March 29th, 2012
San Franciscans for Healthcare, Housing, Jobs, and Justice Pronounce Sutter/CPMC’s Special Deal “Bad for San Francisco”
Broad-based coalition finds proposed development agreement protects Sutter/CPMC’s profits, but fails to meet the City’s needs for healthcare and jobs, or to address negative impacts on housing and traffic March 28, 2012 – Contact Leighton Woodhouse: (213) 948-3545 SAN FRANCISCO – This morning, on the steps of City Hall, dozens of healthcare and housing advocates, union members […]
March 28th, 2012
SF Chronicle: Activists call CPMC deal “unacceptable” and “glaringly deficient”
John Cote, City Insider
Well, that didn’t take long.
The same day Mayor Ed Lee publicly announced he had struck a deal with California Pacific Medical Center to build a massive 555-bed hospital on Van Ness Avenue, rebuild St. Luke’s hospital in the Mission and overhaul their medical facilities around the city, more than 70 people took to the steps of City Hall to denounce the controversial deal as a giveaway that, among other things, fails to create enough local jobs. […]
Sal Rosselli, president of the National Union of Healthcare Workers, representing about 750 CPMC employees, said “Sutter-CPMC has been the worst hospital employer in San Francisco” in terms of wages, safe staffing levels and its approach to unions. He faulted the new deal for not including worker protections.
Lee’s staff maintains that federal law prohibits including labor provisions in the development deal, but Paul Kumar of National Union of Healthcare Workers said the mayor has plenty of tools at his disposal to wrest concessions from CPMC, which posted almost $1 billion in profit from 2005 through 2010, or $830 million over that period when losses at St. Luke’s are factored in.
March 27th, 2012
Just say NO to SEIU takeaways at Kaiser
The evidence is clear. In the last three years, SEIU has given away more than $2 billion in contract concessions across the United States, $1.6 billion of that right here in California, and all of us at Kaiser Permanente are next. Before that happens, now is the time for workers at Kaiser to stand up […]
March 23rd, 2012
Talking Union: “With God on Our Side” by Adam Reich, a review
By Carl Finamore, Mar. 16, 2012
Talking Union
“With God on Our Side” is a very catchy book title. It also appears at first glance to be quite topical because mention of religion so dominates, and distorts many would add, political discussion in this country.
For that reason, curiosity may initially draw the reader’s eye. But the subtitle “The Struggle for Workers’ Rights in a Catholic Hospital” gives it all away. This is a book about organized labor and workers.
This is usually where most readers take flight. But that would be a mistake because it is so much more.
Books about labor post dreadfully low sales, true enough. Nonetheless, Adam Reich has written a very readable and colorful “story of worker leaders” at the largest and most prestigious hospital in the northern California town of Santa Rosa.
The story, however, carries political lessons far beyond the geography of this small-town power struggle. Reich has written a human-interest story about people and why some act so passionately to improve their lives.
March 22nd, 2012
Our election at Seton Medical Center
Last night when the labor board counted the ballots in our election between NUHW and SEIU at Seton Medical Center, neither side won a majority. Our election will now go to the labor board to evaluate the challenged ballots and determine whether to schedule a run-off election between NUHW and SEIU. The SEIU spin doctors […]