A year of triumphs and scandals for SEIU

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.latimes.com/business/careers/work/la-me-stern31-2008dec31,0,2342129.story


Myung J. Chun/ Los Angeles Times
Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, faced challenges on several fronts in 2008.
Union members and President Andy Stern helped put Obama in the White House. But a former top California leader is under federal investigation and a Bay Area local is feuding with the top brass.

By Paul Pringle
December 31, 2008

The year might have ended on a purely triumphant note for Andy Stern, who heads the nation's fastest-growing labor union and played a key supporting role in President-elect Barack Obama's drive for the White House.

Instead, Stern has seen the Service Employees International Union jarred by a spending scandal and internecine feuding, and more recently by the favor-selling investigation that led to the arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Stern has not been implicated in any wrongdoing, and many say he has moved forcefully to address the allegations of corruption in the union's biggest California chapter and internal complaints of financial impropriety at a second Los Angeles local.

While federal prosecutors allege that Blagojevich sought a plum job through the SEIU in exchange for filling Obama's U.S. Senate seat with a labor ally, authorities have not accused union officials of participating in such a scheme. The union is cooperating with the investigation of Blagojevich.

But Stern's critics point out that a trio of SEIU officers who have faced varying degrees of scrutiny were his appointees. Some say that his administration ignored early reports of trouble with one or more of them, particularly Tyrone Freeman, the sacked president of the largest California local. Freeman is the target of a federal criminal probe that confidential sources say probably will stretch well into 2009.

An SEIU inquiry already has concluded that Freeman misappropriated more than $1 million in union funds for himself and his relatives, an allegation he has denied.

FULL 2 page story at link.