NEWS & LETTERS, September-October 2010
Workshop Talks
Unions battle, workers suffer
by Htun Lin
At Kaiser HMO two unions, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), are battling for the right to represent 44,000 healthcare workers. This is no ordinary election. It was called after a petition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed by Kaiser workers who have deep grievances against SEIU and want to be represented by a new union.
In their war against NUHW, SEIU has already spent $40 million from a war chest amassed from a huge dues base, the result of years of membership growth, often from management-assisted hostile takeovers of other unions. They have accommodated companies, promoting no-strike clauses in sweetheart deals with nursing home chains just to get dues-paying members.
THUGS PRETENDING TO BE A UNION
SEIU is running a thuggish campaign, shouting down opponents like Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, who talked to workers about NUHW. Kaiser makes its meeting facilities available to SEIU to spread their propaganda.
SEIU blankets the workplace with disinformation. They claim that if the NUHW is voted in, members would lose existing scheduled raises. This is untrue and violates federal law against companies trying to affect a dispute between competing unions. One Kaiser flyer titled "NUHW Members Face Loss of PSP Bonuses" has the company openly colluding with SEIU. As the SEIU leaflet put it: "On a conference call with Kaiser employees Aug. 3, Kaiser Southern California President Ben Chu confirmed that NUHW members at Kaiser are not automatically eligible to receive Performance Sharing Program (PSP) bonuses….Chu made it clear that only members of unions in the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions--like SEIU--are guaranteed the bonus as part of the national agreement we just approved by a 94% vote."
You know you're in trouble as a union member when union officials brag about how great a bonus they "won" for us. Bonuses are given when a union fails to win a meaningful wage increase. You're in even deeper trouble when those same officials declare that they "won" a "new contract" with "no layoffs," on the heels of a recent "reduction-in-force" blessed by the labor-management partnership (LMP) itself, with a new stipulation that a "partnership healthcare benefits committee" will "review" our benefits package to implement takeaways without a membership vote.
This is troubling. SEIU has a track record of making these kinds of backroom deals which undermine not only union democracy, but also the wages and benefits of its own members.
All this is not to say that workers should give Sal Rosselli, head of the NUHW, uncritical support. Sal Rosselli was there in 1997 when Andy Stern launched his LMP at Kaiser. Rosselli turned on a dime: from criticizing Kaiser's disregard for quality care in their healthcare restructuring--an issue crucial to rank-and-file workers--to promoting Kaiser as a quality care provider.
When he had had enough of Andy Stern's program of telling workers to sacrifice our hard-won gains to "help U.S. industry compete" in the global economy, Rosselli resigned from the SEIU executive board and tried to pull out of SEIU. SEIU then put Rosselli's union, United Healthcare West, into trusteeship.
There are many misleading leaflets accusing Rosselli of stealing money from Stern's dictatorial union now run by Mary Kay Henry, who took over after Stern retired in April. The controversy and accusations certainly involve union money, but Stern himself dramatically broke SEIU away from the AFL-CIO, which was not pro-business enough for him, precisely in order to gain control of AFL-CIO money.
Many newer workers actually know little of this history and find it hard to make a choice because a true workers' union hasn't existed at Kaiser for a long time. Though we've seen how "union democracy" has been the rallying point for oppositions in the past only to see how much they themselves collude with management when they get in power, workers who know the history at Kaiser cannot be neutral in this election. SEIU needs to be soundly defeated, while having no illusions about Rosselli. "Union democracy" is no replacement for workplace democracy and the full control over our own labor.
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