Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Workers Worldwide Union, one of many nation’s largest and most politically highly effective labor unions, introduced Tuesday that she would step down after 14 years in her place.

Ms. Henry was the primary girl elected to guide the union, which represents almost two million staff like janitors and residential well being aides in each the private and non-private sectors.

Below her management, it launched a significant initiative often known as the Battle for $15, which sought to prepare fast-food staff and push for a $15 minimal wage. Profitable over skeptics within the ranks, Ms. Henry argued that the union may make positive factors by way of a broad-based marketing campaign that focused the business as an entire quite than particular person employers.

Labor consultants and business officers cite the marketing campaign as a significant drive behind important minimum-wage will increase in states together with California and New York and cities like Seattle and Chicago. It additionally pushed a recent California law making a council to set a minimal wage within the fast-food business, which is able to change into $20 an hour in April, and to suggest new well being and security requirements.

Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor on the Graduate Middle of the Metropolis College of New York, stated the union underneath Ms. Henry had been “keen to take possibilities on fairly daring initiatives” and known as the Battle for $15 an “extraordinary achievement.”

However the marketing campaign has not unionized staff on a big scale and enabled them to barter collective bargaining agreements with their employers.

Ms. Henry’s tenure has coincided with a sequence of legislative and authorized challenges to organized labor, together with state legal guidelines rolling again collective bargaining rights and permitting staff to choose out of once-mandatory union charges, in addition to a landmark Supreme Court docket ruling permitting authorities workers to do the identical.

The union’s membership has stayed almost flat on Ms. Henry’s watch, whereas the general share of Individuals represented by unions has declined roughly 15 %. However the union misplaced necessary charges from greater than 200,000 nonmembers, inflicting a major lack of income.

The union will choose Ms. Henry’s successor by way of a vote of delegates at its quadrennial conference in Might.

“I’m able to move the baton,” Ms. Henry, 66, stated in an interview. “S.E.I.U. is full of highly effective, dynamic, multiracial leaders of the subsequent technology who’re able to seize this second of employee rebellion.”

The union’s second-ranking official, Secretary-Treasurer April Verrett, stated in an interview that she supposed to be a candidate for the highest job.

A longtime organizer, Ms. Henry was an govt vp when the union’s board selected her to fill out the presidential time period of Andy Stern, who resigned in 2010. She received the primary of three full four-year phrases in 2012.

Ms. Henry’s method has invited criticism that the union is just too top-down in its efforts.

The organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey has criticized the Battle for $15 for being too centered on what she calls “mobilizing” — that’s, relying closely on an expert workers, consultants and activists to generate consideration and form public opinion — quite than constructing an in depth, worker-led group.

As S.E.I.U. obtained extra concerned in a union marketing campaign that an affiliate, Staff United, launched at Starbucks in 2021, some Starbucks staff stated decision-making and communications had change into extra centralized.

Within the interview, Ms. Henry rejected the rivalry that the union’s campaigns didn’t prominently contain staff, however stated it was essential to pair ground-level organizing with different methods that pressured employers.

The union has additionally been a drive in politics and in coverage debates. Ms. Henry took the highest job shortly after President Barack Obama signed the Inexpensive Care Act, which the union had mobilized to assist move. She threw the union into defending the well being care laws towards Republican makes an attempt to repeal it.

The union’s political bets underneath Ms. Henry haven’t all the time labored out, like its endorsement of Hillary Clinton early within the 2016 presidential marketing campaign cycle. Many members later turned keen about her Democratic major rival, Bernie Sanders.

In 2020, the union took a special tack, laying out a coverage agenda that it urged candidates to embrace, which included making it simpler for staff to cut price on an industrywide foundation and making giant investments in house care and little one care, together with elevated pay for care staff. Joseph R. Biden Jr. included most of the union’s concepts into his home coverage platform en path to the presidency.

“It’s an instance of how we take inventory and consider management choices, and draw classes and take into consideration what we wish to do otherwise subsequent time,” Ms. Henry stated of the change in method.

Nonetheless, main house care and little one care measures proposed by Mr. Biden died within the Senate.

Ms. Henry stated the union was spending closely on this yr’s political elections — a sum more likely to exceed $100 million, in accordance with a union official.

“We wish to end the job,” she stated. “We now have Senate targets, Home targets, governors, state legislators, metropolis councils — to make all the foremost positive factors we will make.”