 |
| SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan |
In recent weeks, the California
Secretary of State posted an unremarkable notice on its website that
has important implications for SEIU-UHW’s
members… and offers an interesting window into the manipulative tactics that Dave Regan employed against the union's
own membership to accomplish his ballot
initiative deal with the California
Hospital Association.
Last year, Regan not only launched two statewide ballot
initiatives targeting the California Hospital Association. He also launched a
signature-gathering campaign aimed at putting an initiative on the ballot to
raise California's homecare workers’ wages by $2.00 per hour. It was called the
Fair Wages and Training for
Homecare Workers Act.
Why?
As Tasty explained
at the time, Regan wanted to have an excuse to enlist SEIU-UHW’s 65,000 homecare
workers in volunteer signature-gathering to help collect the 1.1 million
signatures needed to qualify his CHA measures for the ballot.
In order to make sure his CHA initiatives got on the ballot,
he spent millions of dollars of the union's funds to hire professional
signature gatherers... which, according to Regan, allowed SEIU-UHW to easily surpass the number of signatures needed to qualify his two CHA measures.
But Regan didn't apparently do the same thing for the
homecare initiative. What happened?
That's where the Secretary of State's website comes in.
On July 11th, the Secretary of State reported
that SEIU-UHW’s homecare initiative (Initiative #1637) failed to qualify for
the ballot because it was nearly 100,000
signatures short of the minimum number of signatures needed.
Ouch!
