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Case Study: Service Employees International Union
Documenting and Sharing Immigrant Workers' Stories

Learn more about this organization:
http://www.seiu.org

The Service Employees International Union is the largest and fastest growing union in North America, focused on uniting workers in the health care, public services, janitorial, and security services sectors to improve their lives and the services they provide. SEIU is the most diverse union in the United States. Fifty-six percent of SEIU members are women, and some forty percent are people of color. SEIU’s more than 300 local union affiliates and twenty-five state councils represent more immigrant workers than any other union in the United States.

In 2005, the Center began collaborating with the SEIU’s Los Angeles Local 660/723 affiliate, to assist members in sharing stories about their lives as workers. Over the course of two years, Center facilitators led workshops, conducted facilitator training, and assisted this affiliate in establishing a mobile computer lab. The participants in these initial workshops were predominantly immigrant, low income workers in the healthcare and janitorial sectors. This work led in 2006 to a similar project with the SEIU’s Local 1 in Chicago.

In late 2007 and 2008, the Center continued its work with SEIU Local 1 in Chicago, by developing a program that trained a group of “Digital Storytelling Coaches,” made up of rank and file members of the janitorial and security professions. The Center worked with these Coaches to provide them with the skills necessary for assisting digital storytelling workshops—including training and mentoring on group facilitation, script work, digital editing, and time management. This program included a series of multilingual workshops in English, Spanish and Polish, with stories created in each language.

The Center also traveled to Miami, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles to assist with a SEIU national social justice campaign centered on the rights of immigrant workers in the United States. Twenty different nationalities were represented in the project, and the workshops were conducted in multiple languages. The resulting stories were collected and shared in regional and national discussions connected to the SEIU’s organizing efforts to promote responsible immigration reform.

Through these multiple partnerships with the SEIU, most of which were coordinated out of the organization’s national office in Washington, DC, the Center demonstrated the relevance of digital storytelling as a tool for building solidarity and leadership. The many poignant stories of hardship and determination that have come out of these efforts are continuing to resonate for both those who created them and those who watch them.