Here's a story that speaks volumes. Two weeks ago, an administrative law judge found SEIU’s trustees guilty of ordering the illegal firing of an SEIU-UHW rank-and-file member from his hospital job. What was the reason given for firing the worker? SEIU told hospital officials that the worker, a five-year Encephalogram Tech at a Southern California hospital, owed SEIU a whopping $236.16 in back union dues.
After the worker was fired, he filed charges with the NLRB and, with the help of an NUHW attorney, he got a full hearing before a judge. Two weeks ago, the judge issued this 23-page ruling that describes what really happened.
It turns out that the worker, a popular rank-and-file leader and former Shop Steward, had complained that SEIU’s trustees were not giving any support to the union’s members. So SEIU’s trustees got management to fire him… illegally.
The judge ruled that SEIU never answered the worker's multiple requests for an accounting of any back dues he owed to SEIU. And SEIU never informed him they planned to ask HR officials to fire him. So the judge ordered SEIU to clear the way for the worker to get his job back. And he told SEIU to make the worker “whole for any loss of earnings or other benefits arising out of this loss of employment, with interest” (p. 20).
The judge’s ruling has more details about the extreme corruption of SEIU officials. For example, SEIU officials threatened to take legal action against the hospital after HR officials dragged their feet when SEIU instructed them to fire the worker. In one disgusting episode, SEIU staffer Cory Cordova sent emails to HR officials and hand-delivered a letter to the hospital’s HR Director with this text:
…Union demands that Lakewood Regional Medical Center terminate [the worker’s] employment effective immediately. Failure to do so is a breach of the Collective Bargaining Agreement. The Union will have no recourse but to file both a grievance and charges with the National Labor Relations Board. (p. 11)
And SEIU attorney Bruce Harland’s name is splashed across the judge’s ruling. Harland, who’s made a career of trying to block workers’ democratic elections, has apparently now turned to defending SEIU’s illegal firing of the workers who pay actually Harland’s wages.
Tasty has seen a lot of nasty sh*t in his years. But this is a serious low… even for SEIU. In most unions, people like Dave Regan, Cory Cordova and Bruce Harland take an oath “to defend workers’ rights” and “to never see a worker harmed.” What does it mean when rank-and-file workers gotta be more afraid of SEIU than their actual bosses? This, my friends, is the upside-down-world of SEIU… a world where SEIU officials hand over workers’ hard-won benefits in backroom deals with the boss, where SEIU imposes loyalty oaths on stewards, and where SEIU officials use illegal firings to try to eliminate their internal critics.
