July 25th, 2009
Healthcare workers picket in Los Angeles and Oakland
Caregivers picketed the Los Angeles office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on July 23, protesting the Board’s failure to schedule union elections for tens of thousands of workers who want to leave the scandal-plagued SEIU. SEIU has used legal tricks to stall NUHW supporters’ elections for nearly six months. Children’s Hospital workers in […]
July 22nd, 2009
In today’s Sacramento Bee: Governor’s charge on homecare is the fraud
By Sal Rosselli for the Sacramento Bee
Tonight, while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sits down in his Jacuzzi with a stogie, 440,000 frail seniors and people with disabilities are facing the future with fear. These Californians, who rely on the state’s In-Home Supportive Services to live safely in their own homes instead of nursing homes, have become the most prominent scapegoats for Schwarzenegger as he fails to fix our broken state budget.
July 22nd, 2009
Sal Rosselli: Governor’s charge on home care is the fraud (Sacramento Bee)
Tonight, while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sits down in his Jacuzzi with a stogie, 440,000 frail seniors and people with disabilities are facing the future with fear. These Californians, who rely on the state’s In-Home Supportive Services to live safely in their own homes instead of nursing homes, have become the most prominent scapegoats for Schwarzenegger as he fails to fix our broken state budget.
July 21st, 2009
ISR: U.S. Labor in the Crisis—Resistance or Retreat?
THE ELECTION of Barack Obama last November seemed to promise a new era for organized labor. With Obama in the White House and a solid Democratic majority in Congress, it appeared that unions would finally be able to get action on their main legislative agenda—passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a measure that would make it easier for workers to join a union. And with the world’s press gathered outside Obama’s Chicago home during the transition period, a victorious factory occupation at the Republic Windows and Doors plant in that city captured the imagination of the country, and even got some encouraging words from Obama himself. Soon afterwards, workers at the huge Smithfield pork processing plant in North Carolina voted to unionize after more than a decade of vicious anti-union actions by the company. Hopes were high that unions were set to go on the offensive.
A few months later, the picture is quite different. The chances for the passage of EFCA appear bleak. The biggest union in the country, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), was embroiled in the undemocratic takeover of its 150,000-member West Coast health care local. At the same time, the SEIU intervened in the internal conflict of another union, UNITE HERE, once its closest ally, to annex 150,000 members of a breakaway faction. The old UNITE leader, Bruce Raynor sought refuge in the SEIU because, he claimed, the HERE side was spending organizing money wastefully; the top HERE official, John Wilhelm, accused Raynor of bargaining for low wages and poor working standards, Stern style, in order to convince employers to allow unfettered organizing. At stake is not only union jurisdiction over hotels and casinos, but control of the only union-owned bank, the Amalgamated Bank, which had $4.47 billion in assets in 2008.
July 13th, 2009
Counterpunch: The Healthcare Worker War
The SEIU and the Hollow Shell It Left Behind
By CAL WINSLOW
What is the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)? And why is it at war with the Labor Movement?
The SEIU is currently up to its neck in a bloody war with California healthcare workers led by the new National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) – a conflict SEIU leader Bill Ragen quite rightly compared to the US Occupation of Iraq – “easy to get into, then a slog …