Here's some breaking news.
Remember Dave Regan’s
sweetheart
deal with the California Hospital Association?
That’s the deal where hospital executives welcome SEIU-UHW
into their hospitals to unionize up to 60,000 workers. In exchange, SEIU-UHW gives
political favors to the Bosses and commits to force workers into pre-negotiated
labor contracts with cheap wages and benefits.
Well, last night, the workers at a Southern California hospital
rejected SEIU-UHW in one of the first elections run under the CHA deal... and despite the fact that hospital execs gave
SEIU- UHW every possible advantage! The final tally at Mission Hospital, a 552-bed hospital in Orange County, was...
SEIU-UHW: 329
No Union: 409
What kind of help did execs give to SEIU-UHW?
SEIU-UHW got complete access to the hospital's
break rooms and conference rooms to try to convince workers to vote for SEIU. A list of every
employee’s home address and telephone number. An order from hospital execs to
every manager and supervisor that prohibited them from saying anything negative
about SEIU-UHW.
In addition, hospital execs agreed to a rush-job scheduling of the election so that no other unions would be able to get on the NLRB
ballot.
That left SEIU-UHW as the only union on the ballot… but
SEIU-UHW still lost!
Sources say workers are overjoyed to get rid of the SEIU-UHW
organizers, who they affectionately called "the purple clowns."
Apparently, workers were literally tripping over purple organizers camped
out in their break rooms, knocking on the front doors at night, phoning them
relentlessly, and stalking them in hospital parking lots and the cafeteria.
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| SEIU mailer from Mission |
Quite a story, right?
Well, here's the kicker.
On Monday, the NLRB counted the ballots in a separate union election
initiated by workers at Redwood Memorial
Hospital, who petitioned to join NUHW.
Interestingly, the hospital is owned
by the same company that owns Mission Hospital -- that is, St. Joseph Health System.
At Redwood Memorial, however, there was no sweetheart deal... and the Boss fought workers’ efforts to join NUHW. Nevertheless,
on Monday workers voted by more than a three-to-one margin to join NUHW!
That's not all. This is the fourth hospital owned by St. Joseph
Health System to vote to join NUHW.
Apparently, this rising wave of support for NUHW has caused some serious heart palpitations for St. Joseph's execs. So
the company’s top execs decided to invite SEIU-UHW into their remaining non-union
hospitals in hopes that the purple company union will blocking workers from joining NUHW.
This isn’t a new tactic. In the 1960s and 1970s, agricultural
growers invited the Teamsters into
their fields to keep the United
Farm Workers out.
This is what SEIU’s Dave Regan calls "strategic
collaboration" with the Boss, as he did in this recent TV interview with NBC news!
PS. Sources report that the SEIU-UHW organizers on the Mission Hospital campaign have become increasingly suspicious about
Regan’s deal with the California Hospital Association (CHA). During
the campaign, workers repeatedly asked the organizers about the sweetheart
deal, the pre-negotiated contracts, etc… but Regan refuses to show the agreement
to staffers or even the union's elected Executive Board. When they were asked about the CHA
deal, SEIU-UHW organizers were instructed to recite a couple of canned talking
points and then redirect the conversation towards a different topic.
