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In 2019 the winner of the Eugene V. Debs Award was Mary Kay Henry on behalf of the SEIU.

Mary Kay Henry (born 1958) is an American labor union activist who was elected International President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) on May 8, 2010. She is the first woman to lead the union. While serving with the union in California, she helped pioneer SEIU's use of card check agreements, non-traditional collective bargaining agreements, comprehensive campaigns, and system-wide health care organizing strategies.

On April 13, 2010, several media sources reported that Stern would resign immediately as president of the union. Stern resigned on Thursday, April 15. Anna Burger, SEIU's Secretary-Treasurer and the Chair of the Change to Win Federation, was named SEIU's interim president, to serve for 30 days until the SEIU Executive Board could name a permanent successor. Burger was widely considered to be Stern's likely successor. Henry was considered a dark horse candidate, although likely to challenge Burger for the presidency. Several SEIU insiders urged Dennis Rivera to seek the presidency as well. Stern, however, publicly endorsed Burger for the position.

Mary Kay Henry was elected President of SEIU by the international union's Executive Board on May 8, 2010, to serve the two remaining years of Stern's term. Her original term as President expired in 2012. After her election, Henry said her major priorities as union president would be to advocate for labor rights, immigrants' rights, and LGBT rights. However, she said she did not foresee bringing SEIU back into the AFL-CIO and refused to end the union's battles with its breakaway California locals. A few days after her election, Henry began conducting a review of the duties and assignments of SEIU's top leadership and staff (including Secretary-Treasurer Burger), noting, "It is the prerogative of the president to reassign responsibilities." Burger denied that she was thinking of quitting the union due to the review.

She serves on the executive board of Families USA, a non-profit consumer health care advocacy organization. Henry used to be a labor adviser to the Catholic Health Care and Work Subcommittee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Modern Healthcare magazine, an influential trade publication in the U.S. health care industry, named Henry as one of its "Top 25 Women in Healthcare" in 2009.

She was named SEIU's Southern California organizing director in 2000, the international union's chief healthcare strategist in 2004, and elected an Executive Vice President of the union in 2004. Henry helped oversee what she said in 2005 was a $150 million organizing budget, which SEIU intended to use to organize more than 1 million additional nurses over the next decade. She helped negotiate a "no-raid agreement" between SEIU and the United American Nurses in 2006. In her first 25 years with SEIU, Henry played a major role in organizing drives at Beverly Enterprises, Catholic Health Care West, Tenet Healthcare, and HCA, Inc. Stern relied on her to coordinate and lead important legislative efforts. SEIU Executive Vice President Dennis Rivera took over Henry's healthcare organizing duties in early 2007.

Henry was named assistant to then-SEIU Executive Vice President Eliseo Medina in 1998. She remained active in the union's health care organizing, however, representing SEIU in its talks in 1999 to secure a card check agreement with the Catholic Healthcare West hospital chain. More than 17,000 new members at 27 hospitals were organized under that agreement. She was also involved in SEIU's successful negotiations with Tenet Healthcare for a card check agreement.

Henry was elected to SEIU's Executive Board in December 1995 after President John Sweeney resigned after his election as President of the AFL-CIO. SEIU President Andrew Stern named Henry his assistant for organizing in 1996.

In 1993, she was named director of the 475,000-member health care division of SEIU.

Henry joined SEIU as a researcher in 1980. She had a natural gift for organizing, later saying, "I was always asked to get everybody organized to get on the bus and to get everyone to the dinner table on time." Her experiences as a health care worker prompted her to work for a union that was involved in health care organizing. She joined SEIU because it was one of the few unions hiring women as organizers at the time.

During the 1980s, Henry held 18 jobs within the SEIU in California. She served as the San Francisco-area strike coordinator during a 1986 strike by more than 9,000 clerks, certified nursing assistants, and technicians against 14 Kaiser Permanente hospitals and health care facilities throughout California. She helped pioneer SEIU's use of card check agreements, non-traditional collective bargaining agreements, and system-wide health care organizing strategy.

In college, Henry initially wanted to become an urban planner. She continued to work in hospitals as an undergraduate student, and also as a medical assistant for the American Red Cross. She earned her bachelor's degree from Michigan State University in 1979, majoring in urban planning and labor relations. While in college, she was a volunteer lobbyist for a grassroots group, and worked alongside union lobbyists on various issues. Her first job out of college was with the American Foreign Service distributing food stamps to the needy. When a member from the United Auto Workers suggested that the way to end hunger was to enable people to obtain well-paying jobs, Henry began considering union organizing.

Henry was born in 1958 in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. Her father was a salesman and her mother was a teacher, and both were devout Catholics.