On Wednesday, about 550 workers at Providence Tarzana Medical Center in Southern California will finally get to vote. Last year, workers requested an NLRB election so they could leave SEIU-UHW and join NUHW. But SEIU's army of attorneys blocked the election for months. Tasty hears that SEIU is running scared and has bombarded workers with glossy purple mailers and robo-calls.
Providence Tarzana is the hospital where SEIU assigned Local 221's snake-loving Organizing Director Dequasia Gardner to fight workers' efforts to boot SEIU. Tasty hears that Dequasia has split town and is now working in Florida. (Florida has very loose laws about reptile ownership.)
Providence Tarzana is part of a giant chain called Providence Health. SEIU tried for years to organize the company's workers in Oregon, until Andy Stern and other SEIU officials yanked all the funding from the project in 2008. Why'd they pull the plug on the "break-through" campaign? Tasty thinks it might have something to do with SEIU Local 49's then-president, Alice Dale's, vote against Stern's efforts to transfer all of California's long-term care workers under Tyrone Freeman's control. Super good idea to punish a local union leader who stood up to corrupt Tyrone, Andy!
Good luck, Tarzanans! Don't get fooled by any snake charmers...
