With nearly two million members—more than the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers combined—the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is now the second-largest union in the United States. Its influence on the American labor movement over the last thirty years dwarfs probably even the size of its membership. From its role in the 2005 Change to Win (CtW) split with the AFL-CIO to its long history of raiding other unions to its leadership of campaigns like Fight for $15, the SEIU has been at the forefront of many of the battles—internal and external—in twenty-first-century American labor politics.
Luís L. M. Aguiar and Joseph A. McCartin's collection Purple Power: The History and Global Impact of SEIU is a welcome attempt to bring scholarly analysis to the growth, successes, and controversies of “Big Purple.” While perhaps somewhat disingenuously claiming the collection as the “the first book-length academic treatment of SEIU (227)”—Leon Fink...
