The California Nurses’ Association called today about the Yamada campaign, and it piqued my interest enough to check out Mariko Yamada and Christopher Cabaldon’s respective endorsement lists. While doing that, one noteworthy pair of endorsements for Yamada came from the California Nurses Association and SEIU United Healthcare Workers West, two unions who have not only been aggressive in pushing for a single payer health care plan for California, but who also stood up against Schwarzeneggar and the 2005 special election boondoggle back when the CA Democratic party was content to sit back and let Arnold run the state unimpeded.

On the issue of health care reform, the candidates are close but not identical. In a recent debate, Yamada backed Sheila Kuhl’s single payer health insurance plan pretty strongly, while Cabaldon gave it lip service, but like the CA Democratic leadership in last year’s health insurance negotiations, also left himself open to a compromise that fell short of single payer. As the Davis Vanguard reported at the time: [emphasis mine]

For Christopher Cabaldon he suggested that everyone is paying for the uninsured, even when we do not see it. He favors the Sheila Kuehl single payer health system as the ideal. However, he then argued that we must do something even it is not a single payer system. We cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the possible. Finally he argued that cuts in Medi-Cal are taking us in the wrong direction and it will make it impossible to find Medi-Cal providers who cover the disadvantaged. Mariko Yamada was also supportive of the Kuehl Bill and argued that if her supporter, Phil Angelides had been elected Governor, we would have it as law now. She is also willing to consider others but not as enthusiastically. Talked about the fact that social workers have supported single payer health system going back 50 years, back then, she quipped they were called Communists but now normal people also support such a system.

While Cabaldon has his fair share of union endorsements, the presence of that 2005 special election coalition of SEIU-UHWW, CNA, firefighters, police and teachers’ unions on Yamada’s endorsement list suggests that those unions don’t trust Cabaldon, even though he’s the front runner and as such would be easy enough to endorse. It’s not a matter of liberal versus conservative – both candidates are fairly liberal Democrats, well in the mainstream for the blue 8th AD – but it suggests that the battle over the shape of health care reform between establishment accommodationists and single payer advocates that scuttled the compromise last year is still simmering under the surface, and that CNA and SEIU-UHWW are doing some quiet primary work to try and actually get single payer passed as more than a symbolic bill, should the Democrats get a big enough majority in November to pass it over the governor’s veto.

Or maybe I’m just seeing things.

originally at surf putah

Dave Johnson has been posting about this strike and its big picture implications, but I also wanted to share some of the individual stories from the workers on the front lines. Here’s Saras Chand from Fremont:

I am a security officer with Inter-Con at the Kaiser Fremont Medical Center. I live in Fremont as well. I’ve worked here for about 1 year and 5 months.

I am from the Fiji Islands. I left the Fiji Islands to come here because it’s hard to survive back home. You can’t get a good education for your family and it’s hard to earn enough to support them. I have 6 kids and my family is important to me.

I’ve worked other security jobs. In a hospital, security has a lot of responsibility and risk. We come into contact with sick people frequently. Despite that we get paid less here than I have at other security jobs.

I do a good job. I always come on time to work. If something is part of my duties, I do it. My heart tells me I should always do a good job and work my best, no matter where I am. I do my best for Kaiser patients and staff – I am committed to doing my part so no one gets hurt.

But we don’t get respect.

We don’t have paid sick leave. If I get sick, I miss pay. That means when we are sick, we think about coming to work anyway since we don’t want to lose pay. That’s not good for us, for patients, or Kaiser staff.

Some people think security is an easy job. But that’s because they don’t know our responsibilities or how hard we work.

When I was in Fiji, I thought, “America is a good country. I will make good money and support my family there.” But we don’t get respect over here.

When I wake up each morning I pray to God that he will help me do my best for my family, my friends, and at my job for Kaiser.

I am an organizer for SEIU.

