This blog post originally appeared on the Huffington Post

My name is Shirley Nelson. I work as Certified Nursing Assistant and I have been a caregiver at Kaiser Redwood City Hospital for 42 years.

I would like to thank the community of readers here at Calitics for providing me an opportunity to share my point of view about SEIU’s civil lawsuit against 26 union reformers.

They say every coin has two sides, well, so does every case in court…

To begin with, I want talk about the union I used to be an elected leader of before Andy Stern removed me and 85 other union members from office.

UHW was, by all measures, a successful union. We bargained strong, industry-leading contracts. We represented our members effectively. We organized non-union workers to join our union. We trained our stewards diligently. If you ask anyone in the labor movement who knows our history, they will tell you that we served our members well. In fact, our union was an example for the rest of the labor movement of the kind of power that a member-led union can win for its members.

All that has changed since SEIU took over UHW. While UHW was a member-led union, SEIU is an employer-friendly union.

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In just one year of trusteeship, SEIU has given away the lump sum payout pension option for Kaiser employees without a vote, bargained away family health benefits at Alameda Hospital, forced Sutter employees into a substandard health plan and given away $10.5 million at the bargaining table to Daughters of Charity directly from union members’ pockets. Those giveaways are the result of SEIU’s employer-friendly approach to bargaining.

Directly out of our disagreement with SEIU and their takeover of our union, we have built a new, democratic union called NUHW, the National Union of Healthcare Workers. Since we took that step, however, SEIU has pursued what even Judge Alsup has called a “greedy” and “vastly overreaching” legal strategy against the union reformers who organized to prevent SEIU’s takeover and went on to form NUHW.

That is the real background to SEIU’s civil lawsuit.

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When their lawsuit began, SEIU’s lawyers were asking for $25 million in damages from the defendants. After one week in court, they have abandoned 80% of their claims. For example, over the last year SEIU has smeared the defendants with false claims of:

-taking $3 million from UHW’s strike fund

-“Sabotaging” bargaining and grievances

-“Leaving contracts open” at hospitals so workers could vote to choose their union

-Misusing UHW lists and information to help Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital workers and Fresno homecare workers file for elections

SEIU has backed down from every one of those claims when asked to prove them in court.



It is clear that SEIU’s lawyers understand, and want to hide from the jury, that the vast majority of the members of our union disagreed with Andy Stern. It’s also clear that SEIU knows full well that no funds from our former union were used to build NUHW. Every witness they have put on the stand including SEIU officials Eliseo Medina, Mary Kay Henry and Leon Chow have testified to that.

As SEIU has called each key witness in the trial, the judge has been perplexed as to what SEIU thought the testimony was proving. The judge has said over and over that it is completely appropriate to try to prevent the trusteeship of a local union.

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As I sit in court and hear the testimony of the current SEIU-UHW staff members, I am also deeply struck and saddened by the gross incompetence and lack of even basic familiarity with the fundamentals of representing union members they demonstrate. The staff SEIU’s trustees have hired to run my former union have shown themselves to be unfamiliar with the very basics of filing grievances and bargaining contracts. They have also demonstrated a glaring lack of common sense. I say this not only as a union steward but as someone who has trained stewards and bargained contracts for over two decades.

Finally, it has also struck me the manner in which SEIU’s trustees personally attack the former elected leaders of SEIU-UHW like Sal Rosselli and John Borsos. I think I can offer a valuable perspective here, since I was a member and leader of the union before either of them arrived.

I have always known Sal and John to put the members first and to conduct themselves in a deeply ethical manner. That has been our tradition; and that’s why we elected them. That commitment is the founding principle of the new union we are building together, NUHW.

To read more union member voices and get facts about the trial, please visit NUHW.org/trial.

