Back in April, I wrote about a lawsuit SEIU was filing against SEIU-UHW.  Today, that suit was dismissed by the federal district court judge (PDF Order here).

In legal parlance, SEIU failed to state a claim under federal rule of civil procedure 12b6.  The rule is basically a frivolous lawsuit screening tool, and not a very high standard to get past this rule. However, SEIU went for something of a legal reach against their rebellious local, and were slapped down.

Ignoring what I felt personally about this case, I never really saw much in terms of a legal claim. I guess sometimes my legal intuition is right. UHW will be able to receive legal fees arising from the litigation.

You can read UHW’s take here

It is a dirty little secret, but often times the more virulently anti-union employers are religious orders that run health systems.  Such is the situation with the Sisters of St. Joseph who run the St. Joseph Health System.  They have been resisting the efforts of their service employees to join SEIU-UHW for the past three years.

SEIU-UHW is organizing a series of events this week in support of their organizing efforts.  Today Delores Huerta of the United Farm Workers wrote a HuffPost piece on the struggle.

This week I’m joining St. Joseph Health System workers, Attorney General Jerry Brown, Father Eugene Boyle, actor Ed Begley Jr, and community and religious leaders to call upon the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange to make peace with their workers.

For decades, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange have fought for justice for California’s workers. In the summer of 1973, they marched in solidarity with Cesar Chavez and farm workers during the brutal Grape Strike. I witnessed the Sisters putting their personal safety at risk. They walked picket lines and even went to jail with more than 3500 striking farm workers. I was inspired by the Sisters’ commitment to stand with the farm workers, even in the face of violent provocation.

But now, these same sisters are refusing to show their own workers the same justice they once fought for.

Flip it for more and a video.

When I write that the nuns are resisting the organizing, I mean it.  They have been using heavy-handed and it appears illegal tactics to stop their employees from forming a union.  Workers have been threatened that they will lose their jobs is they continue to push for a union.  Delores Huerta writes:

Public records show that SJHS has hired some of the most notorious union-busting firms to fight their employees. Meanwhile, government officials have cited SJHS for violating its employees’ basic labor rights, including illegally firing, spying on, and intimidating workers who want to form a union. These heavy-handed tactics leave workers feeling threatened, intimidated and disregarded.

How can the Sisters support farm workers’ efforts to form a union, but fight their own employees for seeking this same basic right? Is there such a big difference between the people who feed us and the people who heal us? Clearly, there is not.

It is great to see a community coming together to support the workers, including Huerta nad Jerry Brown.  More importantly at least IMHO, 20 former members of the Sisters of St. Joseph’s wrote a letter to the current members, urging them to find peace with their service employees.  Here is a video of the delivery of that letter to the nuns.  No, they did not come receive the letter personally.

International Union Will Push to Weaken Rank-and-File Members’ Voices

My name is Michael Rivera. I’ve been a Respiratory Therapist for 18 years, specializing in Neonatal and Pediatric Respiratory Care. I’m very concerned about the future of my union, SEIU. This week, I’m going to my first SEIU convention where I’m worried that the grassroots union principles that drew me to get involved will be undermined by SEIU’s Washington-based officials. Along with other UHW members, I plan to post here and at www.seiuvoice.org with updates during the convention.

Our International union leadership has put forward an agenda that they’re calling “Justice For All,” which would strip away many of the safeguards for member oversight and governance. What alarms me most about the “Justice For All” platform is that it institutionalizes the practice of weakening the voice of rank-and-file members in national contract negotiations. Their proposal would replace elected bargaining teams with a team appointed by the International president, and it would limit worker involvement to carrying out a plan that was developed by union officials without member input.

By comparison, UHW’s “Platform For Change” proposals (www.seiuvoice.org) would guarantee the right of members to oversee bargaining at the highest levels, including during national bargaining. We don’t oppose the goals that SEIU leaders have pronounced, such as helping the tens of millions of non-union workers to organize and win the same rights that we have. But we believe the best way to build power and numbers within the labor movement is through worker leadership. Our employers must view our union as being driven by the interests of the members. Our power to create change in people’s lives rests on whether our employers view us as the driving force behind our union’s agenda or whether our employers simply see our involvement as academic.

