If numbers were all that mattered, Andrew Stern would be America’s most successful labor leader, hands down. For over two decades, he’s led the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — first as president John Sweeney’s chief strategist, and since 1996 as Sweeney’s successor. Under Stern, SEIU’s membership has nearly doubled to around 1.9 million, a feat all the more remarkable given that most unions during that period shrank or held steady. Union members held nearly a third of all non-farm private-sector jobs between 1950 and 1965; now they hold about 12 percent, and a mere 7.5 percent of private-sector jobs.

SEIU’s dramatic increase has persuaded Stern that he’s found a model for organized labor to regain its clout at the bargaining table and in the corridors of power — what he calls a progressive business model, a rough hybrid of Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs. By working with rather than against employers, Stern believes, unions can regain their long-declining share of the U.S. workforce.

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A focus on organizing rather than political activism is the key, Stern argues from his Washington, D.C., headquarters. Lobbying and public advocacy are mostly futile, as long as unions lack the numbers to cause fear at the ballot box. Stern’s strength-through-numbers evangelism led him to break, very publicly, with his former mentor Sweeney, now president of the AFL-CIO. He and a half-dozen other labor leaders, including James P. Hoffa of the Teamsters and Terence O’Sullivan of the Laborers, announced in the summer of 2005 that their unions would split from the AFL-CIO and form their own federation, Change to Win. At the group’s kickoff conference in St. Louis that September, Stern declared: “We pledge to devote the vast majority of our resources to uniting the strength in modern, growing, strong, powerful organizing unions.”

Stern has his critics, some within his own union. The most prominent is Sal Rosselli, leader of a major SEIU affiliate in California representing health-care workers. His battle with Stern and his allies has all the hallmarks of a looming civil war, one that could get ugly at the union’s annual convention in Puerto Rico later this spring. The conflict underscores the weakening of American unionism’s bargaining power created by Third World mass immigration, legal or otherwise.

To understand the Rosselli-Stern split, some context is necessary. The SEIU is not like Carpenters, Plumbers or other craft unions. Aside from a sizable contingent of nurses, the SEIU overwhelmingly represents unskilled workers — hospital attendants, security guards, janitors, hotel chamber maids and home-health-care workers. Squarely in the lower half of the modern service-economy labor force, these jobs offer relatively little in the way of wages, benefits or career advancement.

These are the jobs our current presidential candidates are fond of telling us that “Americans won’t do.” All things being equal, any employer would rather pay someone $10 rather than $15 an hour. And immigrant workers with low educational attainment and limited English ability are happy to take $10 an hour, at least in the short run — it beats what they’d be making back home doing the same thing. When such workers can’t easily be replaced, unions are in a position to negotiate effectively on their behalf. But today’s high levels of immigration, legal and otherwise, make it almost certain that these workers can be easily replaced — which makes Stern’s endorsement of illegal-immigrant amnesty seem, well, oblivious to economic reality.

Service-economy unions think they can turn open borders to their advantage. The SEIU is willing to cut sweetheart deals — lowering the labor costs even of employers whom they regard as exploiters — because doing so allows them to organize more recruits. SEIU owes much of its growth — in numbers more than in power — to Third World immigration, especially from Mexico. The SEIU estimates that one-quarter of its members are Hispanic immigrants, a proportion higher than any other union in this country, save perhaps the now nearly irrelevant United Farm Workers. And the SEIU is willing to do political grunt work for the Mexican government and U.S. ethnic-grievance groups like La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund: it was SEIU Local 1877 that provided security for L.A.’s massive pro-amnesty marches two years ago.