Shirley Nelson, CNA, Kaiser Redwood City

{Shirley Nelson, Certified Nursing Assistant, has been a caregiver at Kaiser Redwood City Hospital for 42 years.  Elected by her co-workers, she served on the Executive Board of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West until she, and 85 other rank and file members of the board who served with her, were removed by SEIU International in January of 2009. She currently serves on the Executive Board of a new, member-led union in California, the National Union of Healthcare Workers.}

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{NUHW, the National Union of Healthcare Workers, is a vibrant and democratic movement of healthcare workers, dedicated to dignity, justice, and healthcare for all. NUHW Voice features blog posts by workers from NUHW’s Our Voices page. You can follow NUHW on Facebook and Twitter.}

My name is Tyrone Dickens and I am a union healthcare worker.

I have worked as a homecare provider in San Francisco for almost six years. My work involves cleaning, cooking and caring for patients in their homes who cannot do these things for themselves. For some of my homecare consumers who don’t have family any more, I am the only companion in their lives.

This week I have attended a civil lawsuit in which the officials of the union that currently represent me are suing the former leaders of my local union, leaders that I elected and that I still support. I know that may sound confusing, but I think I can explain it clearly so that you can understand.

Despite my and other members’ protests, officials from SEIU removed the former leaders of my union, SEIU-UHW, from office in January of 2009 and since that time have pursued a civil lawsuit against 28 defendants who used to work for SEIU-UHW asking for $25 million. You can read more about the lawsuit and the defendants here.

Like thousands of other healthcare workers in California, I support the former leaders of my union and the new union we are building together, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). NUHW is a democratic union that we, the union members control.

That principle, workers having a democratic voice in our own union, has always been the primary disagreement between the officials of the SEIU and tens of thousands of healthcare workers and the leaders we have elected to represent us.

For that reason, I want the public to understand some facts about this lawsuit. This is a civil lawsuit. For as much as SEIU wants to make this trial seem like a criminal proceeding. It is not.

Despite SEIU making claims to my co-workers that this civil trial is the result of the defendants “stealing” money or that actions taken by the defendants hurt union members bargaining or grievances, the truth is that SEIU’s lawyers, some of the highest-powered attorneys in the country, are not making those claims at all.

However, SEIU is not explaining that to my coworkers.

SEIU is also not telling my coworkers that the scope of their civil lawsuit has shrunk. In fact, Judge Alsup, the federal judge overseeing this trial, reduced the scope of the trial to one fifth of SEIU’s previous charges. Even then, SEIU will have to prove its case in court.

What I’ve seen so far has not impressed me. Today we found out that SEIU staff who took over our union and who were supposed to be looking for and securing files didn’t do a very good job.  The people who are saying that stuff is missing didn’t even try to see if someone else had them. They just said “Oh, well” and let it go.

One of the other things that I have learned about this trial that disturbs me is that the lawyers for SEIU are being paid an estimated three times more than what the civil suit is asking for. Since SEIU’s lawyers are being paid out of my dues money, I think our dues could have been better used fighting Arnold Schwarzenegger and protecting healthcare workers.

Finally, I would also like to share my personal experience of the civil trial. I attended the trial because I wanted information and to see for myself what was being said in court. Sitting alongside me in support of the defendants this week were other homecare workers, nursing home workers, hospital workers, community members, labor allies and friends and family. But don’t take my word for it, come to court and find out for yourself.

Thank you for reading,

Tyrone Dickens, IHSS, San Francisco

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{NUHW, the National Union of Healthcare Workers, is a vibrant and democratic movement of healthcare workers, dedicated to dignity, justice, and healthcare for all. NUHW Voice features blog posts by workers from NUHW’s Our Voices page. You can follow NUHW on Facebook and Twitter.}

“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.

In my years as an activist member with SEIU United Healthcare Workers – West I have been a part of many struggles for working people.  But in the last months we have been in a different kind of fight.  We have stood up to the arrogance of Andy Stern, Anna Burger and other SEIU International officers who, in an attempt to flex their muscles and stifle dissent, have chastened many rank-and-file members and our local, United Healthcare Workers – West with the threat of trusteeship.  But I will say now, organized union members will never be intimidated by anyone, International Union officers included.  We will stand up to anyone.