(Proud to be working on this. Solidarity! – promoted by Bob Brigham)

I have been writing about the strike by California Kaiser Permanente security guards working for contractor Inter-Con Security, who are demanding that laws be enforced and their rights be honored.

SEIU sent out a press release on the situation, titled, Workers With No Healthcare Protecting Kaiser Facilities, Security Contractor May Be Misleading California’s Largest Healthcare Provider.  In summary, the security guards at Kaiser are supposed to be provided with individual healthcare after working for 90 days, but it turns out that many are not.  The security contractor Inter-Con Security has found a way around the promise: they classify workers as “on-call” instead of permanent.

As more and more workers report that Inter-Con is keeping workers on temporary or “on-call” status for months or years, it’s still unclear whether Inter-Con is misleading Kaiser or if Kaiser is simply turning a blind eye to these tactics which short-change workers.

And their families are not provided with health insurance at all.  The security guards — paid as little as $10.40 an hour — are supposed to buy it.  The result is that 41% of the officers who responded to a survey cannot.  And without paid sick days they cannot afford to take the time off to see a doctor anyway.

So here we are with a company finding ways around a promise by changing the classification of the workers to “on-call.”  This points out yet one more problem of workplaces that do not have unions.  How many people are classified as “temporary” or “contractors”?  This is one of the bigger scams that is going on these days.  One reason companies do this is because if someone is not an employee the employer doesn’t have to pay their share of the Social Security payroll tax.  (There are other reasons as well, including avoiding paying promised benefits.)

How do you know if you should be called an employee or an independent contractor?  For a quick guideline, let’s go to the IRS.  They say that by-and-large you are an employee,

if the organization can control what will be done and how it will be done. This is so even if the organization gives the employee freedom of action. What matters is that the organization has the right to control the details of how the services are performed.

Yet most of us see examples of people in this situation who are called “temporary workers” or “contractors” all the time.

Companies are not supposed to do this to us, but here’s the thing: What can you do about it? You and I are individuals, alone.  But corporations have the ability to amass immense power and wealth and influence.  You and I as individuals must stand alone against this power and wealth.  What can you or I or anyone else do on our own?  The average person in our society has very little ability to stand up against this kind of power and wealth.

Over time people discovered that there are some things they can do that will work.  One of these has been to form unions.  By joining together the workers in a company can amass some power of their own.  The company needs the workers in order to function so the workers — if they stick together — have the ability to make the corporation obey employee/employer laws, provide decent pay, and all the other benefits that the unions have brought us.  This is why they are also call “organized labor.”  By organizing into a union and sticking together people have the ability to demand respect and compensation for their work.

This is what the security guards at Kaiser are trying to do.  This is what you should do.

I encourage you to visit StandForSecurity.org.

I am proud to be helping SEIU spread the word about this strike.  

Dave Johnson has been posting about this strike and its big picture implications, but I also wanted to share some of the individual stories from the workers on the front lines. Here’s Dale Brown from Sacramento:

I’ve been with Inter-Con at Kaiser South Sacramento for a year. I’m constantly worried about getting sick. Working in a hospital, I’m exposed to illness and danger all the time. Without paid sick leave, Inter-con officers either have financial hardship if we take off of work, or are forced to work while sick. If I were to have to miss even one week I would be in danger of losing my apartment.

I’m a single mother, and the insurance plan is too expensive for me to enroll my 2 children. It would cause me hardship even just to buy the Inter-Con/Kaiser plan for my kids.

Recently I had to tell my daughter that we couldn’t afford to pay for cheerleading or volleyball because of the low pay-and no raises–paid at Kaiser to Inter-Con officers. That’s not a situation a parent should ever have to face.

I am fighting for a union because we deserve better. We protect Kaiser and its assets, but Inter-Con isn’t even willing to sit down and hear us out. That is just wrong.

But Inter-Con is breaking the law and violating our civil rights. They’re threatening and harassing workers, pulling people aside and interrogating them. I hated to go on strike, because we all want to make sure that Kaiser patients and employees are protected. But Inter-Con’s breaking the law so we had no choice.

