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To: Retort From: CW Big win for California Healthcare Workers Cal Winslow 31.i.10 Congratulations are due to California’s healthcare workers and their new union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). They have won, in this winter of recession and war, a magnificent victory in a key series of electoral contests. Just last week, worker volunteers, health care workers managing their own campaigns, humiliated the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) by choosing NUHW in three representational elections – clearing the path for an all out assault on SEIU, the bureaucratic behemoth of US labor. There are more than one hundred elections to come this year.
Just one year ago SEIU trusteed its California local, United Healthcare
Workers- West (UHW), in a hostile takeover, predatory retaliation for standing
up to King Andy Stern, President of SEIU. The West Coast workers had dared to
dissent, unconscionable in Stern’s “one voice” regime. Worse, they opposed the
SEIU “one strategy” – in this case a strategy that seemed aimed more toward
organizing employers than workers. But the result of the trusteeship has
not been exactly what SEIU intended; one immediate consequence was the
formation of a new union, National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW); then
followed the rapid degeneration of the shell SEIU left behind, SEIU-UHW. SEIU
wrecked a progressive, militant 150,000 strong union – one of the most powerful
in California. This seizure was utterly unwarranted; its consequences have been
tragic; this was predicted, it was the view at the time of virtually everyone,
except king Andy Stern , and of course his celebrated, ever-loyal
Washington DC “brain-trust.”
NUHW set out to build a new union, really to rebuild their union; this was, one
must say, a defiant, highly audacious retort ; for better or worse, SEIU
remains large, it’s pockets are deep, its staff compliant. It is well known for
its “take-no-prisoners” mentality. Still, NUHW and its supporter’s first
response was an astonishing campaign. In literally just weeks, these workers
led a petition drive to decertify SEIU. Their success was historic, the largest
decertification campaign ever. Nearly 100,000 workers signed on. This
meant the majority of SEIU-UHW members, including some 50,000, at the giant
Kaiser Permanente healthcare chain, wanted SEIU out. They demanded the right to
have a union of their own choice. They asked the National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB) to schedule elections - to establish NUHW as their union.
SEIU viewed this as war, “like Iraq”; it established itself in California as an
occupying army. Its commanders, the trustees, were two International SEIU Vice
Presidents, Elise Medina and Dave Regan; it resolved, in trustee, old school
(Cornell?) “Dave Regan’s terms, to “drive a stake through the heart” of the new
union. It was imperial overreach, however; it has become, in Randy Shaw’s
words, SEIU’s Vietnam. For an assortment of carpet bagging SEIU “warriors”
on the ground it became a slog, a quagmire. There was another front, however,
where, perversely, SEIU succeeded but just temporarily. Here the invasion most
resembled an anti-union management campaign. This typically was led by the
lawyers, they took the battle into the Kafkaesque caverns of the NLRB, then
still staffed by Bush appointees - they argued that the healthcare workers’
requests for fair elections were illegal, unfounded, they obstructed, they
demanded delays, they spent a fortune. They did what management does, and they
got their way. For a year. Nevertheless, in December 2009, the NLRB sanctioned
January elections for three Kaiser Chapters, 2300 southern California nurses
and professional workers (social workers, therapists, dietitians, educators,
etc.).
These results in these first elections were as follows: Nurses at Kaiser Sunset voted NUHW 736- SEIU36: 95%,
twenty to one! Psychiatric and social workers voted NUHW 717- SEIU 192;
78% or nearly four to one. Healthcare professionals voted NUHW 189-SEIU 26: 86% or
seven to one.
These results speak for themselves, yet they are all the more sensational
considering that this vote was so long delayed, and that, while the lawyers
were at work, SEIU had carried out a vicious campaign in the hospitals
and clinics of search and destroy - intimidation, harassment and, in collusion
with Kaiser, discipline and dismissals. It not only, with the assistance of the
NLRB, blocked all elections and held 100,000 workers legally hostage (the
majority remain captive still, but not for long). SEIU dismantled the
infrastructure of the union; it fired elected stewards and disbanded bargaining
committees. It attempted to eliminate a democratic structure of
leadership, the human base of the healthcare workers union, a foundation built
in years of struggle. What would be put in place? The headquarters, the
know-it-alls in Washington, apparently were not concerned. What mattered to
them was income, the dues of these often not-so-well paid workers – thus they
entered into secret negotiations with hospital managements, agreed to cutbacks,
reduced pensions and healthcare, gave management the green light for layoffs,
and opened the door for management rights agreements.
