June 29th, 2010
45,000 Kaiser workers win the right to vote!
United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta stands with Kaiser workers filing their petition to join NUHW.Kaiser workers filed a petition today that will trigger elections for 45,000 SEIU members to choose between the troubled incumbent and the state’s fastest-growing union, NUHW. “We worked for decades to make Kaiser jobs good, stable jobs that paid enough […]
June 20th, 2010
KPFA: Labor board rejects SEIU charges and prepares to schedule elections for thousands to join NUHW
KPFA interviews Alta Bates Summit Medical Center worker Beverly Griffith about the coming elections for tens of thousands of California healthcare workers to join NUHW.
June 17th, 2010
Labor board to throw out bogus claims made by SEIU, paving way for thousands to vote and join NUHW
The National Labor Relations Board’s Office of Advice has issued a directive to the NLRB’s four California offices, recommending the final dismissal of charges that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has used to block fair union elections for more than 16 months. As a result of this decision, long-delayed elections may now be scheduled […]
June 17th, 2010
Labor board to throw out bogus claims made by SEIU, paving way for thousands to vote and join NUHW
After 16 months in legal limbo, workers will finally get elections to join NUHW
WASHINGTON—The federal National Labor Relations Board’s Office of Advice has issued a directive to the NLRB’s four California offices, recommending the final dismissal of charges that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has used to block fair union elections for more than 16 months. As a result of this decision, long-delayed elections may now be scheduled within a matter of weeks for thousands of California healthcare workers.
In early 2009, tens of thousands of healthcare workers signed petitions to quit the scandal-plagued SEIU and join a new union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). However, federal authorities failed to schedule elections until charges brought by SEIU could be reviewed.
“It should be a crime that SEIU has been able to take away our right to vote for so long,” said Helen York-Jones, a cashier in food services at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. “You can’t have fair elections when one side gets to choose who can and can’t vote. We’re voting NUHW to bring back democracy and member control in our union.”
June 16th, 2010
The Nation: the SEIU Andy Stern leaves behind
By Max Fraser
In the late 1990s and early 2000s the union began to embrace new strategies to meet Stern’s bold growth targets, seeking deals with large employers in which they would agree to remain neutral in unionization drives in exchange for a quid pro quo from the union. In some cases, this involved the union’s collaborating with nursing home operators to improve patient care or lobby statehouses for increased Medicare payments. In others it meant ceding the union’s ability to strike; or providing national hospital chains with economic relief in the form of substandard wages and benefits; or agreeing to organize certain subcontractor facilities but not others, even if workers there wanted to join SEIU. In a number of instances the more debatable aspects of these agreements were hammered out at the highest levels of the union, with little or no direct involvement on the part of the workers.
Cornell University’s Kate Bronfenbrenner has studied these “employer neutrality” deals extensively, and notes that SEIU is not the only union to use them to grow. “The question is not whether you are using neutrality agreements; it’s about what you give up to get them and how you go about using them,” she says. “If you want to have a lasting union afterward, you have to involve the members. Unions are most likely to win any kind of organizing campaign when they combine top-down leverage with bottom-up organizing. SEIU has had some very effective agreements with employers that have combined the two approaches, but in recent years they started to back off from the bottom-up approach.”