SEIU Convention Opens Next Week

Every four years, elected delegates come together to determine the direction of our national union. This year, we’re meeting in Puerto Rico. As delegates, we’ll vote on policy resolutions and amendments to the union’s constitution and bylaws, and we’ll elect the officers and executive board members of SEIU. The convention is important because it’s where we set goals and establish a structure that will determine what this union is able to accomplish.

I’m not expecting a very fair or open decision-making process at the convention. We know from prior conventions the event is heavily scripted and delegate votes sometimes look like rubber-stamp approvals for SEIU’s Washington-based officials. We don’t expect to win our “Platform for Change” reforms at this convention. But we do expect to talk to other union members there and to leave with more relationships and greater power so that our movement to reform SEIU will continue to grow even stronger.

Since real debate probably isn’t going to happen inside the convention itself, I’m looking forward to participating here in an open discussion and debate about these important issues.

 

( – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

UPDATE: From Shane Goldmacher at the Bee’s Capitol Alert:

“The lawsuit and the PR circus around it are a hoax perpetrated on you, the press, and our members in order to smear us and shut down the Stern team’s political opposition,” Rosselli said in an interview Tuesday.

He said the suit is part of a pattern of “constant threat and retaliation” from Stern for UHW-West seeking changes to how SEIU national operates to become – in Rosselli’s terms – “more democratic.”

***

“UHW-W has scrambled at the last minute to do damage control,” said SEIU spokesman Andrew McDonald. “While it is good that UHW-W now understands the serious problems with their actions, it is very troubling they were willing to perpetuate unlawful actions until those actions were exposed.”

Rosselli called the suit “frivolous.” “The remedy they are seeking from the lawsuit was decided last week,” he said.

I’m guessing right now that the amount of money spent on this lawsuit and the accompanying hubbub approach the amount of money involved in the lawsuit. I’m hoping that money starts going back to where it’s needed like paying for this ad that’s running in Ohio against John McCain rather than into legal costs.

Original post over the flip…

I’m an early riser. So, the fact that I happened to be up in time to catch an email that advertised a 9AM EST conference call is no real surprise. While I get lots of invitations to conference calls that I ignore, this one seemed to good to miss, even at 6AM. The invite was shrouded in mystery. It was sent at 3:35 PST, and offered only very limited details. The vagueness of the invitation left me too curious to miss it.

SEIU International said they were holding the call to discuss a local union, but I had a hunch which one it was: SEIU-UHW. “The purpose is to announce the findings of our investigation into financial improprieties by the leaders of a local union.  We?ll also announce our next steps.” Oh sure, it could have been to discuss the an article in the Las Vegas Sun about an improper transfer of funds between two unions in violation of labor law. But that involved Stern-confidante and SEIU 1199 chief Dave Regan, and considering that I was getting this invite, I knew it was UHW.

The call began with a mention of a previous call like this, where they went after another “gotcha” moment. This time it seems the International didn’t like the way that UHW was organizing its various non-profit 501 containers. So, they’re suing.  The complaint is here.

It is not clear to me that any thing that SEIU was alleging was a)illegal b) against the SEIU constitution or c) a bad thing. A NYT reporter asked a question on the call about what was the meat of this complaint, and I, even as a lawyer, didn’t see much “there there”.  

UHW, when contacted for comment, indicated that the fund in question was given about $225,000 to educate members and the public about healthcare issues. The International claimed that much of this money was spent to run an internal straw poll on whether their long-term care members wanted to stay in UHW (the members said yes). In fact, that poll was run with UHW general funds. About $50K of the fund was used to send mailers to members and publicize the poll, but that seems at least tangentially educational.

But, in the end, this seems more like a game of gotcha than a discussion of union democracy. Here’s hoping for that actual discussion that both sides say they want actually comes to fruition.

My name is Barbara Lewis and I’m VP in the SEIU-UHW (United Healthcare Workers – West) Hospital Division. We’re glad to continue this discussion about the direction of SEIU and defending the voice of the membership.

SEIU has made outrageous allegations here and elsewhere that my local union, SEIU-UHW had a hand in the California Nurses Association (CNA) raid against SEIU’s Ohio CHP (Catholic Healthcare Partners) campaign — a raid that resulted in SEIU pulling the campaign and 9000 workers being denied the right to form a union.

Andy Stern, Mary Kay Henry and Dave Regan’s effort to shift the blame onto UHW for the Ohio tragedy is simply an attempt to cover up their own responsibility in this.

