 |
| SEIU's Mike Garcia is on left |
Insiders report that Mike
Garcia has resigned as the President of SEIU United Service Workers West/Local 1877, a union that
represents 35,000 janitors, security guards, and airport workers in California.
Garcia
reportedly made the announcement last week during a meeting of the union’s
Executive Board and cited his health as the reason.
During his tenure, Garcia oversaw one of SEIU’s mega-mergers
which fused together SEIU Local 1877 and several other SEIU locals into “SEIU United
Service Workers West.” The move prompted the
resignation of at least one SEIU official and was sharply criticized by advocates
of union democracy, who described the move as a "new
stage in the super bureaucratization of labor” due to the new-fangled structures of control that SEIU erected atop the union.
In 2012, Garcia famously teamed up with SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan in
a failed effort to
roll back California's nurse-to-patient staffing ratio law in an underhanded favor to
the California Hospital Association, which is the hospital industry's Chamber of Commerce.
Earlier, Garcia raised eyebrows when his secretary -- who just
happened to be married to Garcia's right-hand man, David Stilwell -- received a
giant pay increase that boosted her salary from $28,000 to nearly $200,000
a year.
With Garcia headed out the door, David Huerta -- the second-in-charge at United Service Workers West
-- has been fingered to take over Garcia's position atop the union.
It's unclear whether Garcia also resigned from SEIU’s International
Executive Board.
