It turns out
that SEIU-UHW officials are currently negotiating not just with Kaiser Permanente but also with Dignity Health, which is demanding sharp
cuts to 14,000 SEIU-UHW members’ pay and benefits.
Dignity, formerly
called "Catholic Healthcare West,"
is one of the largest hospital chains in the Western United States. And SEIU-UHW’s contract
with Dignity is the union’s second largest labor contract after Kaiser.
Readers
might recall that in 2009
and 2012,
SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan and Hal Ruddick negotiated giant cuts to
Dignity workers’ pay and benefits, including the elimination of workers' defined-benefit
pension plan, a wage freeze, cuts to health coverage for workers' dependents, an
intrusive Wellness Program, and other givebacks.
Here's
what's happening in the current negotiations, according to
reports from members of SEIU-UHW’s bargaining committee.
Dignity is
now demanding wage cuts for SEIU-UHW members in dozens of job classifications.
The company
claims that many workers' wages are "above market," so it has
proposed a brand new wage grid that’ll slash their pay. According to the
bargaining committee, Dignity has the lowest standby and collateral pay in
California, and "we got only 2% wage increase for the first two years of
our current CBA and on the third year we took a wage freeze." (SEIU-UHW’s
current “CBA” or Collective Bargaining Agreement will expire April 30, 2015.)
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| Dave Regan |
Under
Dignity's proposal, workers who don't receive wage cuts would get a wage freeze
along with a one-time bonus equal to 0.75% of pay.
In addition,
Dignity is proposing even more cuts to workers' already-reduced retirement plan.
In 2009,
SEIU-UHW's Hal Ruddick helped Dignity to eliminate workers' defined-benefit
pension plan and replace it with a cheap 401(k)-like plan. That change produced
hundreds
of millions of dollars in savings for Dignity, according to the company's
financial reports. Ruddick got workers to ratify the cut by blatantly lying to
them, as documented in this
earlier post.
Now… Dignity
wants even more retirement cuts.
The company wants
to transfer all of SEIU-UHW's members into a new and even cheaper retirement
plan that was set up for Dignity's non-union employees. This change would bring
multiple cuts to SEIU-UHW members, including reducing the amount that the
company deposits in each worker's retirement account by $2,000 a year.
What's going
on? Is Dignity losing money?
Nope. Last
year, it made nearly $913 million in profits, according to its audited
financial statement.
Instead, what's at work here is Dave Regan’s program of "strategic
collaboration” with corporate execs. Diamond Dave is more interested in
pleasing his corporate partners than fighting on behalf of SEIU-UHW’s members. Earlier
this month, Regan told SEIU-UHW’s bargaining committee they
could not "debate" their employer at the bargaining table.
The proposed cuts at Dignity
are simply the latest in a path of devastating destruction that Dave Regan has carved
across California's hospital workforce since he parachuted into California in
2009. For example, Regan has already eliminated the defined-benefit pension
plans for more than 25,000 of SEIU-UHW members, thereby shifting billions of
dollars from workers' pockets into the hands of their corporate employers.
Stay tuned
as Dave Regan and Hal Ruddick, who engineered the massive cuts at Dignity, serve as the lead negotiators for 90,000 Kaiser workers represented by the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions.
