George Hardy (December 15, 1911 – September 13, 1990) was a Canadian-American labour leader who was president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) from 1971 to 1980. At the time of his death, SEIU had grown to become the fifth-largest affiliate of the AFL-CIO.Cook, "George Hardy, 79, Pioneer Leader of Service Worker Union, Is Dead," New York Times, September 18, 1990. Hardy was a vice president of the AFL-CIO from 1972 to 1980, and a member of its executive council. He was a former member of the Democratic National CommitteeLydon, "Democrats Give Labor Key Posts," New York Times, March 23, 1973. and the California Democratic State Central Committee.
Early life and union career Hardy was born to Charles and Bertha (Fitchett) Hardy on December 15, 1911, in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.Who Was Who in America, 1991.Simon, "George Hardy: Champion of the Low-Wage Worker," Union, Fall 1990. The Hardys moved to San Francisco, California, in the 1920s."George Hardy," San Francisco Chronicle, September 15, 1990. Hardy and his family came to San Francisco from Canada working their way as migrant fruit pickers. George grew up on Linden Street in the working class Hayes Valley district of San Francisco. living next door to the Cheney Family. George married Norma Mitchell in San Francisco and had two children, Joan Marie Hardy and Robert Thomas Hardy. Robert was killed in a car accident in 1955 at the age of 18, returning from a high school graduation trip to Arizona. George credited Norma, the Mitchell Sisters (Rene Cheney d.1975, Lottie Andre d.1975 and Edna Peralta d.1988), best friend Ellis Cheney and so many "anonymous" janitors for the support and collaboration which fuelled his great success and the growth of BSEIU (later SEIU) on the West Coast and throughout North America.
1926 to 1942 George's father, Charles (also known as "Pop"), was a janitor, and George became one, too.Sweeney, "George Hardy: Union Builder," Union, Fall 1990. Pop Hardy joined Theater Janitors Local 9 of the Building Service Employees International Union (BSEIU) in 1926, and soon became an unpaid organizer for the union.General description. George Hardy Papers, 1933–1981. Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University. Pop Hardy soon was elected president of the local as well as an International Vice President. Although the BSEIU was dominated by organized crime at the time,Fitch, Solidarity For Sale, 2006; Witwer, "The Scandal of George Scalise: A Case Study in the Rise of Labor Racketeering in the 1930s," Journal of Social History, Summer 2003. Charles Hardy was generally considered honest and a figurehead who was not part of the mob's inner circle on the board.In 1939, Chicago labour racketeer Thomas J. Burke and his allies ran a candidate who defeated Hardy for re-election to the BSEIU board of directors. Hardy regained his seat in 1942, and died in 1948. See: "List Scalise's Withdrawals At $1,500,000," Chicago Daily Tribune, May 3, 1940; Strong, "Burke's Ouster Ends Labor Era," Chicago Tribune, July 23, 1973. In 1932, George Hardy also joined Local 9, the oldest Building Service Employees International Union local in California. The year he joined, he was elected the local's business agent. During the San Francisco General Strike of 1934, Hardy helped his father to organize service workers to support the strike, leading to the closure of restaurants, movie theatres, night clubs, and office buildings during the four-day strike.Selvin, A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco, 1996.Milkman, L.A. Story, 2006.
George Hardy began working as a janitor at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library in 1935.Jacobs, A Rage for Justice: The Passion and Politics of Phillip Burton, 1997. One night, a foreman dropped a match behind a radiator; when Hardy missed it, he was fired. Angry at the pettiness and mistreatment, Hardy, his father and other Irish janitors formed a new local for office building janitors, Local 87.The local grew so large under Hardy that it became one of the most politically important locals in BSEIU. See: Zeltzer, "SF Janitor's Decert Battle Threatens SEIU Stern's Game Plan," LaborNet, July 31, 2004. George Hardy became an organizer for the new union in 1936. Hardy worked by day, and by night (often not sleeping for several days) he organized workers into the new union. Repeatedly fired for his off-hours union work, Hardy was blacklisted. Under future leaders such as Herman Eimers Rex Kennedy, and Robert Parr, members of Local 87 continued to enjoy improved wages, benefits and working conditions. These victories were all won with very few strikes.
