Speaker's Profile

Andrew L. Stern is the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which had 2.2 million members. He is now President Emeritus of SEIU, which added more than 1.2 million workers during his tenure. Called a "courageous, visionary leader who charted a bold new course for American unionism," Stern has been featured on 60 Minutes and CNN, as Fox News Power Player of the Week,[10] and on the covers of the New York Times Magazine, Fortune, and Businessweek. Under Stern's leadership, SEIU became the largest union in the AFL-CIO and the fastest growing union in the world. Then after promoting a debate on the future of American labor, in a bold move, SEIU left the AFL-CIO with six other unions and formed a new labor alliance called Change to Win. Stern was a senior fellow at Columbia University.[15] He is now a Senior Fellow at the Economic Security Project.

Stern has been described by CBS News as the "most important labor boss in America." Stern is unapologetic about holding private equity firms accountable, questioning business and political leaders practices, and competing to build SEIU's membership: "We like to say: We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn't work, we try the persuasion of power". Stern supported expansion of union ranks via the Employee Free Choice Act and regulations on business, profit sharing, and retirement security for employees and more equitable tax policy.

He was a Presidential appointee on the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, best known as Simpson-Bowles.

He is Chair of the Board of the Broad Center, and was a Board Member of the Open Society Foundations, and the Hillman Foundation. In March 2010, Stern was the Alice B. Grant Labor Leader in Residence at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

He is the author of two books, A Country That Works, and Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream. The FT wrote in its review of Raising the Floor, "Technology, as Stern sees it, overwhelms everything else, including the American dream itself. While he is persuaded that automation and information technology will make many jobs obsolete and thereby hurt workers, he does not suggest holding back technological change. He looks for policies to make the unpredictable lifestyle of a gig worker more tolerable — above all, universal basic income, where a regular cash amount is given to every citizen regardless of whether or not they work."