[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 19 (Tuesday, February 2, 2021)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E91]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       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.

                          ____________________