In my previous posts, United Healthcare Workers Holding our Ground and We are the Union. SEIU who are you? I shared my experience of the trusteeship SEIU International imposed on SEIU-UHW and the birth of our new union, NUHW. What I’d like to do today is share with you why this experience has been a defining moment for me and my sisters and brothers building NUHW…

Reaching out

Since I joined SEIU-UHW I’ve gone through a kind of consciousness raising, to borrow a term from the 1960’s.  I used to simply be concerned with my own benefits, my wages, my office space.  I wasn’t selfish, just short sighted.  I could only see what was in my world:  my smallish world.

I’m a Medical Social Worker which means that I help patients with their psychosocial needs in the hospital.  When my former local joined SEIU-UHW, I volunteered to take part in a two-week UHW campaign organizing other professionals at HCA hospitals in San Jose. Through that experience, I learned that my problems were really small compared to workers with no representation.  I was exposed to the struggles of homecare workers, and long-term care workers and learned how very fortunate I was as a Kaiser UHW member.

In joining SEIU-UHW and reaching out to organize my fellow healthcare workers, I had joined the larger world of healthcare workers, organized and unorganized, and I realized my problems and my efforts were on a continuum with other workers.  We had the same desires for fair wages, good working conditions, and most importantly, a voice in our workplaces.  I experienced the power of joining with my sisters and brothers in collective struggles:  I saw how much further I got in my own workplace when we stood with the workers in the larger bargaining unit in collective actions. With this larger worldview, I saw what we could accomplish together.  

I learned that unions were by definition workers bonded together for a common cause: endorsing a vision of collective struggle for collective gain.  As I got involved in political campaigns, in Iowa and New Mexico working to elect our new president, I was part of SEIU-UHW’s efforts to make change in one-to-one conversations, at the workplace, at the doors, and in Sacramento, in Washington, D.C.  

One of the reasons SEIU-UHW was so successful was that we knew we couldn’t just be about fighting bad bosses, we had to be working to build the union at every level: to define ourselves beyond what we were fighting against, to define what we were fighting for, what we stood for.

A new union

I hate speaking and writing about SEIU-UHW in the past tense.  But though it is no longer, our vision prevails in our work building NUHW. We still embody that vision and we are creating the new union.  That new union lives in the present and the future, but to fully create our new union, we each have to stand up for what matters most right now.  That means asking ourselves:  what’s worth preserving beyond a paycheck, beyond benefits?

I believe union democracy is worth standing for because I have seen the power of these values embodied in UHW: putting workers first, empowering us to stand up for ourselves in our workplaces, and to stand for issues that affect patient care in Sacramento, to stand for electing a Democratic president, for the Employee Free Choice Act.

I believe in union democracy because I was and am part of it.   Union democracy is a living, breathing organism.   In the former UHW, union democracy wasn’t just an ideal it was a driving principle.  I’m not suggesting SEIU-UHW was perfect, it was made of people and we’re never perfect.  But its leaders had 20/20 vision in terms of seeing what mattered most, and ensuring that our actions were consistent with those values.

I had an epiphany in line at the first trusteeship hearing in San Mateo, while waiting behind my sisters and brothers to say my 2 minute’s worth to Ray Marshall, to SEIU’s attorneys.  I was nervous, furious, so much was in my heart and so much was at stake.  My legs shook, and I felt sick.  Then it came to me.  I didn’t have to say everything.  It wasn’t about me, not me alone.  I would be preceded by my sisters and brothers and succeeded by my sisters and brothers.  Some of them were ranting and cursing, some of them were crying at the mic.  Mine would be one of the voices speaking in support of my union and all that it meant. All I had to be was a drop of water in this great river headed to the delta.  I could do that, and I could do it really well, I decided.   I could be a fine droplet.  And that would be plenty.  Because the river was so much bigger and more powerful than I could ever be alone.

-Homecare workers’ rally, Fresno, California, March 2009

A defining moment

I keep hearing the phrase “defining moment” to describe this period of time in the labor movement, and it’s a true description.   What impresses me every day is witnessing this moment defining us as people.  As a social worker, I’ve seen these moments come to families when their sister/brother, mother/father is dying, I see families laugh their loudest, scream and rant and act out, attack others or wail and lay hopeless.  I also experience people at their absolute kindest and most loving, their most vunerable and their strongest.  

