If there’s one thing that his friends and foes could readily agree on, it’s that Stephen Lerner doesn’t lack chutzpah.

The fast-talking labor leader says he’s had “a lot of fun” orchestrating a series of bold and sometimes comic attacks on the private equity industry in recent months. He warns that they will continue unless the industry changes its ways.  

“Where they are, increasingly you’ll find us — physically,” says Lerner, the head of the “private equity campaign” at the Services Employees International Union (SEIU).

Last summer, seersucker-clad actors posing as wealthy bluebloods picketed the summer home of Henry Kravis, an industry icon and one of the founders of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. They waved placards in mock defense of the tax treatment.  

When Carlyle Managing Director David Rubenstein bought the Magna Carta for $21 million in December, the union quickly fired off the “top 10 reasons” for the purchase. No. 5 on the list:  Rubenstein would use the 13th-century document as a “prop to hold up at the next congressional hearing on tax breaks for buyout billionaires.”

Lerner credits such “creative actions” for “pulling back the veil” on an industry he asserts is gaming the tax system even as it accounts for five of the top 10 employers in America through firms’ ownership of underlying companies.

Lerner says the union is only demanding that private equity firms provide good wages and benefits to the employees of these portfolio companies and allow them to unionize.

However, the industry thinks otherwise, arguing that the SEIU is waging its attacks in order to attract media attention and to boost its ranks.

“It is unfortunate that the SEIU has decided to demonize private equity as a way to grow union membership. In truth, many private equity firms have strong and positive relationships with unions,” said Douglas Lowenstein, the president of the Private Equity Council, the industry’s fledgling trade group.