Some links that I’ve picked up along the way:

• Assemblymember and former Banking Committee Chair Ted Lieu had a good piece yesterday on the foreclosure crisis and how continuing a laissez-faire attitude toward a deregulated lending industry is a recipe for even more disaster.  AB 1830 is the vehicle to crack down on irresponsible lenders and ban risky loans.

• Steve Wiegand writes about the circuitous route the Governor has taken this year, first toward fiscal austerity, then toward revenue enhancement, and everywhere in between.  Schwarzenegger is completely squeezed, knowing his legacy and reputation is on the  line and at his wit’s end over how to bridge the chasm between Republican intransigence and a way forward for California.

• The California Labor Fed has released its endorsements for legislative races.  Not a lot of surprises here, nor a lot of variance from the CDP endorsements, although Carole Migden and Bob Blumenfield didn’t see their endorsements vacated on the convention floor.  The Labor Fed can endorse multiple candidates in one race, which allows them to wiggle out of some of the more contested primaries (in AD-14 they actually had a TRIPLE endorsement).  The Labor Fed does bring member education, and in some cases money and volunteers, so it’s not a little thing.

• Wired’s Autopia looks at LA’s future in mobility.  In a word, I would call the report frustrating.  It’s basically going to take forever until the city truly has the transit system it deserves; right now, just 7% of the city uses mass transit.

• Mayor Villaraigosa takes a strong stand against ICE raids.

“I am concerned that ICE enforcement actions are creating an impression that this region is somehow less hospitable to these critical businesses than other regions,” Villaraigosa wrote in a March 27 letter to Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security […]

In his letter, Villaraigosa said ICE has targeted “established, responsible employers” in industries that have a “significant reliance on workforces that include undocumented immigrants.”

“In these industries, including most areas of manufacturing, even the most scrupulous and responsible employers have no choice but to rely on workers whose documentation, while facially valid, may raise questions about their lawful presence,” he wrote. He said ICE should spend its limited resources targeting employers who exploit wage and hour laws.

“At a time when we are facing an economic downturn and gang violence at epidemic levels, the federal government should focus its resources on deporting criminal gang members rather than targeting legitimate businesses,” said Matt Szabo, the mayor’s spokesman.

In general I agree with worksite rules enforcement, but the issue does seem to be out of proportion and balance.  It’s selective.

• This is a really interesting and refreshingly honest article by Brad Plumer on the SEIU/UHW situation.

Striking for Justice

Today, security officers who protect Kaiser Permanente facilities in California are striking against their employer-Inter-Con Security Systems–which has met every union organizing effort with fierce opposition, jobsite harassment, and continued intimidation and coercion. The post below is written by Rochelle Duran, an Inter-Con security officer in Fremont, California, who is striking with 80 fellow security officers to make her voice heard.

Forty years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his life organizing sanitation workers in Memphis, my colleagues and I are still fighting for justice in the workplace.

Today, security officers who protect Kaiser Permanente facilities in California are striking against our employer-Inter-Con Security Systems-which refuses to give us basic rights and has met every step we have taken to form a union with fierce opposition and jobsite.

We’ve been struggling with Inter-Con for more than two years now.  Instead of honoring the wishes of its employees, Inter-Con responded by unlawfully intimidating and coercing its officers.

At Kaiser, security officers are among the only group of workers who are being denied the right to form a union. Almost all other direct employees or subcontracted workers are protected under Kaiser’s Labor Management Partnership. As a result, you can really see the stark differences in job quality, compensation, and overall staff morale.

I work the graveyard shift from 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. A nurse I work with was recently shocked to discover that I don’t receive differential pay for my late-night hours. I told her, “How could we possibly expect differential pay when we don’t even get a paid sick day or a basic annual wage increase?”

Forty years ago, Dr. King died while standing up for the dignity and human rights of workers.  Today my co-workers and I will share that struggle. We’ll be outside with signs in hand, using the only tools we have to make our voices heard. I pray this time it will pay off. It’s time for Inter-Con to give us a break. And if we can’t convince them to treat us like human beings, it’s time for Kaiser to give us the support we need so we can do our jobs well and be treated with the dignity we have already earned.

