SEIU Files 5 Ballot Initiatives in Oregon a la Dave Regan's Effort to Ink Backdoor Deal with Hospital Industry

SEIU's Meg Niemi

Recently, Tasty reported that Dave Regan convinced SEIU's Meg Niemi to file 5 ballot initiatives in Oregon in an effort to engineer a Regan-styled secret deal with Oregon's hospital industry.

Well... here's a 35-second tape-recording of Regan as he describes Niemi's ballot initiative bonanza. It comes from an internal SEIU-UHW conference call that took place on October 30.

During that call, Regan described how he's using the ballot initiatives as a bargaining chip to try to secure a secret unionization pact with the California Hospital Association. The sweetheart deal, says Regan, would allow SEIU-UHW to unionize 100,000 hospital workers without employer opposition and would then force the newly organized workers into cheap, pre-negotiated “template” labor contracts.

Some of Niemi’s initiatives are identical to the ones that Regan plans to file in California, says Regan. Niemi, who is the president of SEIU Local 49, has already filed the five ballot initiatives, according to an article that Tasty pasted below.

Regan hints that other SEIU officials may be preparing similar efforts in other parts of the country. During the 35-second recording, he says: "There's a growing group of people that are interested in being part of this strategy..."

Here’s the article about Niemi’s ballot filing.

nwLaborPress.org

SEIU Files Five Prospective Oregon Ballot Initiatives on Hospital Reform

Oct 31, 2013 

 

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) announced Oct. 21 a campaign to get five hospital reform ballot measures on Oregon’s November 2014 ballot. The campaign will be a joint effort by SEIU locals 49 and 503, led by Local 49, which represents hospital support workers at Kaiser Permanente and Legacy Health Systems.

The prospective initiatives are:

• Minimum Charity Care in Hospitals. Require non-profit hospitals to spend at least 5 percent of payments for hospital services on charity health care and community health service.
• Pricing Transparency in Hospitals. Require hospitals to display, on site and online, the “actual price charged” for common procedures.
• Quality Transparency in Hospitals. Require hospitals to display online and on site, quality of care performance measures like infection rates, mortality rates, and patient satisfaction rates.
• Reasonable Rates in Hospitals. Cap hospital prices at 30 percent above the actual cost of providing care.
• Caps on Executive Compensation. Limit executive compensation to no more than 15 times the wage of the lowest paid employee.

Backers turned in initial paperwork to the Secretary of State Elections Division Oct. 22. The next step is to collect 1,000 signatures on each petition, at which point the state would issue a ballot title and approve the initiative petitions for general circulation. Each initiative would need 87,213 valid signatures of registered voters by July 3, 2014, in order to qualify for the ballot.