A little background on my relationship to this issue: I worked for 18 years with our International Union, mainly in organizing – both public and private sector, and since 1998 exclusively in Southern California as an SEIU staff person assigned to help lead our healthcare organizing, along with leaders from Local 399 and Local 250, prior to the merger that created UHW.

In early 2005, I left the International Union to join the staff of UHW to lead our Tenet work in California. I worked jointly with the International Union as a UHW staff person to help organize Tenet workers in Florida. And I led the Tenet Rank and File Unity Council for two years to establish national priorities for the next round of bargaining: priorities that included winning organizing rights and improving contract standards for existing members.

This week, SEIU Local 1199 sent a letter to the homes of all UHW members claiming that our local union was responsible for the California Nurses Association raid that derailed the organizing campaign at CHP in Ohio.

This outrageous allegation has no factual basis whatsoever as UHW was not involved and we immediately denounced CNA for the Ohio debacle. (See relevant documents at seiuvoice.org.) If anyone is responsible for the campaign’s collapse, it is the leaders who negotiated the election agreement.

Simple safeguards should have been taken ensuring these elections would be done carefully without public fanfare and without being vulnerable to an attack typical of the CNA. Mistakes get made, bad things happen, but to try to blame their failure to protect the agreement on some fabricated role of UHW is reprehensible.

Having worked with locals from around the nation as we develop models for organizing registered nurses and gaining footholds in primarily non-union areas, we’ve seen many examples of CNA swooping in at the last minute to disrupt organizing efforts.

In California in May 2003, SEIU, Local 399 and Local 250 won an organizing agreement with Tenet Healthcare to organize all the Tenet hospitals in California and two Tenet hospitals in Florida. This agreement came out of a multi-year national fight with Tenet and once the agreement was reached, there was a great deal of publicity.

Only days after we reached the agreement, the California Nurses Association was on the ground working to undermine it.

The California Nurses Association put out endless literature and news releases about how our agreement with Tenet was a “sell out, back room deal” and that Tenet was “hand picking the union,” and that nurses shouldn’t have to belong to a “janitors union.”

The CNA’s strategy was to file with the bare minimum support necessary at the NLRB to hold up our elections for registered nurses, and to threaten SEIU’s traditional base of hospital members by creating an “ancillary union” to compete with Local 399 and Local 250.

Workers’ right to an election was delayed for over one year, and for that entire year we had to operate on two fronts: hand-to-hand combat with the CNA at the worksite (as their organizers’ main job was to create conflict, intimidation and chaos) and holding together the support we had so that once we could move forward we could win.

We finally settled jurisdictional issues with the CNA in December, 7 months later. It took another full year for workers to finally have their election.

Since the California Tenet experience, CNA has made numerous attempts elsewhere (Illinois/Nevada/Arizona) to derail RN organizing.

Given all this history is well known in SEIU, the CNA action in Ohio should have been 100% predictable. But instead, there were multiple newspaper articles after the Ohio CHP agreement was reached about the details and the locations and dates of the upcoming elections. These constituted an engraved invitation for the CNA to land in Ohio.

Since SEIU is acutely aware of the CNA’s search and destroy missions, why wouldn’t they ensure that no press releases were made?

UHW has done everything we’ve been asked to do and more to help our sisters and brothers in Ohio fight off the CNA attacks. We received a call from Dave Regan when CNA landed asking for our assistance to immediately leaflet the CNA represented hospitals urging their members to request an end to their activity. We did so without any hesitation, and in such an aggressive manner, that the corporate office of Tenet demanded we stop leafleting. We did not stop and continued for several days.

Despite the fact that at the time we were in the middle to four contested organizing campaigns ourselves (two of which were won this week by 1,000 new members) we offered to send staff immediately into Ohio to help. This offer was rejected.

To send a letter to the homes of our members, claiming that our union was responsible for the horrible tragedy in Ohio is nothing but an effort to turn Ohio workers against California workers and escalate SEIU’s attack against our local union.

(This has been an interesting discussion (when people are not flaming each other), so let’s keep it civil. – promoted by Julia Rosen)

Thanks to Brian for his post on the blogger discussion with SEIU's Andy Stern and for opening this discussion. I'm new to the Calitics community and the new UHW Online Communications Specialist.

