SEIU 2024 Convention Core Resolution (Resolution #101A)
This union.
For a century, workers have joined together in this union to build power and win the future. This union, that unites workers across race and across borders. This union, that stands on the shoulders of giants to look at the future. This union, this family of champions for justice, this community of compassionate fighters, agitators, organizers, educators, leaders. This union, a dynamic force for good in the world. This union, ours. This union. All of us. SEIU.
This union is our union.
We take risks, win big, and always look forward. We change the rules for workers who were written out—from home care, nursing home, and childcare workers who have fought for decades to illuminate their essential work, to janitors and security officers who were the vanguard for sectoral bargaining for service workers, to healthcare and public service workers who started organizing before it was legal. We’ve made history with our Fight for $15 and a Union, winning billions of dollars in raises for tens of millions of workers to help close the racial wealth gap.
We reach across industries to win transformational change. We are airport service workers fighting to raise industry standards at the federal level and Starbucks workers demanding the company live up to its professed values. We are hospital and nursing home workers fighting to make sure the profound loss of the COVID-19 pandemic doesn’t happen again, and gig workers facing down billion-dollar tech companies. We’re higher education faculty and staff teaching and supporting the next generation and demanding respect. We’re food service workers fighting for fair wages. We’re fast-food workers in California taking on corporations to lift half a million workers out of poverty, healthcare workers fighting for affordable care for all, workers in the American South united across race to win for our communities, and so much more.
We unite across race—Black, white and brown—all of us together. We unite across ethnicity, gender, faith, language, and age. We are workers across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. We are indigenous and First Nations people who have lived on this land for thousands of years. We are the descendants of enslaved Africans brought by force to North America. We are immigrants and the children of immigrants — some many generations removed — from around the world who came here for a better life. We are part of the Black diaspora, the Latino community, the Asian Pacific Islander community. We are the product of migration — Western and Eastern European, South Asian, Caribbean, Arab, African, Central and South American, and beyond. And within all of the above identities, we are also transgender, gender non-conforming, and intersex people that continue to experience attacks at disproportionate rates at every access point to the basic structure of justice.
We are multigenerational, bringing our different experiences together to reflect each of us. We are the next generation of workers, ready to build a more powerful and inclusive labor movement. We are elders who have faced down the threat of authoritarianism and are ready to do it again. We’re parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles who want to plant the trees our descendants will rest under. We’re community leaders, shop stewards, retired members, activists, organizers, neighbors, and voters. We are people of all faiths and religions. We’re people of every gender and sexual orientation. We are multiracial and multilingual. We are resilient, we are tenacious, we are hopeful. We are the future.
In this union, our values guide us forward: equity, integrity, solidarity, justice, respect, inclusion, and hope.
We recommit to our Vision for a Just Society, where all workers are valued and all people respected—no matter where we are from or the color of our skin, where all families and communities can thrive, and where we leave a better and more equitable world for generations to come.
We know we face obstacles to winning a just society. Unchecked corporate control and structural racism have built a North America for wealthy white people at the cost of all others. Corporations and politicians conspire against workers, spending billions to keep us from having a seat at the table. Our democracy is under attack, as we face increasingly hostile, authoritarian, and white nationalist right-wing movements, including extremist paramilitary groups, that bleed across borders. Reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and women’s autonomy are vanishing. These same corporations and politicians profit from the climate crisis, leaving our communities vulnerable. They try to divide us by race and scapegoat immigrants to distract us.
But we – SEIU, this union – won’t let them stop us.
This union’s mission is to build the power to win Unions for All and end poverty wages forever. It takes all of us. Because when we say Unions for All, that’s just what we mean—nobody left out or left behind. We will write new rules so that all workers—of every race, from every place—can organize across employers, industries, sectors, and geographies, not just worksite by worksite. This sectoral approach will give SEIU members more power to raise standards in our industries and communities, bargain better contracts, and win our fights for immigration, climate, healthcare, and racial justice.
This union’s ten-year goal is to usher in a new era of worker power and unite a million new members in our union by 2034. We will do this by winning bold, groundbreaking sectoral organizing victories that raise standards for workers across entire industries and opening the doors of unions to workers who have been written out and written off. By winning these breakthroughs, growing in our core industries, and building our member strength, this union will win for the next century.
To achieve our ten-year goal, we will lean in over the next four years in three key ways:
- Win Worker Power: Open the doors of this union to workers who have been written off and written out. We will build power in our core industries and beyond by growing every local’s member strength and organizing to win breakthrough sectoral victories in multiple states, provinces, and federally. We will open the doors of our union to workers who are raising standards across entire industries and to service and care workers in the American South.
- Win Political Power: Mobilize a cross-racial, working-class voter base to demand Unions for All. We will unleash worker-led disruption and drive bold demands on corporations and government to write new rules that give workers the ability to join together in our union and raise standards across industries and geographies. We will hold candidates and elected leaders accountable for doing everything in their power to stand up to corporate union-busters. We will fight back against attacks on our democracy in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, where the stakes could not be higher.
- Win the Future: Build a forward-looking, cross-racial, multi-generational, multi-lingual union and labor movement. We will change this union’s culture by investing in local leadership development and training thousands of new organizers – members and staff. We will be an anti-racist union fighting to dismantle structural racism. We will tap into the full participation, power and leadership of union members and not yet union workers in all the languages we speak, and we will uphold language justice. We will embrace technology and shape how it impacts workers, empower younger members to inform our union’s key decisions, equip member leaders to sign up and organize their coworkers, and work to unite the North American labor movement and our allies around our demand for Unions for All.
In this union, SEIU members will use our power to win the future we want – and we know it will be beyond our imagining. Our future will be full of joy, hope, and healthy, thriving communities across North America. Workers of every race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and immigration status will live, work, retire, and age with dignity, sharing the fruits of a just, inclusive society.
We know there’s only one way forward, together, with millions of us united in unions to voice our demands. Our work has dignity. Our lives have value. And we have hope. We’re using that hope to fuel our fight to win Unions for All, no matter where we work, no matter where we live.
In every breakroom, at every bargaining table, in community forums and at the corner store, in our schools, our hospitals, our houses of worship, on social media and video meetings, at every door we knock, and at the ballot boxes where we cast our votes as demands for change, we will make a full-throated demand for Unions for All. Together in this union, we will build power and win for and with one another to create a brand new labor movement, write new rules, and make sure future generations can live free, just, hope-filled lives.
This Union: We Win Worker Power. We Win Political Power. We Win the Future.