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| SEIU at Labor Notes and Zac Altefogt |
Remember how SEIU officials rigged the contract-ratification
votes at Luther
Manor Nursing Home and Mercy Health Partners’ Hackley
Hospital… even going so far as to stuff ballot boxes and block union
members from voting?
Well, here’s what SEIU’s Communications Director Zac Altefogt told the Muskegon
Chronicle after Hackley’s workers delivered a landslide
defeat to SEIU in last week’s NLRB election:
“We're a democratic union, and that was their choice,” Altefogt said of a group that SEIU began representing in 2007 at the time of the Mercy-Hackley hospital merger. “We provided this group with a strong first contract. People can join a union or leave it at any time.”
Yeah right… Looks like Zac has conveniently forgotten how
SEIU has blocked workers’ NLRB elections for up
to 2 ½ years in an effort to stop them from leaving SEIU. Or how SEIU committed
such severe violations of federal labor laws that a judge
tossed out the largest private-sector union election in the past 70 years.
Well, it turns out this isn’t the first time that Zac has massively
misinformed the Michigan media. Readers might remember an infamous episode that
took place in Dearborn, Michigan in 2008. That’s when SEIU sent busloads of people to attack
a Labor Notes conference attended by
union reformers from 50 unions throughout the U.S. During the attack, SEIU knocked workers to the
floor and even bloodied a 67-year-old woman who ended up in a nearby hospital's emergency
room. And tragically, an SEIU homecare worker named David Smith died of a heart attack during SEIU’s assault.
So how did Zac -- after summoning every ounce of integrity
-- describe SEIU’s attack on the Labor Notes conference to Detroit’s Metro Times newspaper?
"It was a peaceful protest," says Zac Altefogt, spokesman for SEIU Healthcare Michigan.
Just recently, Tasty discovered that Zac knew the event wasn’t gonna be a peaceful even
before it happened. Here’s a message that Zac sent through SEIU Healthcare
Michigan’s twitter account in the days leading up to the attack: "Getting ready to RAID the RAD!" “RAD”
refers to Rose Ann DeMoro (the Executive Director of the California Nurses
Association), who was gonna speak at the conference and was the focus of SEIU’s attack that day.
As you can see, it's no great wonder that "Zac" rhymes with "hack" -- because he's a big one.
P.S. For analysis of
last week’s election at Hackley Hospital, check out this
article by journalist Mike Elk in In
These Times.