As a first contribution to this discussion, I thought it would be helpful to share the broad background of our dispute with SEIU, and the outlines of a few of the lessons we've learned in the course of many campaigns to build our union. Through focused efforts to improve the lives of healthcare workers and the people we serve, UHW has developed a model of growth through strength that at the same time achieves the goal of growth for strength.

For the first two terms of Andy Stern's presidency, from 1996 to 2004 and beyond through the initial days of Change to Win, UHW and SEIU shared vision of increasing union membership and improving workers' lives based on building the capacity of strong local unions, maximizing member partcipation in organizing and politics, coordinating our strength across entire industries through democratic structures of accountability to rank and file union members.

However, in recent years, SEIU's priority of growth has lost its qualitative dimension.  It is now an act of blasphemy to question what kind of growth makes sense or what purpose growth should serve or what role the informed consent and active participation of workers should have in growth.  It is expected that local leaders accept the gospel of growth for growth's sake and accept the quickest short cuts possible to achieve it, even when that means putting employers agendas ahead of workers' aspirations, taking decisions out of workers' hands, and limiting workers' rights to advocate for themselves and for the public interest, both now and in the future.

In this climate, UHW's success at winning some of the nation's best contracts that significantly improve standards (wages, benefits, voice on the job to improve patient care, etc.) has actually been derided as “polishing the apple” – i.e. forgoing growth opportunities by using the union's money, staff and political capital to improve contracts that are already “good enough” instead of using those resources for more growth and for that alone.

The misguided notion at play here is that there's a one-to-one correspondence: the more resources spent on improving standards, especially when that involves struggle with employers, the less growth will be achieved.

This caricature does not stand up to scrutiny.

The fact is that UHW was the fastest growing local in SEIU from 2001-06 (excluding growth from mergers) and it's also the fact that most of SEIU's growth in recent years has come through the creation of quasi-public employers for independent homecare and childcare providers rather than from actually winning union recognition from corporate employers based on the kinds of “value added” arrangements that Stern touts in his book, “A Country That Works”.

But even putting aside these facts, we should question the fundamental logic of the Stern regime's premise that pursuing higher standards for organized workers is an impediment to achieving growth, an expenditure of limited resources in a zero-sum game.

Our members' experience is that improving standards and achieving growth generally go hand-in-hand because when workers win higher standards in one place, it inspires workers in other places to join the union.  Indeed, this is why most workers want to join the union.

The hidden and deeply troubling premises of the Stern regime's false choice between growth and standards are these: that no substantial growth can take place in the face of employer opposition and that workers themselves can't be trusted to make wise decisions that defer short-term gains for growth and the long-term power it builds.

The first premise is troubling because starting out, as the Stern regime does, with the PRIMARY purpose of currying favor with employers rather than addressing the issues of union member and consumers cheats workers of their power to achieve real change.

The second premise is troubling because it leads to the kind of autocratic leadership and abuses of power documented at www.seiuvoice.org.  When you believe workers are incapable of making good choices, you take the choices out of their hands and entrust them to a closely held inner circle accountable only to itself and to it own agenda of growth at any cost.

These premises bring extremely big problems.

First, the structural tensions between the goals of workers and the goals of employers require that a good union be able to work constructively with employers when that's possible and to fight their initiatives when that's necessary.  When winning employers' approval is universally understood as a prerequisite for growth and growth is your only concern, you're operating from a position of weakness, as you've given up in advance on winning any objectives that employers might not prefer.  Literally, workers don't even have a fighting chance.

Second, it's wrong and undemocratic and fundamentally disempowering to cut members out of shaping their own destiny. You shouldn't make sacrifices for someone else without their informed consent, and you can't do so without building a hollow organization. Workers can and must take real ownership of their unions and make real choices for themselves to build power.

Moreover, counter to the Stern regime's elitist assumptions, workers have shown time and time again that they are capable of making decisions to postpone short-term gains in favor of long-term growth.  Such trade-offs are an integral part of what unions do, but workers themselves must decide to make them.  It is unacceptable for these decisions to be made Washington insiders who think they know better than the workers themselves what trade-offs are in their best interest.

In a future post, I'll lay out in greater detail some of UHW's concrete experiences of the corrupted culture within SEIU's current top leadership that we are fighting to put right.

Also in Orange.