Moments like this where our gains are all in question, when all that we have worked to create is being threatened, our relationships with bosses, our pensions, even our trust in one another, bring out the best and the worst in us.   Our stewards are being “fired” for refusing to let go of their allegiance to their sisters and their brothers, allegiance to their own beliefs. These moments have defining questions wrapped up into them:  What we are willing to commit ourselves to? What are we willing to risk?  What in us is unwavering?  What won’t we give up?  Where will we put our resources?  Yes our money, but also our time and our energy. These moments show us who we are.  

When I have doubt, or feel afraid, or am not sure that we’ll succeed, I look to my sisters and brothers, and I know who I am.  I’m one of the big wide body of  healthcare workers, the collective, and together, we are our most powerful, and our very best.

–Amy Thigpen, Medical Social Worker, Kaiser Fremont

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JOIN our mailing list (by going to the sidebar and signing up for updates). TELL your elected California representatives that you support California healthcare workers’ freedom of choice to form NUHW through fast, free and fair elections, without harassment and intimidation from their employers or from SEIU. (Enter your zip in box and hit enter.) VISIT our website and DONATE to support our movement. And, most importantly, if you have friends or family who are healthcare workers and would like to join our movement to build a vibrant, member-led National Union of Healthcare Workers, please SPREAD THE WORD.

“We are the union, the mighty mighty union!”

I hear the chants in my head.  When I need them, they come to me.

This line is especially true right now for the former members of United Healthcare Workers-West.   We are the union.  A week and a half ago, many of my sisters and brothers and I slept in our union hall, before the hostile takeover by our International, SEIU.  As we held our hall, my sisters and I worked to maintain our union.  We fended off anyone SEIU sent to weasel their way in without warrants.  We planned how we’d move forward during an imminent occupation:  how we’d communicate with each other; how we would reach deep into our membership to take our union back.  

It occurred to me that night hunched over the bare desks in the communication department office, the union solidarity posters hanging behind me, that though we had been member leaders up to that point, stewards and activists for union democracy, something had changed.  This was a sort of matriculation, graduation day.  

This was not the sort of matriculation I wanted, but in this moment of crisis, while SEIU was preparing to take our hall, after they’d put us into trusteeship for refusing to go along with their undemocratic processes, in this moment when our staff, some of the smartest, most committed, best people I know, were told by SEIU to leave the Hall and were preparing for their “interviews”  (interrogations), our elected officers had been fired for being too strong and too empowered, too unified.  In this dark and outrageous moment in the life of our union and the history of the labor movement, I sensed a quiet determination, a victory.

When I became an active member-leader in the Kaiser Medical Social Work chapter, I learned the skills of organizing and noticed that they were the same as those of social work.  The focus is not on giving answers but empowering people to ask the right questions.  The central tenets of both social work and organizing involve listening and beginning where the person is:  giving them the tools:  knowledge of the contract, worker’s rights, the Kaiser labor management partnership, and engendering confidence in the real source of power:  their sisters and brothers.

I have, in the social worker style of tiresome self-analysis, become my own case study for this transformation from un-empowered, un-unified, social worker to empowered leader.  I watched myself in the last year and a half, learn the skills of organizing, begin to use them in small ways, from shadowing my mentor to leading negotiations in one short year, from being anxious about speaking to small groups of workers to speaking comfortably to groups of 300.   There were many small steps along the way, but what amazed me most was the rare combination of talented and dedicated UHW staff and elected members whose vision and integrity permeated all levels of the Union and the impact that this environment had on me and my sisters and brothers.

Any good social worker knows that the main goal of our interventions is to render ourselves redundant:  to help people learn to help themselves so well that we are no longer needed.  A good organizer’s goal is the same:  to empower workers and worksite leaders so that they no longer need the organizer/representative to solve their problems.  

I drank another cup of stale coffee and planned with my sister in the union hall until the middle of the night during the hostile takeover of one of SEIU’s strongest and most effective locals, my local.   As our elected leaders and staff leaders were being fired, we stepped into their places.  Since we could no longer talk to our staff leaders in exile, we turned to each other.  We called up the words of leaders who have said:  “in every interaction we should be thinking ‘how does this build the union?'”  SEIU would do well to consider that question, rather than the question of how to disassemble my union.  

We are moving to decertify from SEIU, to form our own Union, to maintain our current union.  When we leave our autocratic International for the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), it’ll be a historic day for the labor movement.  But that moment will be only one of the significant moments that happen everyday within the former UHW.  One of them was in that Union Hall that night, when we turned to each other, embodying all that UHW stood for.  

