April 15th, 2010
Beyond Chron: Bloody Nose for NUHW, Black-Eye for SEIU
By Carl Finamore
During a pre-trial settlement hearing with Judge Alsup, SEIU made a last-minute offer to drop their suit if NUHW just “shut down.” Defendants responded by stating that “NUHW is not ours to shut down,” recalled former UHW Research Director and defendant Fred Seavey in a conversation with me.
And certainly, NUHW remains standing after this verdict, there was no “knock-out” blow. In fact, just this January, 2,300 nurses and professionals at Kaiser Permanente hospitals voted by a margin of 85%-to-15% to leave SEIU and join NUHW.
Through it all, NUHW remains defiant and intends to appeal the jury’s verdict.
Of particular concern in the appeal, is Judge Alsup’s problematic jury instructions that defendants could not “obstruct or frustrate the ability of UHW or SEIU to carry out the [trusteeship] decision and did not induce others” to do the same after the January 9, 2009 SEIU International Executive Board (IEB) vote to transfer 65,000 UHW long-term healthcare workers out of the local.
These jury instructions, defendants feel, unfairly characterized the legitimate democratic rights of local union members and their elected leadership as being illegal. In effect, the jury instructions biased the jury in favor of SEIU’s central premise that all opposition to the international should have ceased after the January 9 IEB decision. Every dollar assessed in damages springs from defendants’ actions from this date.
April 14th, 2010
USC community fights back against anti-union campaign by SEIU
Basil Nasir, Respiratory Therapist, USC University Hospital“What we’re seeing at USC is the same thing we saw in the Santa Rosa election. It’s what the rest of the labor movement already knows. SEIU is the boss’s union.” Just like at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital where SEIU got just 13 votes out of 662 eligible voters, […]
April 14th, 2010
Ellen Dillinger’s “Under Trusteeship” visits court
“19 Stories Up in Earthquake Country” is the latest cartoon by Ellen Dillinger, a transcriptionist in Radiology at Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento. Click the small version below to view it full-size.
April 14th, 2010
Los Angeles Times: SEIU President Andy Stern will reportedly step down soon
By Patrick McDonnell, Paul Pringle and Peter Nicholas
The Times’ findings led to the ouster of Freeman, the president of the Los Angeles chapter, and several other SEIU officials. Federal criminal investigations were launched.
Allegations of misuse of SEIU funds by local administrators fed criticism of Stern’s drive to consolidate the organization into bigger and bigger chapters.
One of the harsher detractors, Herman Benson, secretary treasurer of the Assn. for Union Democracy, said the corruption was a byproduct of Stern’s elimination of smaller locals where members could keep a closer eye on the leadership.
Benson said that five years ago, Stern could claim the “high moral position” in the labor movement after having started Change to Win and demanding that unions be more aggressive in organizing and mobilizing workers.
But then, Benson said, the battles that Stern sparked with the Oakland local and Unite Here cost him that lofty position.
The 2008 spending scandal centered in Los Angeles ripped through the SEIU just as the union began to rupture on the West Coast, with leaders of its 150,000-member, Oakland-based healthcare local rebelling against Stern’s stewardship.
April 13th, 2010
Statement by National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) Interim President Sal Rosselli on the likely resignation of SEIU President Andy Stern
Stern’s legacy is that he took control of an organization built by more than a million hardworking janitors, healthcare workers, and public servants, and used their resources primarily to secure his own political power.
Instead of helping SEIU members fight for better jobs and better patient care, Stern gave himself the authority to cut secret deals with corporations and trade away members’ rights.
Instead of helping working people build their own organizations, he “restructured” existing unions, crushed democracy, and put his own loyalists in charge: appointees like Tyrone Freeman and Annelle Grajeda, who could always be trusted to vote with Stern, even if they couldn’t be trusted to keep their hands out of the till. Stern’s allies have been exposed for financial corruption and connected to the Blagojevich pay-to-play scandal.
Instead of uniting the labor movement’s strength, Stern tore apart the AFL-CIO and created the “Change to Win” federation, only to tear apart Change to Win four years later with an unprecedented raid on SEIU’s closest partner in the federation, Unite Here.
Last year, tens of thousands of SEIU healthcare workers in California realized that if they wanted to stand up for their patients and fight for their work to be valued, they would have to do it in an independent union outside SEIU. When Stern came to take control of their local union, they founded the National Union of Healthcare Workers.