G. Hardy; Led Service Employees

George Hardy, a California labor leader who unionized previously ignored janitors, public employees and health care workers during his 50-year career with the Service Employees International Union, has died. He was 79.

Hardy died Thursday night of respiratory failure at Children’s Hospital of San Francisco, the union announced.

From 1971 until his retirement in 1980, Hardy served as international president of the 935,000-member union. He was also a vice president of the AFL-CIO.

“Hundreds of thousands of workers, who might be blocked from organizing to this day were it not for George, have lost a true champion,” said John Sweeney, who succeeded Hardy as president.

The son of a janitor who rose to be SEIU vice president, Hardy was born in Vancouver, Canada, but moved to San Francisco with his family in the 1920s. He began his own career as a janitor but was soon blacklisted by groups opposed to his organizing activity.

Hardy moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s as a union organizer.

He achieved some notoriety in 1947 when he was arrested for threatening to punch John Roosevelt, son of the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt and then manager of Los Angeles’ now defunct Grayson stores. The incident occurred as Roosevelt walked by a picket line marshaled by Hardy at Roosevelt’s store near 7th Street and Broadway. Charges were later dropped.

Undaunted by prominent people, Hardy was as likely to tell off Presidents as to punch out store managers. At a 1975 economic summit, his colleagues laughingly recall, he told President Gerald R. Ford: “Quit fooling around!”

Hardy was elected international vice president of the SEIU in 1948 and soon thereafter turned his efforts from janitors to health care and public service workers, who had been ignored by most unions.

During Hardy’s first four-year term as president, SEIU membership grew by 100,000, mostly in the health care and public sectors. Before his retirement, Hardy helped lay the groundwork for the merger of the SEIU and the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, which was ratified in 1989.

Hardy’s wife, Cissy, died earlier this year. He is survived by a daughter, Joan Twomey, and two grandchildren, of San Francisco.