I saw this stifling of members’ voices at the SEIU Convention in Puerto Rico from the moment we entered the convention center, when our delegation was harassed and followed.  I saw this as the Convention voted to move me and other workers out of my union and into corrupt Local 6434, ignoring our right to decide where we belong.  The hundreds in Puerto Rico voted to move us 65,000 from California.  But we were not intimidated then.

UHW member Ella Raiford, protesting the Convention’s vote to force members out of UHW.

In response, we came out in force.  At our mass demonstration in Manhattan Beach, where we organized 6000 members to protest another sham hearing, I personally went up to Anna Burger and confronted her, telling her that we will not be swayed and demanded that Stern and Burger meet with our membership.  We aren’t furniture, we can’t be moved around on their whims.   We weren’t surprised when she said no to a meeting.  We stood strong in front of them, never scared.

My UHW brothers and sisters protesting the International’s plans to divide us in July.

We continued on to Madison, Wisconsin, where a group of us were determined to meet with SEIU International.  We continued in our demands for a meeting with Andy Stern, and to our surprise he agreed to meet us for a brief talk.  But he said very little to us, claiming that he couldn’t say anything without his lawyers.  Instead of our elected officers working for us, Andy and Anna wanted the lawyers to do their job, so they could wash their hands when we pressed them with questions.  When faced with dozens of informed, angry union members, maybe our International union officers were intimidated by us!

    

We confronted Andy Stern; me right after our meeting with him.

And most recently, I and fifty other UHW members occupied the SEIU International office in Alameda to demand answers from out-of-touch union officials who support taking away our voice.  We shouldn’t be afraid to confront them — they work for us!

Us confronting International officials at the SEIU Office in Oakland.

This is a movement of union members who have one goal: to keep our democratically run union, UHW, where we make decisions.  I and others in our union have confronted our bosses and won, through the power of organized union members.  We are not afraid to take on any fight, even against SEIU International officials.

JuanAntonio Molina

Proud UHW Member

In-Home Healthcare Provider

San Francisco, CA

As I read Andy Stern’s rather verbose diatribe entitled “Just Us” or “Justice for All” I couldn’t help think of how eerily reminiscent Stern’s thought process was to the assertion put forward by President George Bush to the world leaders at large that “You’re either with us or you’re against us”.

Mr. Stern would like us to believe that there are only two distinct questions before us with respect to the direction the SEIU and the Labor Movement can move. The first is to “pursue” what he has characterized as the “Just Us” unionism that seeks only to protect and strengthen current organized workers at the expense of those workers who also would benefit from union membership. Or, as he purports to champion, do we pursue the “Justice for All” approach that “focuses on building a broader movement that improves the living standards and working conditions for all those who have no union…?”

This argument is as flawed and devoid of a broader thought process as President Bush’s argument for unilaterally attacking a sovereign nation was. Like President Bush, Mr. Stern streamlines the issues before us into an overly simplistic choice of good versus evil.

He states that, “This is not an intellectual exercise.” On that I can and do agree. I believe very little intellectual exercise on the part of Mr. Stern was performed before presenting his arguments; otherwise a more detailed and varied list of options might have been presented.

The truth is we do not, as Mr. Stern suggests, have two separate choices before us. In reality, Mr. Stern is excising current members from a fair and democratic process in self-determination while championing a position that allows for an employer friendly way of organizing workers. He as much as says so in the following excerpts from his position paper:

“true worker democracy cannot exist until the 90 percent of workers in America who have no voice gain a union.”

This statement clearly establishes Mr. Stern’s view that we do not currently have a legitimate form of democracy within SEIU and therefore his actions attempting to crush the current reform movement are somehow justified.