For more information on Rochelle’s struggle, go to www.StandforInterConWorkers.org

I work the graveyard shift from 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. A nurse I work with was recently shocked to discover that I don’t receive differential pay for my late-night hours. I told her, “How could we possibly expect differential pay when we don’t even get a paid sick day or a basic annual wage increase?”

Inter-Con won’t even provide security officers with a single paid sick day, which is just crazy in a hospital setting. We’re forced to come to our hospital sites sick-potentially infecting vulnerable patients-because we don’t have any other options. If we don’t show up, it’s not just that we’ll get docked pay-we also risk getting fired. I highly doubt that a measly five days of paid sick leave would break the Inter-Con bank; but I’m more than sure it would improve the services we provide and build loyalty among the staff.

Unfortunately, Inter-Con doesn’t share my sense of pragmatism. In fact, when I went on maternity leave six months ago, they harassed me into returning two weeks before the six weeks of family leave I am legally entitled to was used up. I’d been working at the job for nearly three years, and there was no doubt that I was coming back. But Inter-Con just kept threatening to give away my position, and I was scared. A lost job was the last thing I needed to deal with while juggling the responsibilities of being a mother for the first time.  Of course it wasn’t surprising coming from a company who had told me months before that “they didn’t have positions for pregnant women.”

It still shocks me that as honest workers, we have to fight this hard to get a break and Inter-Con’s only response is to violate our rights. I guess that’s just the way the world is these days. Job security is something you can’t take for granted when you work for a contractor like Inter-Con.

Back when I was out on maternity leave, Inter-Con fired one of my colleagues who had been active in trying to organize a union. Inter-Con said they fired him for his poor language skills- although those skills worked just fine for the three years he had already put in there! He was lucky. Because we’d started working with SEIU, we saw the kind of justice unions can provide. After negotiation and some legal proceedings, my colleague was able to come back to work for Inter-Con in an even higher position than the one they’d fired him from for his “lacking language skills.”

We need more of that kind of justice.

Even though my salary hasn’t budged since I started working at Inter-Con, my life’s changed a lot. I have a six-month old and my family needs me. I suppose I’m just like every other worker in America: I want a job that values my contributions and pays me a livable wage. In the wealthiest country on earth, I just don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Forty years ago, Dr. King died while standing up for the dignity and human rights of workers.  Today my co-workers and I will share that struggle. We’ll be outside with signs in hand, using the only tools we have to make our voices heard. I pray this time it will pay off. It’s time for Inter-Con to give us a break. And if we can’t convince them to treat us like human beings, it’s time for Kaiser to give us the support we need so we can do our jobs well and be treated with the dignity we have already earned.

– Rochelle Duran

For more information on Rochelle’s struggle, go to www.StandforInterConWorkers.org

Rochelle Duran has worked as a security officer at Kaiser Permanente in Fremont, California, for nearly three years. At the same time she fights for justice for her fellow Inter-Con security officers, Rochelle is a full-time student studying to become a probation officer. Outside of work, Rochelle enjoys spending time with her six-month old baby.  

Note: Background information about this diary can be found at the new website www.seiufactchecker.org. Mary Kay Henry is International Executive Vice President for SEIU

I would like to thank Calitics for hosting this debate about the future of workers in this country.  

I have worked along side Sal Rosselli, the president of SEIU United Healthcare Workers West (UHW-W) for 25 years, starting when both of us worked on staff for SEIU Local 250 (which is now called UHW-W).  I was the organizing director and he worked in the East Bay as a union representative.

I also worked closely with him when I was in charge of SEIU’s hospital organizing campaign in Southern California from 1999 to 2004 that ultimately resulted in 26,000 workers becoming members of UHW and gaining major improvements in pay and benefits.

So I am surprised by his recent actions. He has been attacking the democratic decisions made jointly by the huge majority of SEIU local unions across the country. In fact, he recently resigned from the SEIU Executive Committee, saying he could no longer abide by decisions made by “simple majorities” of elected SEIU leaders.  

