The president of the Powerful Service Workers Union will resign

Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union, one of the nation's largest and most politically powerful unions, announced Tuesday that she would step down after 14 years in the role.

Ms. Henry was the first woman elected to lead the union, which represents nearly two million workers such as janitors and home care workers in both the public and private sectors.

Under her leadership, it launched a major initiative known as the Fight for $15, which aimed to organize fast-food workers and push for a $15 minimum wage. Ms. Henry convinced the skeptics in the ranks, arguing that the union would gain can book through a broad campaign that focused on the sector as a whole rather than on individual employers.

Labor experts and industry officials call the campaign a key driving force behind significant minimum wage increases in states like California and New York and cities like Seattle and Chicago. It also pushed one recent California law creating a council to set a minimum wage in the fast food industry, which will become $20 an hour in April, and to propose new health and safety standards.

But the Fight for $15 campaign has not widely united workers and empowered them to negotiate collective bargaining agreements with their employers.

Ms. Henry's tenure coincided with a series of legislative and legal challenges to organized labor, including state laws that rolled back collective bargaining rights and allowed workers to opt out of once-mandatory union rates, as well as a landmark Supreme Court ruling that allows government employees to do the same.

Union membership has remained essentially flat under Ms. Henry's watch, while the overall percentage of Americans represented by unions has fallen by about 15 percent. But the union lost the mandatory dues of more than 200,000 non-members, causing a significant loss of revenue.

The union will select Ms. Henry's successor through a vote of delegates at its quadrennial convention in May.

“I'm ready to pass the baton,” Ms. Henry, 66, said in an interview. “SEIU is packed with powerful, dynamic, multiracial, next-generation leaders ready to seize this moment of working-class uprising.”

The union's second official, secretary-treasurer April Verrett, said in an interview that she planned to run for the top job.

A longtime organizer, Ms. Henry was executive vice president when the union's board selected her to fill the presidential term of Andy Stern, who resigned in 2010. In 2012, she won the first of three full four-year terms.

Ms Henry's approach has led to criticism that the union is too top-down in its efforts.

The organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey has criticized the fight for $15 because it is too focused on what it calls “mobilizing” – that is, relying heavily on a professional staff, consultants and activists to generate attention and shape public opinion – rather than a comprehensive, building an employee-led organization.

As SEIU became more involved in a union campaign that launched a subsidiary, Workers United, at Starbucks in 2021, some Starbucks employees said decision-making and communications had become more centralized.

In the interview, Ms Henry rejected claims that the union's campaigns did not prominently involve workers, but said it was important to combine grassroots organizing with other strategies that put pressure on employers. A spokesperson said the union had sought to invest in the Starbucks campaign, as it did in an effort to replace some of the company's executives, to make it more comprehensive.

The union has also been a driving force in politics and policy debates. Ms. Henry took the top position shortly after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, which the union mobilized to help pass. She pushed the union to defend the health care law against Republican efforts to repeal it.

The union's political bets under Ms. Henry have not always yielded the same results endorsement of Hillary Clinton early in the 2016 presidential campaign cycle. Many members later became excited about her Democratic primary rival, Bernie Sanders.

In 2020, the union took a different tack, laying out a policy agenda that it urged candidates to embrace, including making it easier for workers to bargain on an industry-wide basis and making major investments in home care and childcare, including higher wages for employees. caregivers. Joseph R. Biden Jr. incorporated many of the union's ideas into his domestic policy platform on his way to the presidency.

“It's an example of us taking stock and evaluating leadership decisions, and learning lessons and thinking about what we want to do differently next time,” Ms. Henry said of the change in approach.

Yet Mr. Biden's proposed major home health and child care measures died in the Senate.

Ms Henry said the union is spending a lot of money on this year's political elections.

“We want to finish the job,” she said. “We have goals for the Senate, goals for the House of Representatives, governors, state legislatures, city councils – to make all the big gains we can.”