What Mr. Stern is attempting to accomplish would be the equivalent of taking away every citizens right to vote until everyone over the age of 18 has registered to vote. The 90 percent worker threshold he defines as the benchmark for a “true worker democracy” gives him and other like-minded leaders an indefinite time period in which to further degrade member governance and oversight. Stern goes on to argue that:

“Was America a true democracy when women or African Americans had no vote

and more than half the population was excluded from the process?”

While it is irrefutable that the history of our democracy was morally repugnant in that it excluded African Americans and women, our country did not evolve to a more fair democracy (true or otherwise) by encroaching on the rights of those who already possessed the freedom to vote. Quite the contrary, our democracy evolved and continues to evolve today by becoming more inclusive in nature. Democracy by its very nature must expand and evolve to survive. Furthermore, African Americans and Women didn’t wake up one morning with the right to vote. There was a long and bloody struggle that lead America to reform its position on voting rights.

And the struggle for social equality continues today. We have a female and African American running for the highest office in the land and yet nobody would fool them selves into believing that if either one is elected to the Presidency that we could declare that we have leveled the socio-economic playing field for women and African Americans or any other group of Americans. But what we can claim is that by including more and more people into the process we come that much closer to a “true democracy”.

Unfortunately under the leadership of Mr. Stern SEIU is moving further and further away from this model of inclusiveness and more towards an Oligarchy in which he directs. Many will say we are already there as more and more union locals are consolidated into larger ones and power is wrested from members by the appointed few.

In reality, Stern’s arguments are, at best, a thinly veiled disguise to tie the SEIU-UHW West member driven reform movement and its platform for change within the SEIU to a long ago abandoned union practice of protecting current union members at the expense of non-union workers, when in fact the members who seek reform are doing the exact opposite.

One needs only to compare the SEIU’s “Justice for All” proposals, which lack any substantive details, to the SEIU-UHW West’s member driven “Platform For Change” which outlines in detail its vision for member rights and democracy, but also has a clear and ambitious vision for bringing more workers into the ranks of the organized.

Conversely the SEIU’s “Justice for All”, in reality, is an oxymoron. Its narrow focus of emphasizing organizing the unorganized at the expense of current members and member democracy is two dimensional, lacks vision, creativity, and underestimates the will and commitment of SEIU’s current members.

It presupposes that there can only be one focused approach to growing our union strength; and that put simply is that we can’t do both organizing and strengthening current member contracts.

That is a position of weakness and the end result, no matter how many members are brought into SEIU, will create a national employer union that addresses very little of the workers concerns and pacifies employer fears over any employee voice in the workplace.

The greatest proponents of having a union in the workplace are the current members who have set the high standards they enjoy and, unfortunately, have become the focus of criticism by the SEIU under the leadership of Mr. Stern for wanting to enjoy the fruits of their labor and their successes. Mr. Stern has stated that current members of SEIU-UHW West are only concerned with “polishing their apple”. This defies logic as SEIU-UHW West members have actively participated, often on their free time, in organizing efforts at the national level that have helped to secure union representation for workers in Florida, Texas, Nevada and other states including active campaigns in Colorado. Additionally, millions of dollars from dues goes directly to SEIU for national organizing campaigns.

On top of that, even with SEIU’s relentless attacks against UHW West, UHW West continues to organize workers in California with close to 2,000 healthcare workers in 4 different elections from Southern California to Northern California voting overwhelmingly to join UHW West in the last 2 ½ weeks alone.

UHW West may in fact be polishing apples. They may even be sinking their teeth deep into them and savoring the sweet juice of success, but they are also telling other workers about those apples and helping them to sow their own seeds that they too may enjoy the fruits of their labor and that is truly “Justice for All”. The vision that Mr. Stern has, that continues to shrink the power and decision making into the hands of a very few, is not “Justice for All”.  Under close scrutiny it is really “Justice for All of us here in D.C.”

Michael Rivera, R.C.P.

Perinatal-Pediatric Specialist

Executive Board Vice-President SEIU-UHW West