Sabotage in Ohio

For the past three years, SEIU has been working with hospital workers in Ohio to help them organize to win improvements for themselves and the patients they serve.

Like most workers in this country, they didn’t stand much of a chance as long as management was using its power to intimidate them and discourage support for a union. For three years, they waged a campaign with support from the community to persuade their employer to accept a fair vote where workers could freely choose without management interference.

But this month, just as the workers were about to vote to unite with SEIU, Rosselli went to San Diego and met with Rose Ann DeMoro, president of the California Nurses Association (CNA) at the executive council meeting of the AFL-CIO.

Two days later, CNA organizers showed up at the Ohio hospitals with flyers telling workers how bad SEIU is, parroting many of the arguments being put forth by Rosselli.

CNA’s materials referred workers to a website co-sponsored by leaders of UHW that has anti-SEIU propaganda.

It’s hard to imagine a more unconscionable act of sabotage against workers who were courageously standing up for their patients and themselves. Because of the confusion caused by a union putting out anti-union propaganda, the vote had to be called off and more than 8,000 Ohio healthcare workers were denied a chance to improve their lives.

Some California Organizing History

The idea that Rosselli could be connected in any way to the situation in Ohio is puzzling given the history of his local union. That history provides several lessons that Rosselli seems to have forgotten.

1. The road to winning better pay and benefits for workers and better communities depends on uniting many more workers with us.

2. With so many employers now regional, national, or global, it takes the combined strength of workers and their local unions from across the country to get management to respect workers’ rights.

3. With labor law so heavily stacked against workers, the first step in winning the right to form a union usually is to wage a community campaign to get management to agree not to intimidate workers in the process.

In the early 1990s, the only national chain where Southern California hospital workers had a union was Kaiser. Those members had good pay and benefits and thought they could never lose them. But Kaiser looked around, saw it was the only union company in the South, and started pushing wage cuts.

It was then that SEIU local unions and the national union made an historic decision to pool our resources and unite our strength to help workers organize the other big hospital chains in California – because we realized that uniting tens of thousands of other workers to win better lives was the only way to protect the pay and benefits of our existing members.

In this profound strategic shift, SEIU local unions from Ohio Florida, Michigan, Illinois, New York, Maryland, Washington, and Pennsylvania made the decision to send tens of millions of dollars, and top staff and members came from all over the country to help Local 250 (Rosselli’s local union at the time) and Local 399 in southern California to unite nonunion workers at major hospital chains in the state – Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), Tenet, and HCA.

The national union – which pooled the resources of our local unions — could bring resources to bear that no one local union could. At one point the national union had 150 organizers on the ground in Los Angeles.

Through our united action, we won agreements that limited the interference by these big chains in their employees’ right to organize a union. As a result, 26,000 hospital workers gained a union and became members of what is now UHW-W, added to California members’ strength, and helped all SEIU hospital workers to achieve and maintain better standards for pay, benefits, and working conditions.

These organizing wins led directly to dramatic changes in workers lives. In the first contract with CHW hospitals, healthcare workers won raises of 14-28% and full, employer-paid family healthcare. Better yet, the new union benefits became the industry standard: Within months after the CHW contract was ratified, the other large hospital chains began providing family healthcare as well, improving the lives of an additional tens of thousands of families.

By 2004, more than 50% of Southern California hospitals were union. Rosselli was strongly supportive of those efforts and provided resources because he knew that a stronger union presence in southern California would help his members at Local 250 in northern California improve and maintain their pay and benefits.

Rosselli’s local also benefited from another key strategy decision made jointly by SEIU local unions at our national convention in 2000. We all decided that workers could win more for their families and communities if members in the same industry and geographical area were united in the same local instead of being divided into multiple organizations.

Under that strategy, the hospital worker members of Local 399 in southern California voted to merge with their counterparts in Local 250 in the North to form UHW-W.

Between that merger and the California organizing led by the national union and supported by local unions from across the U.S., Rosselli’s local nearly tripled in size between 2000 and 2006– growing from about 50,000 to 140,000 members.

