Last year after suddenly stepping down from the presidency of SEIU, Andy Stern, the most famous (and infamous) labor “leader” since the first Jimmy Hoffa, stepped right back up into a board of directors spot with SIGA Technologies. And within six months Stern pocketed 35,000 stock options from the pharmaceutical manufacturer (at the time worth a cool half million) plus $116K for his valuable input at SIGA board meetings. 
SIGA is owned by Ron Perelman, the world’s 64th richest person with a net worth of $12 billion that places him in the top 1% of the top 1% on the Greedy Capitalist Index of Evil. Perelman, among many many other things, owns his own helicopter, a nice chunk of Manhattan, 57 acres in the Hamptons and part of an island in the Bahamas called “The Billionaire Boys Club.” At the time it struck most Andy watchers as odd how quickly the iconic class warrior transformed himself into a run of the mill capitalist evildoer, especially as SEIU and SIGA seemed to share no past history that might explain Stern’s sudden interest in legal pharmaceuticals. Then last month Perelman donated enough pocket change to create the Ronald O. Perelman Senior Fellowship at Columbia’s School of Business apparently just for its first visiting scholar, Senior Fellow Andrew L. Stern. This latest chapter in the Stern-Perelman bromance caused an SEIU attack site to finally connect the dots to a backroom deal Stern cut with Perelman in 2006 that pulled the plug on an SEIU organizing drive against AlliedBarton, the billionaire’s security company, leaving outspoken union supporters to fend for themselves when their union organizers literally disappeared overnight. Certainly we are 100% in favor of union zealots blossoming into champions of free enterprise, but never, ever, by selling out the rank and file.