SEIU fought fair elections to the end; indeed it is still fighting. It
responded to the NLRB’s decision with, “NUHW is not a union,” “a vote for NUHW
will put workers “at risk.” Steve Trossman is a generic traveling union staff
man, the proud organizer, it seems, of the SEIU egg-throwing attack on NUHW
supporters at the hall of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) in
November. He is (at a nice salary) a “communications director” for SEIU; he
threatened workers that a NUHW win would cost each member“$15,000.” Glossy
mailers accused NUHW leaders Barbara Lewis, John Borsos and Sal Rosselli with
corruption; picket signs called them crooks, charging they stole “millions.”
But no deal, listen to the workers: “We couldn’t fall for this,” says Jim
Clifford, a therapist at Kaiser’s bilingual clinic on the Tijuana border, a
fired steward. “We’ve been paying attention. We’ve seen the anti-democratic
changes. We know what happened at the convention in Puerto Rico. We’ve got
corruption all around us here in southern California. We could see very clearly
that we couldn’t trust anything SEIU said.”
Leila Valdivia, once the President of an earlier Sunset nurse’s organization,
the American Federation of Nurses (AFN), was reactivated by the election. She
said, “SEIU didn’t bank on our relationships and our history, our history of
fighting and going on strike. I got back involved because I believe in
autonomy; I don’t want just another union. I don’t want SEIU. We believe in the
bottom up, we came from the bottom, it’s in our culture. No one believed SEIU.”
No, they didn’t, and they overcame great odds – SEIU, BIG, “the fastest growing
union in the country,” connections in Washington, blah, blah, blah. It didn’t
matter. The workers voted for themselves and they won, BIG.
These Kaiser victories came on the heels of the Christmas present workers
received (gave themselves) in December at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital where
workers brought down SEIU in another election, this one for union
representation: NUHW 283 to SEIU 13. This was the culmination of a six year
drive to unionize – six years of sacrifice, hard work and struggle – inside
the hospital - to have a union, almost flushed down the drain thanks to the
SEIU intervention. Instead, the NUHW victory, the single biggest hospital win
in the US in the year.
The Memorial workers, cards in hand, had expected fierce resistance from the Catholic
St. Joseph’s Health System – yet they stubbornly refused to concede. But who
could have predicted that SEIU would join in to kill their dream? Without a
single Memorial worker willing to publically endorse them, SEIU-UHW refused
pleas to remove themselves from the ballot; instead, days before the election,
they bused in hundreds of staff and members for a provocative, anti-NUHW
demonstration on the hospital steps. They harassed workers with robo calls and
invasive house visits, they flooded the campaign with glossy mailers and full
page adds in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, also radio spots. There is
no doubt that all this pushed the “no union” vote dangerously high. NUHW
distributed just one mailer, produced gratis, but the worker’s organizing committee,
with strong backing from NUHW volunteers, plus community and religious leaders,
and the North Bay Labor Council (which asked SEIU to withdraw) overcame –David
and Goliath all over again.
These victories have been widely publicized and quite rightly. The press is
getting the idea that something is happening here. Still, I think they
sometimes miss the real point of this story. There’s lot of Rosselli (the
former UHW elected president) v. Stern, in the reporting, and if not that, the
rather sterile NUHW v. SEIU. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard nothing but praise
for Barbara Lewis, Ralph Cornejo and Sal Rosselli, the NUHW leaders – if
anything I’ve heard even more praise for NUHW volunteer organizers. But here is
the judgment of Barbara Lewis, a spokesperson for NUHW in Southern California: “This
victory is a tribute to a rank-and-file leadership that was heavily invested in
a member driven union. The workers organized around this vision, and sought a
union that the workers would control.”
So what is a “member driven union”? How is it different than the SEIU corporate
model, a staff driven, now you see them, now you don’t, dues hungry project,
one that California Nurses Association President Rose Ann DeMoro once called a “management
surveillance team?”