When the newly merged local was formed, it was SEIU President Andy Stern’s responsibility to appoint the local leader until elections were held. Stern appointed Rosselli in 2005 to be the leader of UHW-W, believing that his understanding of how California hospital workers had made gains would lead him to use his local’s strength to unite more workers in nonunion states where his local’s national employers operated.

Withdrawing from Democratic Decisionmaking

But over the last few years, I’ve watched Rosselli slowly withdraw from the democratic decisionmaking process of our union.

He has chosen not to attend a series of meetings of national healthcare leadership bodies when debates were taking place and recommendations were being made by local leaders about how to allocate union resources and unite workers’ strength. He chose to sit out key sessions at the January 2008 International Executive Board meeting, depriving his members of a voice in decisions that directly affect them. And most recently, Rosselli resigned from the SEIU Executive Committee – the committee of elected SEIU leaders that makes national decisions about union strategy. In resigning this post, a move that deprives 140,000 UHW members of representation at the highest levels of SEIU, Rosselli said he could no longer accept decisions made by “simple majorities” of the union’s elected leaders.

Rosselli’s actions reflect a decision on his part to put his own priorities above the lives of his own members and the lives of healthcare workers everywhere.

What Is at Risk

Rosselli through his efforts, is risking the pay and benefits of his own members: The massive resources and time he is putting into his divisive attacks is distracting his local union from focusing on the upcoming contract negotiations of more than 70,000 members – about half his membership.

His efforts risk the ability of nurses and hospital workers in the 33 states where there is no union to unite without interference from their employers. By criticizing the same employer neutrality agreements he once fought for alongside his members, he is giving employers ammunition to use against workers who dream of having what UHW members have.

Through his unwillingness to participate in the democratic process within SEIU, he is forgetting how his local union itself was built and is relegating nonunion workers in California and across the country to permanent second-tier status.

Last year UHW-W helped only 888 California healthcare workers organize, but the number of people working in the healthcare industry overall grew by a much greater number. As a result, healthcare workers in California have less strength this year than last.

As the industry grows and the number of workers who have a union does not, workers’ strength diminishes. The labor movement already has too many union leaders who have adopted the business model of unionism – focusing exclusively on their own members – only to see their failure to grow turn back on them and ultimately decimate the pay and benefits of those members in a constantly changing, globalizing economy.

I urge readers to go to the new SEIU website, SEIUFactChecker.org to learn the truth about SEIU’s record of uniting workers to raise their standards of living and our exciting plans for the coming years to build workers’ power and achieve the goals we all share in the progressive movement.

There is a legitimate, healthy debate to be had in the labor movement about our strategies and our shortcomings, but the lives of workers should always come first. I am afraid Sal Rosselli has lost sight of that.

An Open Letter to CNA/NNOC Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro

This week, nearly 8,000 nurses and other healthcare workers in Ohio saw their dreams of forming a union derailed after the California Nurses Association (CNA) flooded the state with hostile organizers and bombarded workers with wildly false and misleading leaflets and phone calls urging them to vote against the union.

For three years the workers joined with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) members, leaders and staff to form their union. They sent letters to Catholic Healthcare Partners (CHP) officials, mobilized community support, campaigned for fair organizing rules, and signed petitions saying they wanted to unite in SEIU. The effort resulted in ground rules agreed to by both the workers and CHP that were designed to put the interests of workers first-not the union or employer.  They called for quick elections without delays, equal access to information from both sides, and guidelines to ensure honest discourse.  

Because of the union-busting onslaught by CNA, the ethical, fair and democratic elections scheduled for today and Friday at nine (CHP) hospitals in Ohio have been suspended.

The following is an open letter from those of us nurses who were denied the chance to unite this week for better jobs and healthcare to Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association:

March 12, 2008

Dear Rose Ann DeMoro,

It’s hard for us to imagine how someone who calls herself a labor leader could purposely do what you have done to us and our families. You don’t know any of us. You have never been to our homes or met our children. You have never visited us on our shifts, or walked in our shoes. You don’t know a thing a bout the struggle that brought us to the verge of our dream to have a union. And yet without talking to a single one of us you send your bullying staff to come in and spread terrible lies for no other reason than to destroy what we worked so hard to build.