In this dark moment when SEIU appears to have taken what we have built, we know that they can take the hall, but they can’t take us.  We are the union. We will be the union.  We’ll be the most democratic, strongest union because of this moment and all of the moments still to come.   We are the union, the mighty mighty union.  SEIU, who are you?  Whoever you claim to be or to represent, you have not built the union.  You have tried to dismember it.   We are building the union right now.  You’ve lost already, and we’ve already won.  

{Amy Thigpen and members of UHW are sleeping in their union halls across California tonight due the threat of imminent seizure of those buildings by SEIU International, which instituted a takeover of UHW West today.}

Last night I slept on the kind of carpet you don’t really want to examine too closely.  It’s splotched with decades of coffee stains and salsa and too many conversations still seem to hang in the stale air, but there I was, curled up on my air mattresses in the union hall in downtown Oakland, the home of United Healthcare Workers West, my union.   On my right my sister the Medical Assistant slept peacefully, on my left my sister the Call Center Representative, across my sister the Ultrasound Technician, and my sister the Optical Technician.  All of them healthcare workers, member leaders and officers in our union.  I realized that I loved this stale, stained room, with carpets held together by duct tape, I love the room because it holds the waking dreams of my sister and brothers in UHW-W.  The place may be held together by duct tape but we as a union are held together by something stronger.

Whenever my union brothers or sisters ask me to do something, anything — lead a chant, bargain over working conditions, join them on the picket line — I say yes.  Why?  Because everything I’ve been part of as a steward and Medical Social Worker with UHW for the last two years has been about furthering a cause that is just and right and about empowering workers.  And not just any workers, workers who provide in-home care for elders: bathing them, cleaning their homes, feeding them, people who do the work that matters most, even though it’s often valued least.

Convalescent workers and homecare workers get paid far less than their colleagues in the hospitals.  But as members of UHW, Hospital workers and Long Term Care workers are joined together in one statewide healthcare union. We’ve raised standards for all, including some of the best wages and benefit packages under the Mariner contracts settled late last year.   And when I say we’ve raised the standards, I mean we. We bargain our own contracts, we elect our leaders from stewards to our executive board of rank and file members.  So why are we sleeping in the union hall?

Despite all of the member-led success of UHW, our International Union — SEIU — placed us in trusteeship today.  It’s a long story, and a very well publicized one, but it’s really not a new story.  It’s an old one, about leaders, in this case, Andy Stern, president of the International Union, forgetting who they represent. It’s a story about a few people, our International Executive Board, who care more about concentrating power than the reality of the workers they are supposed to represent.

So we’re sleeping in the UHW hall and we’re unified in our worksites, only unfortunately instead of concentrating our efforts on fighting for better wages or working conditions or patient care, we have to fight our own International Union.  At a time when our country has pulled together in an historic way, putting the needs of the collective above the few and the privileged, it’s a terrible irony that Andy Stern would choose to attack and destroy, instead of building on this momentum.  Luckily, though Stern and his trustees may have forgotten about workers, people like my sisters and brothers have not, and we will not.

Tonight I’m going to sleep on the stained carpet again surrounded by my sisters and brothers.  If Stern and his trustees disturb us, try to bust into the Hall, cut off the power, the water, we’ll resist.  We’ll hold this duct taped hall as long as we can, and if we have to yield our hall, we’ll take our fight to the facilities, to the courts.  We will hold our union and build our union.  How am I so sure?  Because I believe in the power of each of us bound to the next by common values and a common goal: to improve the lives of healthcare workers and patients, a goal we’re all ready to lose sleep over, to fight for and to win.

Cross-posted at OpenLeft)

At the SEIU hearing on the future of healthcare workers in California, a colleague sitting near me turned and asked: “Why would SEIU try to do this?” It was the same question I’d been asking myself. The evidence is so abundant that one statewide union for all healthcare workers (exemplified by UHW) has succeeded in raising standards and influencing healthcare policy. There is no evidence that dividing nursing home and homecare workers from hospital workers has achieved anything close to these gains.

I’m a medical social worker with Kaiser Permanente. My co-workers and I joined almost 6,000 healthcare workers to protest a Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) hearing in Manhattan Beach, California. The hearing’s purpose was ostensibly to review the arguments for and against SEIU’s efforts to separate nursing home and homecare workers from UHW. It was obvious from the beginning that the hearing was a sham. This is discussed in more detail here.

