The year might have ended on a purely triumphant note for Andy Stern, who heads the nation's fastest-growing labor union and played a key supporting role in President-elect Barack Obama's drive for the White House.
Instead, Stern has seen the Service Employees International Union jarred by a spending scandal and internecine feuding, and more recently by the favor-selling investigation that led to the arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
Stern has not been implicated in any wrongdoing, and many say he has moved forcefully to address the allegations of corruption in the union's biggest California chapter and internal complaints of financial impropriety at a second Los Angeles local.
While federal prosecutors allege that Blagojevich sought a plum job through the SEIU in exchange for filling Obama's U.S. Senate seat with a labor ally, authorities have not accused union officials of participating in such a scheme. The union is cooperating with the investigation of Blagojevich.
But Stern's critics point out that a trio of SEIU officers who have faced varying degrees of scrutiny were his appointees. Some say that his administration ignored early reports of trouble with one or more of them, particularly Tyrone Freeman, the sacked president of the largest California local. Freeman is the target of a federal criminal probe that confidential sources say probably will stretch well into 2009.
An SEIU inquiry already has concluded that Freeman misappropriated more than $1 million in union funds for himself and his relatives, an allegation he has denied.
Several current and former SEIU staffers said they had gone to Stern's lieutenants with concerns about Freeman's spending on cars and restaurants as far back as 2001, although the complaints did not include allegations of any illegalities. Most of those people asked not to be named because they feared jeopardizing their futures in the labor movement.
They said they also had raised questions about Freeman's relationship with a union worker with whom he had a child and whom he eventually married. Nothing was done, they said.
Sal Rosselli, the president of an SEIU local in the Bay Area, said he was among those who complained. He is now locked in a feud with Stern.
"There were lots of discussions about problems with Tyrone -- the way money was being spent, Ford Explorers for all the staff, second cars for some people," Rosselli said.
