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PASSING OF JOHN J. SWEENEY
______
HON. ANDY LEVIN
of michigan
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
Mr. LEVIN of Michigan. Madam Speaker, I first met John Sweeney when I was 22 and his staff offered me a job helping nursing home workers organize with SEIU in my home state of Michigan. The union was hiring a novice, front-line organizer, but I was ushered into the office of the president of the national union to meet the man himself. He was modest and unassuming that day, and he never changed, even as he doubled the size of SEIU, even as he became the consensus choice to lead the only insurgent takeover of the AFL-CIO in its history, even as he helped transform its policies to focus on organizing, support immigrant workers and much more. John Sweeney never saw himself as being above any of the workers he came to represent, and he fought for them with unquestioned integrity and an openness to innovation and change possible only with true humility. I ended up spending five years organizing with SEIU, then returning years later to help his campaign to take over the AFL-CIO, and then working 11 years under his leadership there. Throughout that time, I trusted President Sweeney completely-he gave me big assignments and the leeway to make them my own. He drew the best out of me by letting me know he had faith in me. He tolerated mistakes, but not lapsed ethics.
One story that captures John well is that when I was creating Union Summer, a program to put 1,000 young people onto the front lines of union organizing and bargaining campaigns in the summer of 1996, shortly after he became AFL-CIO president, he insisted on making the
`Summeristas' as we called them employees of the AFL-CIO, even though they were essentially doing a three-week summer camp. He knew it would be much more expensive and a lot more work, but he insisted on taking full responsibility for every one of them.
John put the interest of other people and the labor movement above his own, every time. I loved John Sweeney in an uncomplicated way that feels hard to describe and that I hope remains possible in our troubled world. He was an honest leader, a great soul, doing his best to keep faith with his God and lift up his fellow human beings. Godspeed, John Sweeney.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 19
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