Dale Brown, Kaiser South Sacramento Medical Center

I am an organizer for SEIU.

(I am proud to be helping SEIU spread the word about this strike. – promoted by Bob Brigham)

Yesterday I wrote about the security guards who are striking at Kaiser Permanente because their contractor-employer is engaging in illegal tactics while trying to block them from forming a union.  The guards work for Inter-Con Security Inc., which is contracted by Kaiser to provide security services.

You can read articles with details about what happened with the strike yesterday here and here.  (There is close to zero coverage of this strike in newspapers.  But you wouldn’t expect a corporate-owned media to provide information about labor, now would you?)

Please visit the site Stand for Security for background and details about the security guards’ fight to form a union.

While this strike is about violations of workers’ rights, there are very good reasons for their three-year effort to form a union.

In Oregon, the state just north of California, Kaiser Permanente security guards are employed by Kaiser, not by a contractor.  They are unionized and here is a short chart of just some of the difference this makes.

This chart is an example of the difference that a union makes.  The column on the left — the one with better pay, health care, sick days, pension and other benefits — is the workers who are in a union.  The column on the right is these security guards.  So this is why these security guards have been fighting for three years to join a union.  The employer, Inter-Con Security won’t even give sick days!  For people working in hospitals!  What are these workers supposed to do?  And they won’t even pay when the workers have jury duty!  (Shouldn’t a company be concerned about the greater public good, like a court system that works?)

But this chart is also representative of other workplaces, showing the difference that forming a union can make for other workers.  How else are workers going to get back their rights, get health care, get pensions, and get paid?  If you see a better idea out there, please let us all know because this strike and the things happening to these security guards shows that it is very very difficult to form a union.  In today’s environment where workers are afraid of employers moving their jobs overseas – or even just laying them off and telling everyone else to work harder – and then giving their pay out as raises to the executives and multi-million-dollar bonuses to the CEO, this is a very brave action to take.  

On top of that, the Republican government has stacked the labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board to side with the big corporations.  So it is even harder to form a union than ever.  Which is, of course, why wages are stagnating and CEO pay is off the charts.

This is why these workers are striking — to demand that their civil rights be honored and to demand that their right to form a union be honored.  These security guards are placing everything on the line — and doing this for all of us.  If they win this fight, all of us are a step further toward our rights being honored, and toward our own jobs paying more and giving benefits.

I am proud to be helping SEIU spread the word about this strike.  

Manuel Perez is bringing a socially conservative, economically progressive county back to the Democrats.  Imperial County is one of the poorest in California.  It’s part of the California 80th  Assembly District, which reaches from Palm Springs to Mexico and Arizona.  dday gives the best brief of it here.   It’s not on the radar of some of the wealthy liberals in the west of the district, which is one of the reasons why we’ve lost this race to Bonnie Garcia over and over.  Imperial County has been voting against registration and handing victory to the Republicans, but it’s looking up in 2008.  Voters in Riverside and Imperial Counties have a winning progressive this year.

Manuel Perez was raised in both Coachella and Calexico, he does not dismiss the voters in Imperial County.  

“Manuel Perez has demonstrated the integrity, honesty and due diligence to bring forth the true representation of Assembly District 80.” — Victor Carillo, Supervisor District #1

  “I’m supporting Manuel Perez for State Assembly because he is the most qualified candidate and he is well versed in the Imperial and Coachella Valley.  I am confident that Manuel will keep the interests of the Imperial Valley at heart in the California State Assembly.” — Tony Tirado, Imperial County Democratic Central Committee Chair.

His healthcare priorities come from his binational research on the health of women farm workers, and his work with Borrego Community Health Foundation.  

The California Medical Association PAC and SEIU healthcare workers and nurses recently endorsed Perez, touting his healthcare advocacy and efforts to provide healthcare for all the residents in the 80th Assembly District.

Manuel Perez also earned the endorsement of the California Nurses Association.

