What's in store for workers under Dave Regan's secret
partnership deal with the California
Hospital Association?
Well, workers in California might wanna chat with their Ohio
counterparts who’ve been reaping the bitter fruits of Regan's earlier sellout "partnership" with Catholic Health Partners
(CHP), a $6 billion hospital chain in Ohio.
In 2008, Regan inked an infamous back-room deal with CHP’s execs.
At the time, Regan was president of SEIU
1199 Ohio.
Under the deal, the company’s execs -- not the workers -- asked
the NLRB to hold unionization elections for 8,000 workers. And get this: the
Boss asked for only one union to be on the ballot: SEIU!
The backroom deal -- negotiated by SEIU’s Dave Regan, Scott Courtney and Mary Kay Henry -- ultimately led to SEIU's
violent attack on a Labor Notes
conference in 2008 that sent some conference-goers to the emergency room and
left David Smith, an SEIU homecare
worker, dead of a heart attack.
So why was CHP willing to ink a secret unionization deal with SEIU? Here's a clue.
In the first contract, SEIU negotiated ZERO improvements to
workers’ wages, benefits and working conditions. A company official described it
this way:
There are no separate standards giving Union employees more money or rights and privileges than non-union employees have in the workplace.
Then, in 2012, SEIU
let the company eliminate workers’ seniority rights and their defined-benefit
pension plan.
Fast-forward to 2014.
Last week, The Morning Journal (Lorain, Ohio) reported
that CHP is now demanding even more cuts from SEIU’s members at Mercy Regional Medical Center in Lorain,
OH, including:
- the elimination of step increases in the wage scale.
- the elimination of paid sick time.
- the elimination of overtime pay.
- cuts to workers' health insurance that would force them to pay $5,000 more in out-of-pocket expenses per year.
Damn.
So… is CHP going bankrupt? Hardly! Profits are up over last
year -- $113 million in profits during the first six months of 2014, according
to the financial statements on CHP’s
website.
The moral of the story?
You can trust Regan and his Purple
Palace pals as far as you can throw them. They're happy to toss workers under
the bus to keep their business buddies happy and the union dues flowing.
