History

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» In 1921, members of seven small janitor unions united to build their strength by forming a single organization, the Building Service Employees International Union. The BSEIU, a union of mostly immigrant workers chartered by the American Federation of Labor, changed its name to Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in 1968. Chicago-based Local 1, SEIU’s first local union, is still organizing janitors and security officers today.

» BSEIU Local 49 (later re-named SEIU Local 49) was founded in 1922 by 6 janitors and elevator operators in Portland. The founding members were fighting for a 6-day work-week and a minimum wage of $110 per month.

History

» During the 1920s, Local 49 worked hard to organize the janitors who cleaned the many movie theaters and dance halls in Portland. In 1927, after several years of organizing, janitors at all the major theaters in Portland won their first union contract, with wages of $5 per day.

» In the 1930s, Local 49 helped school janitors, watchmen, and dock workers join our union, along with janitors and watchmen at the Oregonian, who won a 20% raise when they organized for the first time. By the late 1930s, Local 49 had grown to 200 members.

Emanuel Hospital Strike For Recognition, 1950-52

» In the years during and following the Great Depression, BSEIU was the first union in the country to help other service workers like hospital caregivers and public employees unite together in a union, paving the way for the modern SEIU’s three core industries: property services, public services, and health care. In 1968, the union was renamed the Service Employees International Union to reflect its membership and key sectors.

» In the 1940s, Local 49 helped the Vancouver, WA school district custodians, janitors, and bus drivers organize and join our union. Towards the end of the decade, workers at Emanuel and Good Samaritan hospitals began their historic organizing drive.

Emanuel Hospital Strike For Recognition, 1950-52 » In 1950, both Emanuel and Good Samaritan hospitals began an 18-month strike for the right to join a union. This was before hospital workers had the legal right to union representation — there was no election process overseen by the federal government as there is today. The only way to win the right to bargain was to strike. The strikes continued until March of 1952, when workers at both hospitals settled their first union contract.

» By the 1960s, Local 49 had over 3000 members in Oregon, Washington, Northern California, Idaho, and Utah. Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria and Albany General Hospital workers joined the local during these years. Local 49 began to organize workers at bowling alleys, eventually representing workers at over 30 bowling alleys in the area. Janitors at Reed college and the University of Oregon also organized during this period.

» New federal legislation giving hospital workers the right to organize and join unions lead to a surge in health care membership during the 1970s. In the 1950s the only health care members of Local 49 were Kaiser, Emanuel, and Good Samaritan employees. In the 1960s and 1970s they were joined by workers at 10 other hospitals and nursing homes. In the 1970s and 1980s, Local 49 became more involved in politics to combat the right-wing backlash against unions during the Reagan era.

» In 1997, about 2000 SEIU members struck at Kaiser Permanente. Nurses refused to cross picket lines in support of the strikers. A month later the historic Labor Management Partnership was signed by the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals, the Permanente Medical Groups, and 26 local unions [including SEIU Local 49], creating the largest such partnership in the United States and ending a 33-day strike in Portland.

» In 2002, after a brief period of trusteeship by the International, SEIU Local 49 emerged stronger and more focused than ever on building political, community, and industry strength for our members. We elected a new executive board, re-wrote our constitution and by-laws, began campaigns to organize more workers into our union to raise standards in our key industries [property services and health care], and began building a grassroots member-driven political program to make sure members’ voices are heard in Salem, Olympia, and Washington, DC.

» Since 2002, over 700 workers have joined Local 49 from Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis, GCA/Holman and SBM/Somers janitorial services, and Kaiser Permanente. In 2004, workers at Providence Health and Services began organizing to join SEIU Local 49. When Providence workers win the right to free and fair union elections and join Local 49, they will help raise standards for hospital workers all over Oregon.

» On a national level, SEIU's membership has grown from 625,000 in 1980 to more than 1.8 million today. At a time when the majority of organized labor was shrinking, SEIU was aggressively uniting workers’ strength – largely in the fast-growing service industries. By 2000, SEIU had united 1.4 million members, to became the largest and fastest growing union in North America.

» SEIU represents more immigrants than any other union, and our membership is among the most diverse in the labor movement. Since President Andy Stern took office 1996, over 900,000 workers have united with SEIU, many of them women and people of color. Also that year, SEIU officers also committed to diversify the union’s leadership to reflect the membership, and today, more than 50 percent of SEIU members are in local unions led by a woman or person of color.

» Following the 2004 presidential elections, SEIU launched a widely publicized dialogue to help rebuild the labor movement following several decades of decline. Despite massive economic changes in our world today, the strategies, structure, and priorities of the AFL-CIO, and many unions, haven’t changed much since the federation was founded 50 years ago — prompting SEIU and four major unions to disaffiliate from the AFL-CIO in the summer of 2005 and build something stronger to help unite the 90 percent of workers who have no union.

» At a historic founding convention in St. Louis on September 27, 2005, SEIU, along with 6 other unions representing 5.5 million workers — the Teamsters, UNITE HERE, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Laborers, the Carpenters and the United Farm Workers — formed the Change to Win Federation to develop joint strategic organizing campaigns to help ensure that workers, not just executives and stockholders, benefit from today's global economy. With a key focus to unite non-union workers by industry, the new federation aims to empower working people in this country so that they can build the strength to make their voices heard in their jobs, their communities, and in Washington. The delegates elected SEIU’s Anna Burger as CTW federation chair — making her the first woman in U.S. history to ever head a labor federation.