“Manuel Perez is on the front line of the healthcare crisis, making sure kids see pediatricians and seniors receive needed medicine,” said Zenei Cortez, RN President California Nurses Association.  “He’ll provide fresh ideas and needed leadership in solving the state’s healthcare challenges.”

His education priorities come from his Schools not Jails experience and his budget battles on behalf of the students of the Coachella Valley Unified School District.  

The New River, and its toxic threat to the health of local residents, informs his environmentalism.   A grassroots organizer is running for state office, as a citizen, a teacher, a healthcare provider, and advocate for social justice.  The only Democrat in the race who speaks Spanish, the only Harvard graduate in the race who also knows poverty firsthand.  

Our most critical unions, key legislators, and advocates like Alice Huffman of the NAACP and Dolores Huerta, co-founder of UFW support Manuel Perez, which means he’ll actually get to take that information to the state legislature and get things done.  But it’s also going to take grassroots support of the currency persuasion.

On to the 2/3 majority.  Act Blue page for Manuel Perez -for California Assembly.  

Crossposted at dKos

x-posted from The Bayne of Blog

Last night, I was privileged to attend a dinner honoring fifteen state legislators for standing with working families. The California Labor Federation and State Building and Construction Trades Council sponsored the dinner as part of their annual Joint Legislative Conference.

Honored for their 100% labor voting record were State Senators Ellen Corbett, Christine Kehoe, Carol Migden, Darrell Steinberg, and Patricial Wiggins. Also honored were Assemblymembers Julia Brownley, Mark DeSaulnier, Mike Eng, Ed Hernandez, Dave Jones, Mark Leno, Fiona Ma, Ira Ruskin, Lori Saldaña, and Sandré Swanson.

Among the votes for which they were honored were these.

They voted to crack down on the underground economy by strengthening labor compliance programs and by supporting real penalties for employers who intentionally misclassify workers as independent contractors.

They voted to improve childcare quality for working families by giving childcare providers a right to organize.

They voted to increase benefits for permanently disabled workers, after the Schwarzenegger Administration slashed benefits by 70%.

They voted against tribal gaming compacts that denied casino workers a real right to organize.

They voted against a repeal of the 8-hour work day and a takeaway of the guaranteed right to a lunch break.

They voted for a resolution calling on Congress to overturn the “Kentucky River” decision to protect the right of charge nurses – and all lead workers – to join a union.

They voted to protect our members’ health care, control health care cost, require the state to disclose which employers have their workers on publicly funded health care programs, and expand coverage through a statewide purchasing pool for health insurance.

The voted to promote worker safety by banning the dangerous butter flavoring chemical diacetyl and instituting an indoor heat standard.

Over the last three days, organized labor has been working in solidarity with one another in a project called Hollywood to the Docks, a three-day march and protest involving both Change to Win unions and AFL-CIO members, from the Teamsters to SAG, from the ILWU to the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports.  They’ve literally walked from the heart of Hollywood to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach for the last three days, concluding with a concert on the docks tonight and appearances by Speaker-Elect Karen Bass and LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Next Monday, April 21, will be a day of action across the state put together by a coalition called Students for California’s Future, representing 3.2 million students, with major rallies planned in Los Angeles and at the state capital.  They are rallying against cuts to education and the university system, and this will be just the beginning of a year-long effort to call attention to education funding.

And tomorrow, at 4:00 at the ABC/Disney headquarters in Burbank, in protest of the historically awful, content-free Democratic debate aired on ABC last night, the Courage Campaign and local LA activists are going to offer lapel pins to Disney employees.  Otherwise, their network news anchors George Stephanopolous and Charles Gibson will think they hate America, which they obviously wouldn’t want. (We’ll have a lot more on this later)

Angered by eight years of conservative failure and inspired by a fiercely contested Democratic primary, a rejeuvenated grassroots is building all over the country and in California.  Find an organization that speaks to you.  Participate.  Organize.  And inch by inch, we’re going to take this state and this country back.

