SEIU tries to impound today's Kaiser ballot count

Tasty hears that SEIU is making a last-minute attempt to block the ballot count for 1,800 Northern California Kaiser professional workers who just finished voting in a mail-ballot NLRB election. This morning, workers and NLRB agents gathered at the NLRB office in Oakland and they've already unsealed the ballots. Now, SEIU is trying to stop the ballot count from proceeding. Gimme a break, SEIU!

So what's the deal with this election? These 1,800 workers are divided into three separate bargaining units, each of which is voting as a separate unit. All three groups (mental health workers, optical workers and medical social workers) first requested elections in June, but SEIU and Kaiser teamed up to block the NLRB from scheduling the elections until after the large, 43,000-member Service & Tech election was finished. SEIU and Kaiser wanted to run the big election first, because they calculated that a win in the big unit would cause the smaller units to vote for SEIU. NUHW wanted all of the elections scheduled for the same time so all Kaiser workers could vote together.

Well, it looks like even though SEIU got its preferred election scheduling, SEIU is plenty nervous about the outcome. Tasty hears that SEIU's "vote SEIU" mailer for the largest unit had only 24 people on it. From what Tasty hears, NUHW has a good chance of winning the biggest unit of 1,100 workers. As for the other two smaller units (approx 360 people each), Tasty hears that SEIU is likely to win one while the other one may be close. Just as we saw in the big unit, Tasty hears that both Kaiser and SEIU ran very dirty campaigns with tons of violations of federal labor law, including captive-audience meetings, etc.

Tasty will keep you updated on developments at the ballot count. Stay tuned!