November 23rd, 2009
In These Times: The Fight For ‘Employee Free Choice’ In California Healthcare
As organized labor tries to sustain its inside-the-Beltway campaign for an Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), competitive healthcare worker organizing in California provides a contentious counterpoint to union claims that representation election decisions should always be made without threats, coercion, or other forms of interference facilitated by National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) delays.
In California healthcare, one leading EFCA proponent—the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—has become a major foe of “employee free choice,” wherever its own members or even unorganized workers favor another union.
Tens of thousands of SEIU-represented hospital and nursing home workers have expressed a desire to join the National Union of Healthcare Workers, as demonstrated by their majority card or petition signing. But since last February, SEIU’s standard response to NUHW election petitions has been to enlist the always dysfunctional Labor Board—the bogeyman of EFCA campaigners everywhere—in stalling as many of these votes as possible.
November 22nd, 2009
Unchain our votes: Workers meet with NLRB and deliver hundreds of petitions
On Nov. 19, Southern California caregivers met with the National Labor Relations Board in Los Angeles to ask them to stop blocking election for thousands of healthcare workers to join NUHW.
November 19th, 2009
Labor Notes: NUHW Supporters Brave Eggs, Bottles in Los Angeles
To get to a public forum featuring speakers from the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) yesterday, attendees in Los Angeles had to pass a demonstration of a few hundred SEIU staffers and members who had arrived on buses.
The SEIUers chanted, beat on drums, and threw eggs and water bottles in an unsuccessful effort to intimidate people from attending. One attendee said SEIU was only making more enemies. For others it recalled SEIU’s failed attempt to invade the Labor Notes Conference in Dearborn in April 2008.
Nonetheless, NUHW is gaining allies in Southern California. The forum drew 100 union leaders and rank and filers from at least seven unions and a number of community organizations. It was organized to introduce NUHW to a broader audience, share the story of the union’s remarkable breakaway from SEIU and its plans for tremendous growth, and garner both political and financial support for the 10-month-old union.
November 19th, 2009
Workers’ eyewitness reports on SEIU’s election fraud in Fresno
Workers tell how they were threatened and intimidated by SEIU staff who broke the law to tamper with their ballots in this summer’s union election. Read more in the Wall Street Journal, the Fresno Bee, and In These Times. And if you haven’t signed the Fresno Petition, please do so now.
November 17th, 2009
Labor unions and political leaders rally to support NUHW
Last night in San Francisco, labor leaders and elected officials from all over the Bay Area gathered to honor our struggle for democracy and celebrate healthcare workers’ 75-year history of democracy and member power in California.
Today’s Beyond Chron tells the story:
“NUHW’s fundraising has grown amidst rising labor movement anger at SEIU, and it now has enough money to fund its current campaigns.”
And now other unions are joining our fight at the NLRB to get fair elections to choose our union:
“…[L]abor is increasingly going public with its criticisms of SEIU’s tactics. For example, on October 27 the 19,000 member IBEW Local 1245 joined UNITE HERE Local 2 in submitting court papers challenging SEIU’s blocking of over eighty NUHW petitions affecting over 27,000 California healthcare workers seeking to choose their union.”
“…The increasing willingness of other unions to openly back NUHW … means that SEIU’s efforts to frame NUHW as a ‘rogue’ labor organization guilty of ‘raiding’ other unions has failed, and that the labor movement now sees NUHW as health care workers’ leading voice for democracy.
Elected officials, too, are siding with NUHW. State Senator Mark Leno arrived at the fundraiser with a Senate Certificate of Recognition for NUHW’s accomplishments and our 75-year legacy.