For three years we have worked with SEIU members, leaders and staff to form our union. We sent letters to hospital officials and mobilized community support for fair organizing rules. SEIU has supported and encouraged us through some very hard times, and helped us stand up for ourselves. We are caregivers-registered nurses and respiratory therapists, dietary and housekeeping staff, lab techs and other employees. SEIU helped us understand how we could do more by speaking with one voice and standing together for our families and our patients. SEIU respected our intelligence and our ability to make our own decisions.

You say you stand for democracy. But then you come in with a goal of destroying our campaign without ever asking us what we think about SEIU and our agreement for fair election ground rules-ground rules we now understand you have made use of many times in California.

You say you stand for justice. But then you deny us our opportunity for a fair vote free of misleading propaganda and scare tactics.

Our efforts to unite for better jobs and health care were not a secret. At any time during those three years you could have come and presented your union, compared yourself to SEIU, and asked us to make a choice. But you didn’t. So it is obvious to us that your sole intention was to destroy what we have built. What kind of organization sets out to destroy the efforts of the very people you claim to stand for, and then tries to pretend it’s a moral cause?

Here in Ohio, union organizers and representatives don’t behave the way yours do. They show respect for hard-working people. We have read all the words about how you try to justify this, but when compared to the needs of our families and the needs of our patients, they show a complete disregard for basic fairness and decency. You have brought harm to thousands of workers and families in Ohio, and you should be ashamed of what you have done.

Click here for a full list of letter signatories.  For more backround on the story you can read today’s articles in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times.  

A few weeks back I brought you the story of the Quaker teacher who was fired by Cal State East Bay for altering the state’s ridiculous loyalty oath to conform to her religious beliefs. Today’s LA Times reports that she has happily won her job back – with help from her fellow teachers, her union, and even Attorney General Jerry Brown.

The university, averting a showdown over religious freedom, agreed to rehire Kearney-Brown after the office of state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown helped draft a statement declaring that the oath does not commit employees to bear arms in the country’s defense….

The firing of Kearney-Brown, who also is a graduate student at the campus, brought widespread criticism from faculty members, students, Quakers and civil-liberties advocates. Some faculty members began circulating a petition objecting to it. The United Auto Workers, which represents teaching assistants, pursued a grievance on Kearney-Brown’s behalf.

“People were outraged,” said Henry Reichman, a Cal State East Bay history professor and chairman of the Academic Senate. “I was very vocal on the campus that this was an outrageous thing.”

The ultimate resolution involved Kearney-Brown getting CSUEB to attach a document to her signed oath clarifying that the oath would not require her to take up arms to defend the state or the constitution, in conformance with her Quaker beliefs. Although the university resisted this, Jerry Brown’s office produced a document that read:

“You should know that signing the oath does not carry with it any obligation or requirement that public employees bear arms or otherwise engage in violence,” read the unsigned statement. “This has been confirmed by both the United States Supreme Court . . . and the California attorney general’s office.”

Although this particular story has a happy ending – and should set a precedent for others whose religious or personal beliefs would be violated by this ridiculous oath – it still raises the question of whether or not this ridiculous anachronism still has any place in California.

It also reminds us of the importance of unions in protecting not just wages and benefits, but civil liberties. Kearney-Brown, like most CSU TAs, is represented by UAW Local 4123. (Note: I was an organizer and steward in UAW Local 4121 at UW.) With her union on her side she had legal and political power, helping her get her job back within days. It also helped that our state Attorney General was willing to step in and defend her civil liberties, as opposed to trying to trample them like some other AGs we know.

Ultimately this reminds us of the importance of coalitions to protect civil liberties. Whether it’s a loyalty oath, FISA, or waterboarding, our basic rights must be supported and protected by the public. Once we start abandoning or refusing to defend the rights of others, we will quickly find we are losing our own.