Perhaps this post would be better for Labor Day than Columbus Day, but either way it’s something that I think is important. Labor unions often get painted with broad strokes as relics and dinosaurs just waiting for mammals to take over the world. Heck, I have some very progressive friends who have voiced that opinion.  But that doesn’t make it right, or even defensible.

Last week I attended the SEIU-UHW Leadership Conference, and talked to a few people there about why unions, in general, and their union, in specific are important.  I thought the responses were interesting in a number of ways. But I’ll frame this post using the words of Jorge Rodriguez, the executive vice president of SEIU-UHW, and the former president of SEIU Local 399, the LA area SEIU health union that merged to form UHW. I’ll just paraphrase those words: “The status of labor is directly correlated to the status of the middle class.” 

That might seem to be something of a truism, but look back, and you’ll see it’s true. In countries where labor is strong, the middle class is strong. We can pour through the history books, union membership data and economic data to show that this is true. Growth of union membership is uniquely tied to growth of the middle class.  When labor was at its height of membership (%-wise) during the middle of the 20th century, the middle class boomed and flourished. People were stable and confident in their futures within their workplace, and productivity reflected that worker content.

But we live in a different era now. And in this era, we compete globally, racing to the bottom at breakneck speeds. We can’t compete with the Indias, Chinas, and Mexicos of the world. It simply won’t happen on a cost basis, especially with the disaster that is our health care system. And so unions are an anachronism of a bygone era.

Or so the story goes.  However, the story is very, very misleading. The story makes assumptions, faulty ones at that. Assumptions that by paying workers less, there is more. Assumptions that by squeaking every last penny out of the system, we can somehow improve America, or at least Gordon Gekko’s America. As if Wall Street will tussle the CEO’s hair and reward him with a few more stock options, and then the American Dream will be fulfilled.

But the American Dream? You know the one where you can pay your bills. The one where we can all sleep at night without the fear of a loathsome disease wiping out your financial future because you have no health insurance? The one where the next generation doesn’t backslide into poverty? That American Dream requires strong labor.

If you don’t mind let me give you a little anecdotal evidence of the power of unions, for those who say that labor has no relevance in this economy.  I’ll even make it simple the first time around. Leave it to dollars and cents, to make things crystal clear.  Take two, totally real and entirely unfictionalized, hospitals in the Southland, in areas of equally high living costs, we’ll call them Hospital X and Hospital Y.  Hospital X is a union shop organized by the very same SEIU-UHW that I referenced earlier.  At Hospital X, certified nursing assistants (CNAs) earn about $26 depending on experience. You won’t get rich off such a salary with housing costs as high as they are in Southern California, but it’s a wage that you can live on.  At Hospital Y, a non-union shop, a Licensed vocational nurses (LVNs) with about twenty years of experience (!) earns only about $17/hour. So, despite the higher level of education and experience, the LVN at the non-union hospital was earning less than a CNA at a union hospital.

Now, try to tell me why unions are unnecessary.

Well, here’s another story in case you still don’t believe me. A nurse at another non-union hospital, let’s call her Emilia, was working in the oncology unit.  Well, it turns out that the oncology unit wasn’t profitable enough for the corporate honchos, so they shut it down, thus downsizing Emilia. Well, never fear, because the hospital offered to take her back as a “temporary employee” aka, the same job for a lot less pay and no benefits in another unit. So, get it? Same job but different hospital floor=no benefits & lower pay. 

Of course, the next question you might be asking is, isn’t there a nursing shortage, can’t she go somewhere else? Well, Emilia is in her late 50s, and though nobody will tell her this to her face, she’s just too expensive. You see, health insurance for a woman in her 50s is expensive, so why pay that when you can get a 25 year old nurse who doesn’t get sick for less money? Of course, problems like institutional memory, and experience aren’t factored into that equation, but who needs experience? Right? You want that fresh out of college kid tending to you in the hospital, right? Right?

But, anecdotes are anecdotes, and there are millions more of them.  It can only take so long before we realize that there’s a pattern here. Corporations exist to serve their investors, not their employees. It’s just the way that it is, for better or for worse. But taking that as a given, we need to work within the confines of the system to get the best deal for the workers of the world.  The vehicle for that?

Labor Unions.  Strong, Organized Labor Unions. To Rebuild Labor Unions is to Rebuild the Middle Class.