United States more opportunities to attend college and obtain legal status.
Holding big banks accountable. Working together with a coalition of lawmakers, community leaders, and economic experts, SEIU members around the country worked to hold big banks accountable to working families and our communities.
- SEIU members took on Bank of America, the nation’s largest bank, by challenging a harmful merger in Chicago.
- SEIU issued a call for new standards that would protect low-income and minority families in particular from schemes to drive up ATM, overdraft, and other fees; excessively high interest rates on credit cards; and predatory and abusive lending practices.
Reforming the corporate buyout industry. At a time when corporate takeover firms are increasingly putting pensions at risk, hurting working Americans, and cutting into state and federal tax revenue—all while their top executives reap hundred-million dollar payoffs—SEIU took action to curb the industry's growing excesses.
- SEIU launched a comprehensive corporate social responsibility campaign that calls on buyout firms to ensure that workers also benefit from buyout deals; respect their workers’ freedom to choose to form a union; hire responsible service contractors; pay their fair share of taxes; and not endanger public pensions through risky investments, privatization, and tax avoidance schemes.
- SEIU formed a committee of public sector union leaders and member pension fund trustees to work with governors and other officials at the state level to investigate the impact of buyouts on state tax revenues, state services, and other issues.