A source forwarded a copy of the agenda for tomorrow’s
meeting of the Steering Committee of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, which will be held at
the Marriott Hotel in San Jose, California.
Check it out… especially if you’ve ever had concerns that John August, Dave Regan and the other illustrious members of the “Steering
Committee” are a bit too deeply embedded in Kaiser’s pocket.
Here’s what the agenda says (see full agenda below).
From 11:00am to 12 noon, John
August and a business school prof from MIT will lead a discussion about “Kaiser
Permanente’s Financial Challenges.”
Are
you kidding? Financial challenges? Just
ten days ago, Kaiser announced that it made $2.6 billion in profits last year
-- that’s 30% more profits than in 2011. And Kaiser has pocketed a total of $8.7 billion in
profits since 2009. Do those sound like “financial challenges” to you? Kaiser’s only challenge may be finding a bank vault that’s big enough to hold its
bags of gold.
At 9:45am, the Steering Committee will discuss “Updates on
KP’s actions on cost cutting, position elimination and related issues.”
What
does this mean? Well, “position elimination” refers to the 1,000 layoffs
that SEIU-UHW accepted across California. Hmm… sounds like more workers’ jobs may
be on the chopping block.
What about “updates” on “KP’s cost cutting?”
According to Tasty’s
sources, this refers to SEIU’s not-so-secret deal with Kaiser to slash workers’
health benefits and eliminate their defined-benefit pension plan. Dave Regan
has already implemented these precise cuts
on 20,000 of SEIU-UHW’s members at Catholic
Healthcare West/Dignity Health and the Daughters
of Charity Health System. Now, Kaiser’s execs are anxiously awaiting their chance
to “cut costs.” That’s why Kaiser is working so hard to help SEIU-UHW try to
win the upcoming NLRB election at Kaiser.
In the afternoon, the Steering Committee will discuss “Total
Health.” That’s Kaiser’s and SEIU’s codeword for the Corporate
Wellness Program that they recently implemented for Coalition members at Kaiser. Under this program, Kaiser will collect “bio-metric
data” from each and every worker, including workers’ body mass index, blood
pressure, cholesterol levels and smoking rates. And Kaiser will link workers’ future
compensation to improvements they make on their bio-metric performance… with
the aim of saving Kaiser money on employees’ health insurance costs.
Quite a revealing agenda, right? And it makes it crystal
clear which way the “Steering Committee” is headed... which is wherever Kaiser tells them to go.
PS. Check out this interesting workers’guide to corporate wellness programs, which sheds light on the coercive
programs that SEIU and various companies are pushing on workers across the US.