The three Chapters, nurses at Kaiser Sunset and two professional units
scattered across southern California, were given just one month to prepare for
these elections. What did they do?
Kaiser Sunset is seven floors; it’s the size of three football fields, a huge
facility. The nurses there worked on their days off, they worked after work.
They walked the floors. “We educated the new nurses,” says Leila Valdivia, “Some
of them didn’t know why we had a good contract. They didn’t know we had strikes
every three years in the eighties and nineties, our last strike was for 11
weeks in 1997 – it was against mandatory overtime – this is important for
nurses, they have children, families, they often work two jobs. We are militant
people. The new nurses listened to the older nurses. They learned the history”
“We were ready to change,” according to Tessie Costales, also a Sunset RN, a
fired steward. “We had no representation; they got rid of our stewards – all
because they wouldn’t sign the SEIU pledge of allegiance. They abolished our
union.
“But we were ready, it was not new to us, we’d done this before -no money, etc.
We just volunteered, hours, material. We stayed connected, from the very
bottom. We kept everyone informed. We wanted autonomy, democracy, a voice. And
we wanted to win, not just to win, but to win BIG. We did!
Turusew Gedebu-Wilson is a member of the professional chapter, a dietitian at
Kaiser West LA. She was a UHW steward; she was fired by SEIU.
“We saw this coming, the trusteeship. We went to the Puerto Rico Convention. We
witnessed where this was headed. It was a long, long struggle, a whole year. We
just kept engaged, stayed focused. And it’s done, done – that’s the great
thing.
“We never gave them legitimacy. We wouldn’t attend their meetings. We
detached ourselves. They tried to intimidate us, they used scare tactics, and
they lied and lied. But our stewards just kept on going.
“I was kept going by this from Gandhi, ‘First they ignore you, Then they laugh
at you, Then they fight you, Then you win.’
“We built this union, it’s our union. We’ll build it again. We won because we
trusted and respected each other and believed in our cause of building a
democratic, transparent and member driven union. We knew what we wanted, it was
a long time coming but we made it, BIG!”
“I wasn’t sure at first what I wanted to do,” says Valdivia. “I was burned by
SEIU, I never forgave them for butchering 535 (535 was an SEIU local that
succeeded AFN as the union of Sunset nurses and was then merged into UHW). I
hated that. I want a union but I don’t want just any union. And I don’t’ want
SEIU.
“We’ve been fighting here for thirty years. We’re rambunctious; we needed a
chance to speak up. I spoke to Ralph (Cornejo) and Sal (Rosselli), they
convinced me to join in. We convinced others, the older nurses. SEIU fired all
our stewards. Did they think we wouldn’t notice? The whole thing just exploded
in the last three weeks – SEIU didn’t have a chance.”
The professional workers tell the same story. They work in some fifty
facilities, some with just a handful of co-workers - a challenge, to be sure,
to organize.
David Mallon, a therapist at Kaiser Downey, tells me, “No staff could
have made us do this, not even NUHW. We believe in democratic unions, we don’t
work well in hierarchical structures. And we’ve been interested in this for a
long time. We believe in unions and we are militant.”
The professional workers had also been burned when SEIU dissolved local 535 in
2006. “It was our union – since 1975. It was dissolved without our consent,”
says Mallon. “We petitioned against merger, Stern ignored us. And then comes
trusteeship. We’ve been treated like furniture.
“Another thing. SEIU was out best ally. They fired all our stewards, our
elected leaders. Everyone knew these people; they had voted for these people,
we were irate. The members were irate; 62% signed the decertification
petitions. These fired stewards were our backbone, but there were many other
activists. We built networks, we made personal calls, we used blackberries,
cell phones, text messages. We had meetings, members invited members to speak
and to debate, and we had debates with SEIU staff. We sent hundreds, probably
thousands of emails.
“We met with the nurses, we had an inside committee and Barbara Lewis and the
outside committee, we worked hand in glove with them. It was symbiosis – we
have active members and an idealist staff – all volunteers. What more could we
want. SEIU would never understand. We were very confident; we predicted maybe
60% - who would have thought 85%?