Gerry Hudson, Executive Vice President of SEIU, opened the proceedings by talking about the three SEIU locals that represent nursing home and homecare workers and how they’ve progressed toward their goals. In short, he said the locals had not met our goals and that the jurisdiction of representation of nursing home and homecare workers should be changed to a different local.

UHW has raised objections to the hearing, because preliminary reports show a bias against our model, despite the facts of our success. But this hearing wasn’t about advancing the interests of nursing home and homecare workers in California. If it was, the facts might have been relevant to the proceedings.

The truth is that UHW has achieved incredible gains for healthcare workers. From 2001 to 2006, we (and our predecessor locals) organized more than 65,000 workers. We organized another 2,000 in the first half of this year-more than the rest of SEIU’s entire healthcare division. We also just won a great contract with Mariner Health Care, where more than 1,000 workers in 10 nursing homes will have patient care committees, successorship language, and some of the highest wages in California. Have we failed our nursing home and homecare workers? No we haven’t. We’ve succeeded. So what’s really going on?

In trying to answer this question, I wondered:Who stands to gain from removing workers from UHW? Local 6434 stands to gain, as they would end up swallowing our members. SEIU stands to gain, because UHW is leading the reform movement to bring member-led democracy back to our union, and move away from Andy Stern’s top-down management style. Local 6434, by comparison, toes the International’s line. If UHW were stripped of half of our very politically active membership, our voice of dissent would be significantly diminished. If Local 6434 and SEIU were the winners in this arrangement, it’s also clear who would lose: healthcare workers.

There is no proof that a Local of nursing home and homecare workers alone can succeed in bargaining better contracts or organizing more members. UHW has proven that one union for ALL healthcare workers is the best way to raise standards for workers. My answer to my co-worker’s question: “Why would SEIU try to do this?” wasn’t simple but it was clear. The goal is not to empower workers. The goal is to empower SEIU International. Last time I checked, that’s not what unions are supposed to be about.

 by Amy Thigpen Medical Social Worker Kaiser Permanente Fremont

After your mother has a stroke, who cares for her so you can work?  A Long-Term Care worker does.  Who connects your mother with the programs that provide this care?  A Medical Social Worker does.  I am one of those Medical Social Workers and a member of United Healthcare Workers-West, a 150,000 member-strong SEIU local.  On July 14, our proposal to unite all of California’s healthcare workers into one union will be heard in Manhattan Beach.

Hospital workers, nursing home, and homecare workers should be united in one union because we are united in our purpose: improving our patients’ lives.  Together, the care that we provide enables people to lead independent and productive lives.

The natural alliance among healthcare workers goes beyond the care we provide.  For example, we are united in our efforts to improve the healthcare system in California.  In years past, we have successfully defeated the governor’s efforts to slash homecare workers’ salaries and deny them medical benefits.  What happens in a nursing home can and does affect what happens in a hospital and visa versa.  If there was a decrease in homecare workers because they weren’t paid a living wage, your mother might have to go to a nursing home.  Not only do most of us prefer to live in our own homes,  there wouldn’t be enough nursing home beds due to the huge increase in need.  The ER’s would be full of patients whose families couldn’t care for them at home.  Many would end up in the hospital until we could find a safe place for them.  The cost of healthcare would rise and be passed on to every one of us fortunate enough to be able to afford the already exorbitant premiums.

If workers from just one part of the healthcare industry had taken on this challenge, rather than uniting around this issue, the governor’s proposal might have passed.  The impact on California’s healthcare landscape would have been enormous.

At the hearing in Manhattan Beach on July 14, SEIU will consider our proposal for uniting all healthcare workers in California.  Also on the table will be another plan, which would split nursing home and homecare workers from their natural sisters and brothers in hospitals and clinics.  That proposal runs counter to the theme of unity that came out of the 2008 SEIU Convention last month.  Dividing healthcare workers diminishes our power to influence our jobs, our patients’ lives and healthcare in California.

We’ll be having a series of events on Monday to show how strong healthcare workers in California will be once we’re united.  That includes a rally outside the hearing, live blog updates on the proceedings, daily video reports, and more.  I encourage you to visit www.seiuvoice.org next week to keep up with what’s going on.

[ Cross-Posted at Openleft ]