Nonetheless, within seven years Hardy had organized a majority of the city's janitors. Hardy formed a group known as the "Hayes Valley Gang"—neighbourhood friends who were also blacklisted janitors and union organizers—who travelled helped organize building workers in San Francisco and then travelled to Los Angeles to build several small locals. By 1943, Hardy had organized BSEIU locals from San Francisco to San Diego. Hardy's efforts at organizing were helped by the international union's quick growth and increasing strength. BSEIU's national membership was almost 100,000 in 1945, and reached more than 200,000 by 1950.Erickson, et al., "California's Revolt at the Bottom of the Wage Scale: Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles," California Policy Options 2002, 2002. Hardy moved to Los Angeles in 1946, and the union's organizing efforts (strongly backed by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters) took off in the city under his leadership: Three locals with just 2,800 members blossomed into eight locals with more than 8,500 members. By 1950, Hardy boasted that so many workers had been organized in Los Angeles (including a third of the city's large office buildings) that the union had obtained 40 percent wage hikes in the past four years. Local 399 had 5,000 members in 1950 and 11,000 in 1960—making it the second largest local in the national BSEIU. Hardy pressed for, and the union was successful at, the transformation of part-time jobs into full-time positions.Mines and Avina, "Immigrants and Labor Standards: The Case of California Janitors," in U.S.-Mexico Relations: Labor Market Interdependence, 1992. Health benefits and pension were also added to most union contracts.
Hardy also began to expand the union's base. By 1960, over a third of the members in Los Angeles worked in the public sector. The union also expanded out of office buildings, and represented workers in bowling alleys, supermarkets, hotels, apartment buildings, gymnasiums, clubs, public schools, and hospitals. Hardy expanded the union's racial and ethnic diversity as well. By 1950, half of the members in Local 399 (the largest in Los Angeles) were African American, and 9 percent were Mexican American.Greer, Last Man In: Racial Access to Union Power, 1959. Overall, 38 percent of BSEIU members in Los Angeles were black.
Hardy also made several important innovations in union structure and operations. First, he united all BSEIU locals in the state into a new California State Council, the first statewide coordinated body in SEIU history. Second, he built an extensive communications network of bulletins, mailings, newsletters and updates (all run out of the BSEIU office at 240 Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco) which not only kept the local unions in touch with one another but also helped create a politically powerful union as well.
The strong union which Hardy built also drew attention from organized crime. When mob leaders tried to take over Local 87 in the late 1930s, Hardy and other leaders threatened them with baseball bats and refused to grant them entry to the union's property.
1943 to 1971 Hardy served with the United States Army in the European Theater of Operations from 1943 to 1946.
After his discharge from the Army in 1946, Hardy returned to Los Angeles and was elected president of BSEIU Local 399. Two years later, after the death of his father opened a position on the BSEIU international executive board, Hardy was elected an international vice president of the union. In 1950, he also established the SEIU Western Conference, the first interstate conference of councils and locals within the international union. The same year he undertook major organizing campaigns again among public employees and expanded the union's membership drive to include health care workers. He also began affiliating many small, independent unions to help bolster his membership numbers. To support the organizing effort, Hardy established a large research department at the California State Council and within his home local to conduct investigations into employer businesses. Hardy also pushed BSEIU locals under his control to hire researchers as business agents and local union officers. Hardy also built large member education and training divisions in many locals.Greenstone, Labor In American Politics, 1970.
The member education divisions not only educated members about how unions work, but also served to boost Hardy's political efforts. George Hardy despised Republicans and labour leaders who supported them. From the late 1950s and through the 1960s, Hardy and the BSEIU locals in California became much more active politically. All of his support went toward liberal Democrats. During these years he set up a committee of labour union leaders to support Democrats and wean labour leaders away from the Republican Party.
The move into health care was particularly risky. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 originally included health care workers from the protection of federal labour law, but the Taft-Hartley Act amendments exempted workers employed by non-profit health care organizations from the law in 1947.Blancett and Flarey, Reengineering Nursing and Health Care: The Handbook for Organizational Transformation, 1995; Ellis and Hartley, Nursing in Today's World: Trends, Issues & Management, 2004. Since nearly all health care organizations at the time were non-profit, this effectively excluded the vast majority of health care workers from federal labour law.Clark, Delaney, and Frost, Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector, 2002. In 1962, Congress passed legislation allowing workers in health care institutions owned by the federal government to engage in collective bargaining. Publicly owned hospitals were covered by the NLRA in 1967, and non-profit nursing homes in 1970. Congress amended the Taft-Hartley Act in 1974 to bring non-profit hospitals back under the NLRA's coverage. BSEIU had organized its first hospital workers in San Francisco in the 1930s.Schoen, "The Labour Movement in Health Care: USA," in Industrial Relations and Health Services, 1982. Hardy's push into health care proceeded very slowly. Nationwide, only 2.3 percent of all health care institutions had a union in 1970. Despite a sharp upturn in the number of dismissals of health care workers for union activity in the 1950s and 1960s,Babson, The Unfinished Struggle: Turning Points in American Labor, 1877–Present, 1999. Hardy had organized one of the largest pockets of unionized health care workers outside New York City by the late 1960s.
By the time Hardy was elected SEIU president in 1971, SEIU's fastest-growing areas of membership were in health care and public employment. Under his leadership, SEIU's membership in California had grown to more than 105,000.