I think these members have it right. There existed in UHW, before trusteeship,
a powerful, democratic and militant workplace culture – based on workers. And
years of struggle. It was the foundation of a member driven union. This
included a deep respect for the capacity of workers to organize, self-organize,
for their courage and creativity – all so absent in SEIU. It still exists, a
little battered perhaps, but if these three Kaiser units are any indication, it
is, if anything, tougher than ever. “We can handle this,” says David Mallon. “We
aren’t people who are afraid of a fight.” I think SEIU can expect more of the
same.
A little background. What do these workers mean by the merger? Simply that they
have been pawns in Stern’s grand scheme (the “one strategy,” centralize, bigger
is better) to reorganize SEIU in California – regardless of what was wanted by
the workers out here. The SEIU local 535, I have been told, allowed these
workers space, their own leaders, control of finances. All this was threatened
when they were merged – but, according to Mallon, “Ralph and Sal were patient
with us, they worked with us. We got what we wanted. They earned our trust.
They kept their promises.”
And corruption? There’s plenty of it, most spectacular the 2008 Tyrone Freeman
scandals in southern California SEIU local 6434 – Freeman, a Stern appointee
and favorite, once President of 6434 is now fired and facing federal charges.
Why? Accused of stealing more than $1 million dollars from the local. And then
Annelle Graheda, another Stern appointee, was removed as head of the SEIU
California state council – her hand allegedly in the till, also her boyfriend
on the payroll. Now, in San Diego, the mysterious departure of SEIU local 221
President Sharon-Frances Moore, with a six-figure severance handout and ongoing
SEIU work as a “consultant.” Moore is yet another Stern appointee. The story is
he met her at a party – and was so impressed that even though she was without
union experience, he sent her out to San Diego with a very nice salary.
Perhaps SEIU thinks that members do not read the papers. Apparently not, for
the trustees response is, tragically, more bluff and bluster, this time, “Yes, “
Steve Trossman tells us, “the results /of the Kaiser election/ were disappointing…”
But what next? “Kaiser Members Launch Huge Contract Campaign!” Trossman
tells us that “more than 100 plus members of our stewards council met this
month… our facilities are abuzz …” He promises “raises for all members; locking
in all our current benefits and our voice at work; securing our jobs well into
the future.” And a turkey at Thanksgiving?
Here we go again. How long will SEIU be able to find people, often brand
newcomers to labor, often youngsters to do this California dirty work? How long
can they stand it? Many joined because they too (once?) were idealists. Many
have resigned already. More have refused California duty. This story is rife
with rumors of intrigue, distrust, cracks in the monolith. We will see.
There will be perhaps as many as 100 elections in the months to come, in June
Kaiser workers can again petition to decertify SEIU. What can we expect? David
Moberg, the senior labor writer for In These Times, reminds us that “SEIU
has a clear advantage in resources it can – and has –put into battle.” He also
tells us that “it is dealing with a union workforce where there is widespread
resentment of SEIU policies and behaviors.”
That’s right, and nothing is predetermined. This is not, however, an academic
issue. We don’t have to be mere bystanders. We want the workers to win. We want
them to have a union. A NUHW victory will be good for healthcare workers and
patients, for the working people of California, for working people and the
labor movement everywhere. So we need to get involved – as we said a year ago,
Now is the Hour! Stand Up for the Healthcare Workers! Stand up for NUHW! ------------------ A footnote: A particularly vicious part of the SEIU attack
on California healthcare workers is their management-style legal assault.
Thirty former leaders and staff of UHW have been accused with various specious
charges – SEIU is suing them for $19 million. Legal defense costs are now in
the hundreds for thousands of dollars. SEIU’s clear intention is to humiliate
and break these people – all good union men and women. You can help. Contribute to: The Fund for Union Democracy and Reform 465 California Street Ste. 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104 www.fundforuniondemocracyandreform.org -------------------------------- Cal Winslow has written CounterPunch articles on the
subject of the SEIU and NUHW, including “Stern’s Gang Seizes UHW Union Hall,”
February 2, 2009. He is also the author of Labor’s Civil War in California, PM
Press (forthcoming, March 2010) and an editor of Rebel Rank and File: Labor
Militancy and Revolt From Below during the Long Seventies, Verso
(forthcoming, April 2010). |