By now you may feel like you’ve heard quite enough of the back-and-forth between SEIU and the CNA over union representation of nurses and healthcare workers in Ohio. You may have also heard that the dispute runs deep and wide and goes back years and across state lines into Nevada, California, Texas and several others, and that the encounters have become more extreme.

And perhaps you’re wondering-why should I care?

If this were just about CNA and SEIU, or even just about a dispute at an isolated hospital in one state, you could move on. The thing is, these struggles are not taking place in a vacuum-and what becomes of them has far-reaching impact that touches us all. At a time when the economy is bad and getting worse, and the number of workers represented by a union in this country is an anemic 12%, labor unions face a choice…and workers everywhere face the consequences.

Unions can fight for turf within the ever-shrinking pool of unionized workers, or we can get back on the offensive by reaching out to help more workers join unions to strengthen the hand of more working families.  

SEIU has been at the forefront of unions doing exactly this since 1996. And the results speak for themselves.  Since 1996, more than 1 million new members have united to join SEIU.  Today SEIU represents 1.9 million workers. These new members range from child care workers to city employees in nonunion right to work states like Texas and Arizona to, significantly, hospital workers.

By contrast, CNA, harking back to old-school craft unionism, has pursued an elitist agenda that not only excludes hospital workers who aren’t registered nurses, it prevents registered nurses who want to join a union other than CNA from doing so simply because it’s not the CNA.

Six days before union elections at nine hospitals in Ohio-one with unprecedented ground rules that resulted from three-plus years of hard work by hospital workers, their community allies, and SEIU to hammer out fair election guidelines with the state’s largest health care system-CNA dropped into the state. CAN organizers ran a fiercely anti-union campaign encouraging workers to “vote no.” Their tactics so poisoned the environment that the elections were cancelled. I won’t go into detail here-it’s all detailed in this timeline: http://www.shameoncna.com/incl…

By disrupting this process, CNA sent an unmistakable message to the hospital industry: if a hospital agrees to a fair organizing process, it will be subjected to outlandish accusations of “company unionism” and “backroom deals.”

The CNA’s actions in Ohio represent a major setback in the labor movement’s efforts to raise the standard of employer conduct in organizing campaigns. And it’s not the first time CAN has used such divisive tactics to poach members from an existing union or otherwise divide workers who are in the process of forming a union. It’s happening in California, Nevada, Texas, and elsewhere.

But why might it matter to you? It should if you (you being a working person, a progressive, a consumer in the American economy, or all 3) because this approach undermines the future of the labor movement. At this time of historic inequality and utter insecurity in the American economy, workers need more than ever the strength in community that comes from being organized at work.

In the healthcare sector alone, there are nine million workers out there who don’t have a union. As boomers age, our healthcare needs grow, and the industry’s identity crisis drags on, healthcare workers united in unions have a crucial role to play.

The same is true for the other industries that employ hundreds of millions of American workers-88% of whom don’t have a voice on the job.

But our ability as workers, progressives, and consumers to sit at the big kids’ table depends on our ability to grow and our ability to work together. On a national scale, we’re living the reality of what happens when a smaller and smaller percentage of workers stand together: corporations get to have a bigger and bigger say in the way things work and who gets what.

But at SEIU, we’re living the reality of what happens when workers-with tremendous courage and at great odds-stand together for the interests of all working people: lives, neighborhoods, cities, and whole industries are transformed for the better.

Experience has taught us the hard lesson that circling the wagons simply doesn’t work. And our progressive sensibilities-our concern for the common good-confirm it.

This struggle matters because it’s not just about CNA or SEIU, or Rose Ann DeMoro or Andy Stern. It’s about the future direction and vitality of the American labor movement-a movement that has the ability to blaze a path to an economy and a society that works for everyone-not just the lucky 12%…or 11…or 10…or 9%…

–posted by Nadia, SEIU staff