A tip for Kaiser workers.
Beware of Hal Ruddick.
He’s the new Executive Director of the Coalition
of Kaiser Permanente Unions and will serve as the “Chief Negotiator” for
the partnership unions’ 90,000 members during negotiations with Kaiser Permanente .
As an SEIU staffer and one of Regan’s lieutenants at SEIU-UHW, he has a long history of
cutting backroom deals with bosses and lying to workers.
In 2011, Ruddick was the Chief Negotiator for SEIU-UHW’s bargaining
with Dignity Health. During the
negotiations, Ruddick agreed to eliminate the defined-benefit pension plan for
14,000 SEIU-UHW members and replace it with a 401(k)-style plan.
Even though it
was a huge cut for workers, Ruddick got workers to ratify the cut by telling them it
was a "pension improvement." Ruddick and SEIU-UHW actually issued
leaflets to workers with a headline of “We Did It!... Pension Improvements.” (See below.)
You can read more in these earlier posts (Fyi, Dignity was formerly called "Catholic Healthcare West."):
And here's another example of Ruddick’s dirty tricks. It comes from Ruddick’s time at SEIU Healthcare Illinois-Indiana, where he was the Chief Negotiator
for 8,000 nursing home workers. In 2009, Ruddick did a backroom deal that
allowed the Boss to strip millions of dollars from workers' health insurance
fund, which sent the fund careening towards bankruptcy. Read more at this post:
It's the SEIU way...
