Wade Rathke - Founding Service Employees International Union Local 100

Founding Service Employees International Union Local 100

Rathke is also founder and Chief Organizer of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 100, which is headquartered in New Orleans and also has chapters in Texas. Founded in 1980 in New Orleans as an independent union of Hyatt employees, the union became part of SEIU in 1984. SEIU Local 100 organizes public sector public workers, including school employees, Head Start, and health care workers, as well as lower wage private sector workers in the hospitality, janitorial, and other service industries.

His work in the labor movement includes three terms as Secretary-Treasurer of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO. Rathke is the president and co-founder of the SEIU Southern Conference; a member of the International Executive Board of SEIU; and Chief Organizer of the Hotel and Restaurant Organizing Committee (HOTROC) a multi-union organizing project for hospitality workers in New Orleans sponsored by the AFL-CIO and its president, John Sweeney.

Read more about this topic:  Wade Rathke

Famous quotes containing the words founding, service, employees, union and/or local:

    ... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.
    George Grosz (1893–1959)

    I have said many times, and it is literally true, that there is absolutely nothing that could keep me in business, if my job were simply business to me. The human problems which I deal with every day—concerning employees as well as customers—are the problems that fascinate me, that seem important to me.
    Hortense Odlum (1892–?)

    My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
    Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)

    The local snivels through the fields:
    I sit between felt-hatted mums....
    Philip Larkin (1922–1986)